Day 14 - 524 Words

Our second day in Montgomery was spent at the zoo as Donnelly had planned. It was a nice time. All of the animals were on fields or in other natural type habitats. There were no cages. It was fun to take over the zoo with a group as large as ours, especially as we were mostly people in our twenties. The zoo employees seemed used to large groups of kids, and to large groups of retired people, but not to people our age. We road the train around the zoo and then did a walking tour as well. We spent some time in the aviary, but by far the part that was most popular with our group was the reptile house. The Montgomery Zoo boasts that it is home to some of the world’s most venomous snakes.
One of the guys in the guild, a guy named Phil, was obsessed with snakes. This was like heaven for him. He read the descriptions of every species aloud. He could spend half an hour just watching one snake sit. By lunch time we were ready to get back on the road, but Phil wanted to watch those snakes forever. As far as I could tell, he didn’t care whether or not we ever got to the convention. I wasn’t really comfortable hinting to him that we needed to get a move on. We had one guy, Owen, though, who was pretty clever.
“You like snakes, Phil?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I heard there’s a really great store in Kansas City that sells exotic snakes.”
You could see the wheels turning in Phil’s head. It was the first time he’d looked away from the snakes since we had walked into the reptile house, actually.
“Really?” Phil asked Owen.
“You bet.”
“Wow. We should go there.”
“Definitely,” Owen agreed.
“When do you think we’ll get there?” Phil asked.
“Well, Kansas City is scheduled for day five, but with the amount of time we’re spending here it could be longer.”
“What are we waiting for?” Phil said. “Let’s get out of here!” I guess he thought the prospect of actually owning an exotic snake was more interesting than just staring at them.
Now that Phil was ready to get moving, we could hit the road once more. Our next stop was Nashville, where one of the two female leaders, a woman named Bryce, had planned for us to experience both ends of the cultural spectrum in one day.
It took us about six hours to get to Nashville, stops included. We met Bryce and her Tennessee crew at the Opryland Hotel, where she had snagged a group rate for the out of town types in the group to stay. After what was becoming a fairly standard meet and greet type of deal, we pretty much took over the hotel’s Cyber Cafe. A lot of the guild members hadn’t been able to join us on the road trip, and we’d promised them a play by play of the whole thing. Some of us had to censor ourselves to keep from complaining about Phil’s snake obsession and the delay it caused us.