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The goal today was to go from Key West to as far into South Carolina as I could.

Going south down to the Florida Keys I took the toll road almost the entire way because my Garmin told me to After looking at my backup paper road atlas it seemed as though I-95 went parallel to the toll highway for a significant chuck of the way. While I normally leave the directions planning mostly up to Garmin I decided that I would try to get over to I-95.

My Garmin was not pleased. Everyone who has one of these things has missed a turn and heard it say in an increasingly annoyed tone “recalculating” when it determines how to get you out of the mess you just got yourself in. In this case though, I was doing it on purpose. The Garmin told me at just about every street “turn left,” “turn right,” “make a u-turn” until I was almost right to the entrance ramp for I-95 (about a mile separated the two highways). Finally it recalculated and had me go along I-95, but a closer look showed that it wanted me to take the first possible exit and return to the toll highway. I was a bit worried that maybe there was something I wasn’t seeing, but once Garmin finally gave up and sent me along I-95 the estimated time to get to my destination dropped by one minute. This leads me to conclude that Garmin and the Florida Toll people are in cahoots with each other

I made it to Georgia and decided to get a recommendation for Savannah. Foodio54 sent me to Bella’s Italian Cafe. I’ve wanted to get just some lasagna for a few days now, but the opportunity hasn’t presented itself before today. The lasagna at Bella’s was fantastic. For some reason I will either love or hate lasagna, there is no in between, and I think it all comes down to the cheese. Additionally Bella’s makes their own bread and it’s almost like eating a donut instead of typical restaurant bread that is mostly only acceptable for birds and fish I would suggest that they hire maybe one more server (and in fairness I have no idea maybe someone called off), but it seemed like all of their servers were running all over, but were still a little slow because they had too many tables. Overall that’s really no big deal though.

Tags: Big Road Trip