The original plan for today was to make it to Pensacola, but we changed this to Panama City. This helped as it equated today's and tomorrow's journey times as Panama City was an hour and a half closer to Tampa. We left in much better weather than yesterday:
 |
| From 2007 USA Elises |
A few Lotus related things happened today: first off we drove under a bridge that was called "Jim Clark Road". I didn't have time to grab a picture of it unfortunately. At the next petrol stop we met a family whose father told us his mother was from Norfolk. He was quite pleased when we informed him that the cars he had just been cooing over were from there too. He did however come out with one of those classic lines for people with English ancestors: "my grandmother shot at V2 bombs in the war". It's like anyone with a long lineage in the US had family on the Mayflower; that ship must have been a massive cruise liner. Or anyone in Liverpool in the 50s used to go to see The Beatles at The Cavern, which of course held 100,000 people.
There were a couple of mileage milestones: I hit 2000 miles for the whole journey so far, and my Elise clicked over to 25000 miles since I got her in April 2005:
 |
| From 2007 USA Elises |
We had to shop around for a hotel as down by the main waterfront it was full of college kids doing what they do, and we didn't want to leave the cars in areas where they would be up to mischief at night. It seems that Spring Break hasn't yet finished. That area of town was full of youngsters revving beaten up Camaros and Civics with body kits so we headed out a little. We ended up at a quieter area with rooms overlooking the cars so it all turned out ok. Dinner was (yet another) steak.
I realised that we have yet to see another Elise (or any Lotus) so far on the trip. Tomorrow we hit New Orleans; I know there are a couple of EliseTalk people who live there so maybe tomorrow we will have more luck.
See the gallery for more pics, and as usual today's GPS route can be seen at automapic.com.
