At the risk of revealing that my insides are made far more of pasty geek than rugged road-tripper, I’ve always thought of Anne Marie as sort of like the Millennium Falcon (or, if you’re a Whedon fan, Serenity). She’s old and a little scrappy, but she’s got character.

Okay: she’s really, really scrappy.

We’ve had a handful of technical difficulties before on this trip, but the worst of them by far came while we were trying to leave Weaverville, North Carolina (right near Asheville). Of course, something would break down then, when we were struggling to maintain something completely anathematical to the spirit of the trip: a schedule. Our good friend Max Wareham (pictured) was flying down to Jacksonville, Florida on Wednesday to get picked up by the bus, so we had very little time to cover that one last stretch of the southern East Coast.

So, of course, we had barely left the parking lot when things went haywire. We lost a whole day to milling around in a Wal-Mart parking lot and fixing various technical issues I’ll confess to not fully understanding (I only understood three words: “replace the alternator”) before we were back on the road again. Now we were trundling through southern North Carolina and Georgia, where the heat was unlike anything we had experienced thus far. It was miserably, hellishly, Biblically hot, the kind of heat where everything sticks to everything else and you feel like you’re marinating in your own sweat. We barely had the energy to sit up straight.

But we did make it to Jacksonville, albeit a day and a half late. And it was here that we exchanged one bus crew member for another: Mike, alas, had to take a flight from the Jacksonville airport back to Connecticut. But at least we had been joined by Max, and had no more firm scheduling commitments–the next few days were bound to be far more relaxing.