We woke up again to the boiling sun, which is becoming a trend now. Cold at night, so we bundle up, then in the morning it takes your brain a moment to realize how hot it actually is, and then you panic try to escape the heat as fast as possible. Nothing much interesting was at this rest area, so we got going around 10am towards Atlanta.
Before the capitol building we needed to stop at the CBP Deferred Inspection site, which according to their website could help with my I-94 issue. Unfortunately, when we arrived, it looked basically abandoned and there was a sign on the door saying they don’t accept walk-ins, and that I should email them and expect a response within 1-3 days. Well, I’d emailed them a few days ago and not got a reply, so that’s no good.
Slightly annoyed by the CBP development, we headed on our way to the Georgia Capitol building further into Atlanta. We found parking nearby that was $14 for an hour! There wasn’t anything better around and we were running out of time to get to Tallahassee before dark, so we just ate the cost and walked a block to the capitol. As we walked there, we passed a police officer sitting next to his car as two people lifted a new windshield into place on his car. It’s a bit of a weird place to do that, but if it works it works I guess.
After getting our photos outside the building, we headed inside and had to go through basically airport-style security to get in, along with showing our ID’s and getting them scanned into the system. From there we could head upstairs to the museum floor, where there was a lot of information about the history of the capitol and the state itself, along with lots of artifacts and a good view of the floor below (the center is open so you can see all three floors).
We finished up at the capitol pretty quickly and headed back to the car as we wanted to get to Tallahassee before our picture-taking window passed. We arrived just after 7pm, and found some street parking nearby to the capitol, which as an added bonus was free after 6pm! The weather was fantastic, with clear sunset skies, a warm but not hot temperature, and a cool breeze to top it off.
Our parking was only a few minutes walk to the capitol complex from there, but it’s not entirely clear which building is the main capitol building, nor where the front is. We walked around for a few minutes until we eventually found the front where we were able to get our photos. It’s always a bit awkward taking photos when cars are passing since I feel like they’re looking at me, even though I know they likely don’t even notice or care.
After the capitol, we headed east towards the coast and stopped at a laundromat. It was a nice enough place, but I needed to pay an extra dollar for a card to swipe at the machines rather than just using coins, but oh well. It was also really hard to hear the attendant over his accent and the very loud radio playing throughout the store, but we eventually got it figured out and sat in the waiting area while our laundry finished. The clothes came out of the dryer mostly dry, but with a few damp spots unfortunately. It wasn’t enough to worry about though, so we packed our stuff back up and headed on our way.
We were heading to a rest area just north of Orlando for the night, so we could head into Orlando (Disney Springs, specifically) tomorrow morning to meet up with a friend of Kyle’s for lunch. On the way there, we discussed implementation ideas for an automated stop sign mapper, where we’d attach a camera to the car and take photos every few seconds, then use machine learning to detect stop signs and place them on Open Street Map (if they don’t already exist) at the coordinates where the photo was taken. It sounds relatively simple, but there’s so many edge cases that we kept coming up with that added to the complexity of the idea. It’s still an interesting idea though, and if I end up doing it I’ll definitely write a post about the process.
We got to our rest area late, and noticed that all the rest areas in Florida are patrolled by armed security or the Florida Highway Patrol at night, which is a nice touch which makes it feel safer, although I haven’t felt unsafe at any rest areas so far anyway.