Kyle once again woke up before me as usual, and walked up to the main building of the welcome centre to use the wifi (more rest stops should have wifi!). I woke up a little later and walked up to the building and found him, where I gave him his toothbrush and we both went to brush our teeth.
Our next stop was Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Along the way we took some smaller state routes rather than the interstate, which was really nice and put us right in the middle of a small town named Demopolis where we stopped at a breakfast diner to eat. The food was pretty good, and not too expensive, and we stayed a while to charge our phones and download some maps of the area to reduce our data usage when navigating, something we will be doing more often going forward.
The staff were really nice, and it seemed like one of them was training the other, as when the presumed trainee asked if we wanted refills on our drinks after we paid, he offered to put the refill in to-go cups (which we agreed to), and the woman training him said “And see? Look how happy it made them!”, which I thought was fun. The trainer did accidentally spill soup on Kyle as she was clearing the table, but we understand accidents happen and we still left them a really good review.
We arrived in Montgomery and took our photos in front of the capitol building, where we also noticed that the bollards in front of the stairs were not correctly lined up with the centre of the road and entrance to the building. The bollards weren’t actually attached to the ground, so we could have shifted them all over, but they’re heavy and that’s a lot of work, and while probably not illegal, very weird.
We then took a look inside and went up into the dome, where we could then view the original house and senate rooms, and read up on the history of the building. Some pretty awful things have been done in this building back near the start of the country, but they’re doing a lot better now.
We then started driving towards Atlanta, but weren’t planning to make it all the way tonight as it would be dark by the time we got there. We instead stopped in a small town along the way to do some DoorDash, but ended up only getting 2 bad orders before looking for another town with better results.
We came across the town of Auburn, Alabama, a college town with a beautiful downtown and a population of around 80,000 people. It being a college town proved to be very effective for doing DoorDash, as we got about 8 hours of consistent high paying orders, and were able to be really efficient once the evening rush hour downtown cleared up.
We finally decided it was probably time to go to the rest area, and got on our way. We arrived at the Georgia Welcome Area around 3am, but realized that we had switched over to the EDT timezone, and it was now 4am! Not great for our sleep schedules. Oh well, we’ll figure that out later.
