Forty miles from Atlanta, this is nowhere

9:46AM EDT | N33°'38'29" W84°25'39"

So I'm in Atlanta now. I bet you didn't see that coming. Here's the scoop on how I got here: I knew I'd be taking a flight from San Diego back to Boston on this trip, Atlanta is a major airline hub, and I have a friend that lives in Atlanta. So, I figured I'd check for flights that laid over in Atlanta and I called Jess. "I was able to find a five-hour layover, but the catch is, it's at 4:00 AM. Want to come to the airport and hang out?"

As we were driving down i85, lost and looking for food, I made the near fatal mistake of letting it slip that I had rather big family news. You see Jess is a long-time friend of the family and is always excited when there's big dirt. Well this one was pretty major so I figured I'd tell her when she was sitting down. Make that when she was sitting down with out a steering wheel and our lives in her hands. "Oh just tell me" she demanded.
"No no, let me just wait 'til we're at breakfast."
"Oh my god did Michele get engaged!" she probed.
"No. I'll tell you when you're not driving." I said, in earnest slightly scared of her driving habits when excited.
"Oh my god who's pregnant?"
"I'll tell you the news soon." I mumbled, cleverly avoiding a confirm or deny of the validity of her question.
"Holy crap, who's pregnant!" she guess, easily able to decipher my evasive language, which, it turns out, was not nearly as clever as I'd lead my readers to believe in the previously line of this narration.
"Lindsay." I said plainly, with no way out.
"Holy shit!" she changed lines. "Lindsay's pregnant!?" she changed back. "Oh my god"
"Yup." I confirmed, knuckles white, clenched to the door handle.

We went on to talk about the family's reaction and my reaction, which has thus far been limited to "Woa." "Really?" "Woa."

We got to breakfast alive and ate at a place call the Huddle House, just down the road from her apartment. And for the first time in my life* I ordered grits, a well known southern delicacy. I have to say it was rather bland.

Later we headed down the road to Jess's apartment and we sat at talked about various things not of interest to the road-trip-blog readership. I attempted to fix her virus-infected computer, got a drink, and then head out to catch my flight.

I got in passed security just barely on time and sauntered slowly down to my what I thought should be my gate. I sat down to relax and notice an unfamiliar town name on the gate sign. "New Orleans? Who the hell wants to go there?" I said to myself and then I got up to inquire with the attendant. She informed me plenty of people did and that I now needed to go to the furthest gate in the airport from the one we were at. With that, I was off tearing through the escalators and moving walkways, yelling to small children to clear the way, and stiff-arm tackling little old ladies. I was doing to make my flight... And just then I looked up and saw it.

I saw the sign. And it opened up my eyes. I saw the sign. No one's going to drag me up to get into the light where I belong. In fact no one's even going to tell me where said light is either. At least not if they use air-port LCD screens running Macromedia Flash.

You see in my mad dash through the airport I was naturally wondering two very important things. Where are airport concourses and what does their info display's code look like if they accidentally cast an identifier to a string when outputting. The answer, of course, is that the concourses are over to the left and _level0.panel4 is the identifier they used to contain data that they accidentally don't display.

Yes, it's true, not even my heart-pounding, I'm-going-to-miss-my-flight adrenaline rush could keep me from taking a minute out of my frantic run to grab a couple quick snap shots of this sign.

I'm now sitting, sweating, and breathing heavily on a plane bound for Boston, the end of my trip. I will be landing 45 minutes before The Can Kickers first Boston show in nearly six months. You may think it's a bad idea to attend such a show considering I haven't slept and my shoulder is in a considerable amount of pain. I might agree with you too, but I'm going. Their good friends, I haven't seen them in a quite a while, and I want to hear about the Mexico tour.

* And the last time.