Today's adventure sends me east on I-40, destination Atlanta. At 860 miles, it's a drive I'd normally make in one day -- however, as I'm still healing a bit, and there's a pretty good chance I'll be running into snow and ice along the way, I've decided to split the drive across two days. My initial plan was to head east on I-40 to Memphis, and then go from Memphis to Atlanta. In case weather gets bad, my alternate plan was to head south to Dallas, and then go east to Atlanta on I-20 -- a route that adds almost 200 miles and over 3 hours to my overall time. The current plan is to try I-40 and, in case things get bad, head south to I-20 and continue east from there.

Packing for this trip has been split into equal thirds. One third of the luggage is clothes. Because I'm still on a special post-op diet, one third is food -- mostly powdered protein drinks, vitamins, and stuff like that. The final third is electronics -- laptop, cell phone, portable dvd player, Gameboy, GPS, MP3 cds, DVDs, and at least half a dozen chargers, if not more. In fact now that I think about it, it might be more of a 25/25/50 split.

Launch time, 10am.