I stupidly left my camera card reader AND memory card in St. Louis when I left yesterday…so I have no pictures for Tuesday, February 23.

Today, while on my way to Nashville, I stopped at a gas station outside of Memphis and bought a disposable camera (heck yes), because I didn’t feel like driving anymore without some sort of way to take photos. This means that I DO have photos for today, the 24th- I just have to get the film developed and the negatives scanned. We will see if any of them actually came out.

I wasn’t supposed to be going to Nashville at all, actually. I drove to Memphis because I was tired of waiting for InterLibrary Loan to send me the microfilm I needed for data collection, and I figured it would be much easier to just go right to the source. And the library at UMemphis had e-mailed me to say that they also had microfilm for the Atlanta Journal-Constituion, which is my other newspaper source. A trip to Tennessee, then, would be killing two birds with one stone.

However, upon getting to Memphis, I discovered that the library did not in fact have the AJC microfilm I needed. I had a minor freakout, then started checking library catalogs for every university within 8 hours of my current location. I was seriously considering trekking all the way up to Urbana, Illinois (which would have been awful) before I checked Vanderbilt’s library collection. This, amazingly, happened to have every volume of the AJC going back to 1899, well before the Journal and the Constitution had even merged. Hooray! I checked out of my hotel a day early, drove east for a few hours, and holed up in the Vandy library for four hours getting the rest of my newspaper images. Then I drove back to St. Louis.

So (for some reason the map loads a little too zoomed in):

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Columbia,+MO&daddr=Saint+Louis,+MO+to:Memphis,+TN+to:Nashville,+TN+to:Saint+Louis,+MO+to:Columbia,+MO&hl=en&geocode=FRlbUgIdCBh_-inJgoG786vchzEgb726LWkRoA%3BFc-0TQIduUaf-in5ju36qbTYhzFb4Lsiyuo5vg%3BFd5WGAIdLPah-ilFl0PqHn7VhzH-thpgFfOT0Q%3BFQLZJwIdRcbT-ik9kOsTMuxkiDGg2umh0Lk_fQ%3BFc-0TQIduUaf-in5ju36qbTYhzFb4Lsiyuo5vg%3B&mra=ls&sll=37.059145,-89.55399&sspn=4.050315,9.876709&ie=UTF8&ll=37.05948,-89.55399&spn=3.82012,5.56034&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

By the time I get back to Columbia at 10:30ish tomorrow, I will have driven about 1,000 miles total (according to all-knowing Google, today’s Memphis-Nashville and Nashville-St Louis drives accounted for 523 of those miles), through five different states, in a 3-day span. AND I have all of my data now! Time well spent, I think, since it takes about a week to get anything processed through ILL.

It’s true that I should have had my act together a long time ago, and requested the microfilm early in January, but as blog readers know, a couple of things happened in January that set me back much more than I ever expected. And, for a carless person like me, the chance to spend three days driving on the open road…is not one to pass up. Carpe diem, mes amis!