After a very late night in Nashville, which ended with me sleeping for a few hours just inside the door of my hotel room, I somehow piloted the rental car to Atlanta, where I finally dropped it off. Before returning the keys I ran my eyes across the now dusty Precision Red Impala and reflected on all we had experienced together. In nine days of driving I had put 4,525 miles on the car. To get an idea of how far that is, imagine driving one mile 4,525 times. I had driven across an entire continent for no real purpose, other than to observe it. I saw a bunch of stuff. Most of it was road. Some of that road was asphalt, some of it was concrete, none of it was edible. I had seen some interesting things, but nothing too exotic. It was time to change that.
As I rode the yellow Hertz shuttle to the main terminal, I decided to leave, in the Ridiculous Race, a picture of Mexico and the American South so complete that if the regions were to suddenly disappear from Earth they could be reconstructed out of my words. I think I succeeded quite nicely.
At 9:00 p.m., I boarded Delta flight 61 from Atlanta, Georgia, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
