Wednesday, March 27, 2012.
Getting Ready To Go Nowhere.
A couple of weeks ago Mary Ann and I hatched an idea to scratch a few minor itches. She needed a short getaway. Since the kids left home (Mary Leigh and The Boy flew to Baltimore to spend the Easter holidays with his parents yesterday), she travels about once a month to avoid melancholy. And this will be the first Easter in her life in which she would not be surrounded by family.
To give me an investment in her plan, she recalled my mentioning a bucket-list item. Someday, I want to say I have driven the entire length of US 90--originally known as the Old Spanish Trail. Already covered: every inch from New Orleans west to US90's terminus at Van Horn, Texas. And east to around Pensacola. "A classic Tom thing to do," sez MA.
Our plan was to leave tomorrow for Tallahassee, then drive Friday first to Jacksonville (where US 90 emerges from the Atlantic Ocean), then south to St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. MA always wanted to go there, and so did I.
On top of all that, she added an interview on a Jacksonville television station for herself and her book, Suzie Homemaker Chronicles. It sounded like a plan, with only one element missing: a place from which I can broadcast the show.
It used to be easy. I'd plug my Vector remote gadget into the data port on the side of the hotel room's telephone, and I was on the air. But phone companies are replacing copper wires with fiber optic cables and internet-related connections. My trusty equipment is not compatible with those technologies. It's too much to expect a high-tech device to avoid obsolescence after twenty years. But nothing has come along to replace the Vector. At least not for doing talk shows. The digital delay on voice-over-internet connections makes having a phone conversation on the air nearly impossible.
We spent the afternoon trying to find out whether the hotels in which Mary Ann allegedly (but not completely) made reservations still had the data ports. The one in Tallahassee did. The one in St. Augustine didn't. I told her that I'd check into a cheap hotel (that's where I'm most likely to find the wiring I need) just to do the show. She would not hear of it. (MA so hates hotels with fewer than four stars that she considers me infected if I so much as set foot in one.)
I stayed home to nurse this problem. We didn't go out for either lunch or dinner, like people awaiting disaster. As far as I knew, the plan was to leave at six in the morning, and figure out my electronic problems from the road.
