For many drivers Friday, rest stop No. 19 in Bibb County was much more than bathrooms and a couple of vending machines.
Because until that rest stop in Macon, some of those drivers hadn’t had a proper rest in the 12 hours since they began fleeing a storm slated to destroy their homes.
Most of the people packing the rest stop were sporting license plates from Florida, which is in crisis mode due to Hurricane Irma.
Sarvireddy Eppaturi, a 36-year-old software developer, was sitting on a concrete bench outside the rest stop scrolling through his phone Friday afternoon.
On top of the table was his driver, fast asleep and using a bunched-up sweatshirt as a makeshift pillow.
They left Tampa with family and friends Thursday night and had stopped twice before Macon.
Eppaturi said Florida traffic was awful in Ocala and Jacksonville, stopping them from getting much above 40 mph for long stretches.
His gameplan was to head for Hindu Temple of Atlanta, which he heard was taking in evacuees.
“Otherwise I don’t know where I’d stay the next couple of days,” he said.
But with the storm possibly heading for Atlanta, Eppaturi was considering making a break for Tennessee or North Carolina.
Tennesse is where Phil Wheaton and his wife were heading.
They left Cape Coral, a city in Southwest Florida that has a complex canal system prone to flooding.
Leaving Tampa about 4 a.m. Friday, they hit traffic that had them sitting in place for minutes at a time.
The couple’s destination is a cabin in Tennessee rented for them by a concerned daughter in Michigan.
Children much younger also have their parents running around in this time of emergency.
Nicholas, 2½, babbled as he zipped through the rest stop with his father Pablo Zitzmann keeping an eye on him.
Zitzmann, 29, said he and his wife — both chefs at their high-end Asian restaurant, No Name Chinese, located in South Miami — went “straight from the kitchen into the car.”
In his rubber restaurant shoes and a sriracha T-shirt, he sat in the grass at the rest stop and enjoyed the respite from the road.
They left at 9:30 p.m. Thursday and took at 30-minute nap somewhere along the way, which included bad traffic in Florida. It was bumper-to-bumper for four hours from Gainesville to the state line, Zitzmann said.
Luis Perez and his nine relatives divided into two cars stopped in Macon while heading for family in Indiana.
Perez, 15, said the caravan left about 9 p.m. on Thursday from Homestead, Florida — a city in Miami-Dade County that was flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
His father had been driving 12 hours.
Perez and his mother were some of the many people who took a bottle of water from a local church handing out snacks and drinks at the rest stop.
Chris Fuller, with Northway Church in Macon, said his congregation brought between 500 to 600 snacks and an unknown amount of donated bottles of water and Coke, the latter of which went the fastest.
“People need that caffeine,” he said.
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