4-05-08 Super 8

The Super 8 we were staying at seemed not as good as any other I’ve been to.  I had an eerie feeling about it and I do not know why.  I did not sleep well. Maybe it was the shooting that happened before we got to the hotel.  I guess some guy shot another guys car window out down the road from the hotel.  On top of a bad night of sleep, I got up at 5:00am because Tim, Jacob, Paul, Tyrone and Jeff had to drive ahead to the next city, so they could get work done on the web site.  We are really behind on getting Paul the information he needs, including journals, so I am writing mine this morning. I stayed up for an hour getting everything ready to go at 8:00am and I had no plans to fall back to sleep, but after I got everything ready, I laid down on the bed and dozed off accidently.  I got a little more sleep, which was nice so I can’t complain. We were finally ready to go at 10:00 AM.  I was really looking forward to riding.  It was a perfect day to ride.  It was sunny, clear and mostly flat the whole way from Tuscaloosa to Hot Springs, AK.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t ride that much because of time constraints as we were behind.  That was depressing. From Tuscaloosa to Hot Spring, AK, I noticed a lot of trash on the side of the road. People don’t seem to care about just throwing stuff all over the ground.  I don’t like that.  The weather today was very nice, I think it got up to almost 70, with lots of sun, but the closer we got to Hot Springs, we saw all the flooded rivers from the storms that went through in the past days.  It was really a mess, the water was everywhere and then just before Hot Springs we saw where a tornado hit the night before.  It was really crazy, hundreds of trees just blown over and thrown around the ground.  We saw some houses that were flattened and I felt sorry for the people who lived there and hoped they got out ok.  I guess Thomsen was right for changing our route, otherwise we might have been riding through that stuff and I wouldn't have liked that very much.