Coast to Coast: Day 19: Macon, GA. Monday, May 26, 2014

     I went outside in the morning to get some fresh air and check that no one had stolen my bike overnight. Liz was still there, so I went to the gas station next door and bought some beef jerky. Then I went back into the hotel, locked my door, and prepared for a day of sitting in front of my computer. I would leave this room only one other time that day to stock up on more beef jerky. Beef jerky isn’t nutritious, but it was the closest thing I was going to have to a real meal.

I called my dad and described the hotel I was staying at. He laughed, which made me feel a bit better since he didn’t seem to be too concerned with my safety. I didn’t really give him all the details of the hotel until after I returned home, which completely changed his perspective. At the time, his reassuring words were all I needed.

     Before my trip, I had a serious addiction to the PC game Farming Simulator. It was a game that, you guessed it, simulated being a farmer. It was actually an extremely boring and repetitive game, but it was terribly addictive. The CD was already loaded in the tray of my laptop, and I pulled it up for the only time during my journey. 

     I made it just past the title screen before I felt a sharp anxiousness. It was the kind of anxiousness you feel the day before a big test, and you are still procrastinating. All this time I had kept myself busy; eating and drinking, sleeping, riding, and gas stops were the only part of the equation up until this point, with the exception of a few isolated hours during the previous day. I felt like I was wasting time, even though this was the only opportunity I had to truly relax. I still couldn’t do it. I had to be doing something productive, so I pulled up my online journal with the unreliable internet service and wrote as much about the trip as I could remember. It ended up being the smarter decision, because I wrote late into the night and was able to double the size of my journal. Writing didn’t really dissolve my fears over the situation that I was presented with or make time appear to move faster, but it did give me something to do while waiting to get out of that prison. It really was a prison. I was stuck in that room because I was overconfident with my lacking mechanical abilities, and now I was serving time for it. This analogy is only further proven by the felons that inhabited the hotel.