Memphis brings back memories of my school's jazz band, and our trip to the city to perform at the area schools. During that trip I had a great time, and got a small taste (a very very small taste) of what it was like to travel and perform in a jazz ensemble). Since then I have not traveled anywhere but the Roland Hayes Conert Hall in any ensemble except Marching Band, which is a completely different experience. (That was a lengthy tangent, and now I wll return to my summer road trip)
After Memphis, and marveling at the effeciency of the Fedex hub, which is where all Fedex packages are sent and sorted, and effeciently shipped out, We journeyed on. After this we had various stops in Tennessee, followed by stops in Ohio.
Before going to Ohio though, in my home state of Tennessee I suprisingly saw one of the highlights of the trip. The highlight was a monument at a rest area. The monument was in the shape of an arc, and shaped like a leaning sun dial. on the "dial" were individual stones with the names of all the counties of Tennessee on them.
The stones seemed to be of proportional size to the area of the counties, a very interesting monument indeed.In Ohio we had an extended stop in a repair shop, as the truck had trouble supplying compressed air. Compressed air is used for many things, most important though is to supply air to the pulled trailers, this is why a semi driver must connect and disconnect airlines to a each trailer his connects and disconnects from his tractor.
The stay in the repair shop was about five hours, which when looking back was not so terrible, but at the time seemed like an eternity. There was a Driver's lounge, which had a television and magazines, but the TV had only about three channels, one of which had The Ellen Show and Soaps and the others what seemed like enless news broadcasts. The magazines were of course all trucker magazines, and were not very interesting to me, although I still looked through them pretty thoroughly. This time would seem to be the best time to read my book 'Ringworld', which I did some, but being in a Driver's Lounge, next to a worker's mess area and the workshop distracted me, especially at their intermiitent break times, of which they had two while I was there.
I was only able to read about a chapter of 'Ringworld while at the shop.
After getting out of the shop and what seemed like an eternity we left, and traveled through Cincinatti that night. The truck functioned pretty good for the rest of the trip, filling trailer's with air in record time. In my trip through Cincinnatti, I was able to see multiple buildings and the bridge from the old TV show 'WKRP In Cincinnatti'. Seeing the landmarks from that show proved to be a pretty interesting experience, and it was also pretty cool seeing the Cincinnatti Red's baseball stadium.
The rest of the trip involved going to North Carolina, and then to South Carolina and then back to Tennessee. We listened to an audiobook during this leg of the trip. The audiobook was very intersting, and almost as good as reading a book. On the final leg of the journey, we encountered a monstrous flash flood near Knoxville, which meant very slow moving traffic.
As this has been a long entry, and the last section of the trip was not particularly exciting, I have abridged this section. The trip was interesting, and for the most part it was enjoyable.
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