We are in Hen­der­son­ville, NC for the next cou­ple nights. My sis­ter and her hus­band are vis­it­ing the area and see­ing as this is closer than Con­necti­cut we always try and meet them when they are here. For years they have been telling us that when Allen hits 55 he is going to retire early and move here.

Tonight while on a drive north of town they asked if we minded vis­it­ing a devel­op­ment where there are some nice home lots that they we think­ing of buy­ing in, we said sure. We drove up to near the high­est point in the place and looked around. It was about 500 feet higher than the main road and the views were great. There were a couple/three lots still open, one had a for sale by devel­oper sign, one had a for sale by a real­tor sign and one didn’t have any sign except for what looked like a buried cable marker. All of them looked like a nice spot to put a home.

After we got back to the hotel my sis­ter told us that the one with­out a for sale sign was theirs. They had bought it a cou­ple years ago and wanted to get an unbi­ased opin­ion from us.

Sneaky.

Our bags are packed with winter-like clothes (it snowed today at Mt Rush­more) and more elec­tron­ics than an F-14 fighter plane.

On our lit­tle tour of Dau­fuskie Island there were sev­eral his­toric sites and a cou­ple of art “gal­leries” that were high­lighted for us to stop at.

When we left the Gen­eral Store and Cart Rental place we started out fol­low­ing the rec­om­mended tour route. The first stop was a spot that held two his­toric places, an old church and an old school. Of course there were two other golf carts stopped there too, so we hung around until they left and instead of con­tin­u­ing on the “tour” we took the first left we could. From then on we almost never saw any of our ferry mates again. Hey we came here to get away from people.

We even­tu­ally rode on most of the tour route just back­wards or com­ing at it side­ways. There were a cou­ple of his­toric ceme­ter­ies that we wanted to check out and in spite of trav­el­ing down the roads they were on, never did see any. We did find one of the artist gal­leries, The Iron Fish, and parked our golf cart under the tree in the side yard. It is a 100 year-old orig­i­nal island house that has a front porch that serves as the gallery and the front wall is cov­ered with funky, yet appeal­ing schools of metal fish. The are also metal crabs and mer­maids mixed in. There was a note on the front door with pur­chase instruc­tions: If you see some­thing you like take it and slip your money under the door. For credit card pur­chases, leave a note say­ing what you bought and your phone num­ber. A nice school of four small fish would be an awe­some dec­o­ra­tion on a liv­ing room or bed room wall, but at $85 per fish they were a bit rich for our blood.

As we got back into the cart to leave we both noticed sev­eral large metal squir­rels stuck to the trunk of the tree and both of us went, “Coool.” I checked the price and they were $45 a piece and both of us went, “Naaah.” Just before turn­ing the key to start the cart Donna said, “You sure?” I hes­i­tated and then said, “Why not?” Chase, the artist, was in his back­yard, so I walked over and gave him the cash. He offered to wrap it up, but we declined just stick­ing it in the bot­tom of our black travel bag.

I looked up that sec­ond Mount Pleas­ant loca­tion on the net last night and nei­ther one of yesterday’s places were, as I sus­pected, the offi­cial PO. The actual CPU was about a mile down the road in another shop­ping cen­ter. Amend­ment 1 to the Post Office Photo Safari Con­sti­tu­tion was cre­ated today. It reads: While still in the area of an unlo­cat­able Post Office from the Big List, it is per­fectly accept­able to search the USPS web site to find the updated Post Office and sub­se­quen­tially pho­to­graph it. So first thing this morn­ing we went back over the Cooper River Bridge, and like yes­ter­day it was just as the sun was com­ing up. With only a slight bit of drama we found the Mount Pleas­ant CPU tucked inside a place called Smoker Friendly.

A ten mile dash on I-526 led us to North Charleston where our first orig­i­nally sched­uled Post Office of the day caused a real prob­lem. 1050 E Mon­tague Avenue had a reg­u­lar blue box out­side, along with a blue dis­tri­b­u­tion box, but zero out­ward signs of actu­ally being a Post Office. The sign hang­ing off the front and the gold painted let­ters on the win­dow both pro­claimed this was Aunt Bea’s Restau­rant. I took a photo any­way, then we cir­cled the block just in case, but no other evi­dence of postal activ­ity was found.

The next Post Office, accord­ing to my Google map, was not too far away at the point where E Mon­tague met up with US52, AKA Rivers Ave. When we got to there though the address num­bers were in the low four thou­sands. Ack. We headed north in the hopes that the blocks were short, they weren’t, after about 5 miles we found the Post Office. Trou­ble was we now had to back track all that way because there was still one more PO in North Charleston to get. After that we needed to go back north fur­ther than that pesky North Charleston PO to get the ones in Goose Creek, Charleston South­ern Uni­ver­sity and Ladson.

Once through with Post Offices the weather had warmed enough that we could drive home with the top down. About 15 miles from home I added Amend­ment 2 to the Post Office Photo Safari Con­sti­tu­tion, to wit: It is accept­able to shoot a new Post Office not on the Big List when it was cre­ated sev­eral years ago or to retake a Post Office photo if it has been updated or replaced since the Big List was cre­ated, only if said Post Office is plainly vis­i­ble from the driver’s seat while trav­el­ing the roads of South Car­olina and as long as that travel wasn’t specif­i­cally for the pur­pose of tak­ing a photo of said Post Office.

Almost exactly 5 years ago when we started this adven­ture, the town of Wind­sor was using a trailer for their Post Office, in the inter­ven­ing years the trailer was replaced by a reg­u­lar building.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morn­ing, sailor’s take warn­ing. This pic­ture of the sun­rise behind the south cause­way bridge in New Smyrna Beach fore­told the storms that trav­eled across Florida today. On our drive down to Palm City we man­aged to stay ahead of the heavy rains and even got to drive the first 30 or so miles with the top down.

We did get wet pretty good this after­noon after we got to Donna’s sister’s place. To kill a cou­ple hours Sandy took us for a drive around to see some local sights. When we walked out to the beach near the Hutchin­son Island Mar­riott Resort‎ (where this pic­ture was taken) and stood for a few sec­onds admir­ing the surf, the rain started to come down. We were less than 50 yards from the car and by the time we got back in it we were pretty wet. My back seat com­pan­ion, Des­de­mona, decided to dry her­self off by rub­bing her face along the side and back of my shirt while I sat there. Don’t worry, my wife was in the front seat and thought it was fine, Desi is Sandy’s dog.

After the usual sun­rise, break­fast, walk on the beach thing, Donna and I headed out to help the local retail­ers have a good Black Fri­day. We were not alone. At the first place we stopped at, Tanger Out­lets 2, they were busy, but not so over­crowded that it wasn’t unpleas­ant. But by the time we called it quits at the other Tanger Out­let place the park­ing spots were at a pre­mium. Try­ing to leave got a lit­tle dicey as folks jock­eyed for the scarce spots and clear exit paths. We didn’t go par­tic­u­larly early because we weren’t out to to get big ticket items with big ticket dis­counts and our Christ­mas shop­ping is already fin­ished, we just did a lit­tle clothes and trin­ket shop­ping for ourselves.

We’re here. The trip up was very nice, we stopped for pizza in Dhalon­aga at our favorite Ital­ian place before hit­ting the real moun­tain roads. Woohoo. But wouldn’t you know it, when we hit the best part of GA60, AKA The Snake, we would got stuck behind an aptly named Sequoya, big, pon­der­ous and slow going. Minor inconvenience.

The only other minor incon­ve­nience is the 1/2 mile of unpaved road to the cabin. At a cou­ple of points it is seri­ously slanted up and water is mak­ing nice lit­tle wash outs to try and steer around. I only scraped the under­car­riage once, but I wouldn’t want to drive down it a night. Plus tomor­row should be inter­est­ing as we are sup­posed to get some good rain in the afternoon.

We are stay­ing in the Hol­i­day Inn Express in Lake City, SC, just a cou­ple years later than our first attempt. After a long lay­off it was good to get back in the Post Office sad­dle again — Paxville, Davis Sta­tion, Gree­leyville, Lane, Salters, Kingstree, Cades, Lake City, Scran­ton, Cow­ard, Eff­in­g­ham, Pam­plico and Johnsonville.

Thir­teen POs today and we have 7 lined up for tomorrow’s return trip. This was a sec­ond trip to Paxville because the first time we couldn’t find the Post Office, through no fault of our own I might add. Cou­ple of inter­est­ing town names today. When you say John­sonville all I think of is Brats, but my favorite has to be Eff­in­g­ham because if it is pro­nounced the way I hear it in my head, it sounds like some­one is cussing about a ham.

Bowl­ing Green was one of 10 Post Offices we pho­tographed today. The oth­ers included a going ghost town with a bunch of inter­est­ing build­ings in the down­town (Great Falls), one that should have been open but wasn’t (Lando), one with a quite friendly Post­mas­ter who made fun of me because I mis­spelled Edin­burgh (Edge­moor), one where we had to bob and weave around the town’s Christ­mas parade to get to (Fort Mill) and one that was right where it was sup­posed to be, but turned out it was a CPU with a much larger one that wasn’t on my list closer to town (Clover.)

We are spend­ing the night at a Court­yard by Mar­riott in Rock Hill and Donna summed up our expe­ri­ence so far by say­ing, “Maybe we should stay in Super 8 Motels, that way we won’t be dis­ap­pointed because of our low­ered expec­ta­tions.” The first room we were put in the bath­room tile was miss­ing grout over a large sec­tion and the floor under­neath felt spongy. The sec­ond room was bet­ter, but the water pres­sure is weak and the wire­less inter­net is lame, the con­nec­tion is good, but the speed is hov­er­ing around only 5.5 Mbps, so I can’t even stream RP. Plus break­fast isn’t free here. Unfor­tu­nately there wasn’t a HIE any­where near here.

One R2D2 mail­box and
Four­teen Post Office pic­tures in the morn­ing.
One hun­dred four­teen pro­fes­sional cyclists in the afternoon.

I missed you?

At some­what the last minute we decided to head south to take some Post Office pic­tures. Found a HI Express in a town called Yemassee and made a reser­va­tion. It wasn’t until we got there that I won­dered if they had Inter­net access in the rooms. If it didn’t I’d be fine with that, I brought a book. Well, it turns out that there was wire­less access, but because we were at the end of the hall it was weak as a kit­ten. After I gave up, Donna got the Weather Chan­nel to load, but it appeared as if we were on a 14.4 modem (and then wouldn’t stay con­nected.) So we gave up.

Post­ing this on Sun­day, but dat­ing it Sat­ur­day for his­tor­i­cal top tran­si­sion data.

Hager­stown, MD to Con­cord, NC. Today’s plan was straight down I-81 to I-77 and we stuck pretty much to it. Boy is this cor­ri­dor busy dur­ing the week.

We stopped in Lex­ing­ton, VA to take a leg stretch. We used to have some­one to visit when we came to town, but now that the Lewis clan has pretty much scat­tered, we were left to our own devices. So we decided to do the Sally Lewis Loop Walk, about 2 miles around the out­side, then through the mid­dle of the cam­puses of VMI and W&L.

Couldn’t hardly stand the traf­fic I-81 any longer when a warn­ing sign let us know the right lane was closed at mile marker 127. We ducked off the Inter­state at Exit 132, fol­low­ing US11 into Chris­tian­burg before turn­ing south on VA8 to pick up another stretch of the Blue Ridge Park­way. With today’s 34 mile seg­ment it meant that we had dri­ven a total of 220 miles out of the pos­si­ble 469.

I-77 was just as busy as 81 and once you got about 40 miles north of Char­lotte the road sur­face started to reflect the heavy usage by becom­ing very rough and pot­holed. Mak­ing us very happy to get on a sec­ondary road east to make it to our overnight stop des­ti­na­tion. we prob­a­bly could have made it all the way home tonight, but decided to stop here in Con­cord, so that when we get up early tomor­row morn­ing, we can ride home with the top down.

Wash­ing­ton DC to New Britain, CT. We were on the road by 8:00AM and leav­ing DC on the GW Park­way is a treat. Nice quiet tree lined road that I’m sure is busier at other times, but on Sun­day morn­ing is almost lonely. Traf­fic didn’t really pick up until we got into Delaware, by NJ it was mas­sive. Ten lanes of Turn­pike, five each direc­tion, were filled with trav­el­ers. The Gar­den State Park­way was busy as well until we got north of Pas­saic. For­tu­nately there were no inci­dents or acci­dents to bring things to a standstill.

Once we were across the Tap­pan Zee Bridge we got off the high­ways and started dri­ving the byways. But first we stopped in Tar­ry­town and got a slice of pizza. It was lunch time, but it didn’t mat­ter we wanted some pizza, every time we come up here we try and eat pizza at least every three days, because to quote my sis­ter, “The south may be friendly and have good BBQ, they don’t know pizza.” For­tu­nately for us pizza joints in the north­east are as preva­lent as drive-thru espresso places in the north­west, i.e. on every corner.

No water­fall pic­ture today. As a mat­ter of fact I didn’t take a sin­gle pic­ture, so for your enjoy­ment, here is one from yesterday’s visit to the National Zoo. They have set up some high lines between sev­eral points in the zoo and the orang­utans have the free­dom to roam them. Just don’t stand directly under the wires.…

Salem, VA to Wash­ing­ton DC. Fifty miles on the Inter­state, and then 60 miles on the Blue Ridge Park­way. Then 100 miles on US 29 before fin­ish­ing up on I-66. The last 30 miles into DC was very busy with two slow downs to crawl speed before we go onto city streets and started to hunt our hotel.

We checked in and called Sally. We met at her apart­ment where a plan was for­mu­lated: din­ner and a jazz con­cert at the Capi­tol. We dined at the Asian Kitchen just around the cor­ner. After a brief pit stop at our respec­tive rooms for the proper shoes, we started to walk over to DC. Hey, the Capi­tol is just on the other side of the big pointy mon­u­ment. It was a nice night for a walk and it was a good thing because by my rough mea­sur­ing on a map it is about 5 miles from where we started. The con­cert start time was 8:00 PM and when we got close to the Capi­tol we didn’t here any music. When we finally made it at 8:30 we saw them tak­ing down the signs announc­ing the event and load­ing them on a bus. They called it because it might rain. We took the Metro back.

Today’s water­fall, Wig­wam, was a mere pup at 30′ com­pared to the past two days, but the walk to it was a piece of cake, about a hun­dred yards off the parkway.

Donna felt good enough to go out to eat lunch and gro­cery shop. Chick-Fil-A Sand­wich combo meal for me and a Kid­die 4 Nugget meal combo for her. Because we had a coupon the Kid­die Meal was free.

After the shop­ping she was still feel­ing alright, but didn’t really want to go to Ander­son as we had planned, so she asked me to can­cel the room reser­va­tion. When I went to the Hol­i­day Inn site to can­cel, there was some red let­ter­ing at the bot­tom of the page warn­ing me that even if I can­celed I would not be get­ting my money back. Ooops, I guess when I made the reser­va­tion I selected a room with a low rate that was non-refundable. So we packed a change of clothes, our tooth brushes and got in the car. Of course we packed some Post Office maps too. We hit 4 towns on the way up, we will do the 4 in Ander­son in the morn­ing and will try and get 4 more on the way home tomorrow.

The mural above was on a build­ing right next door to the Post Office in Don­alds. Clever use of per­spec­tive. And the tree as util­ity hook-up is genius.

Right next door to our hotel in Ander­son is a place called Buffalo’s South­west Cafe, where we have eaten before, which was call­ing our name for din­ner. We split the Navajo Chops (two 6oz pork chops topped with bour­bon, roasted apples and brown sugar but­ter, served with loaded mashed pota­toes and steamed veg­gies) and a large din­ner salad. Water for her and iced tea for me.

It is unsea­son­ably cold here this week­end, not news to most on the east coast, so the top will be up in the dozen or so pho­tos in the Post Office Gallery that we take, but unlike those in the north­east there will not be any snow in the background.

We made a trip up to Chester­field, SC today to see Donna’s cousin and her hus­band. We were sup­posed to go up on Fri­day, but fate put a big dent in those plans for us Thurs­day evening.

Donna’s Aunt Mary was stay­ing there in Chester­field, prob­a­bly for the rest of the win­ter. She had come down after Thanks­giv­ing and had to be hos­pi­tal­ized because she was get­ting dizzy. After a cou­ple of days in the hos­pi­tal the doc­tors turned her loose, unsure what was wrong, but blam­ing it on her wors­en­ing emphy­sema. They put her on oxy­gen and told her it might be best if she didn’t return to NJ until the weather warmed up. When we last vis­ited in early Decem­ber she didn’t look like the same per­son that we had seen last July. She had lost weight and was hav­ing trou­ble walk­ing because of the breath­ing issues.

Thurs­day when Lau­rie and her hus­band Ted returned from his dial­y­sis they found her on the kitchen floor. She had fallen a cou­ple hours ear­lier and she couldn’t get up because her hip was bro­ken. She was rushed to a hos­pi­tal in Rock­ing­ham, NC where she passed away a cou­ple hours later from res­pi­ra­tory failure.

Mary and Donna’s mother were not only sister-in-laws, but they were best friends, hav­ing met in col­lege long before they met the broth­ers they would end up mar­ry­ing. Bar­bara was short and stocky and Mary was tall and thin. They were per­fect travel com­pan­ions because Bar­bara drove, but had no sense of direc­tion while Mary was afraid to drive (liv­ing in Jer­sey like she did, who could blame her) but was a born nav­i­ga­tor. The two of them vis­ited each other a cou­ple times a year and there was always a trip together in there some­where. They earned the nick­names Thelma and Louise when they drove from Seat­tle to Aiken when Donna’s mom moved in with us. They even started sign­ing their Christ­mas cards to each other that way.

So long Mary, we’ll miss you here on earth, but we know you are happy to be reunited with your trav­el­ing part­ner again.

I know some­one who will never get a flu shot again. Tues­day before last Donna got a flu shot at work. Every­one told her it was a good idea because even though she is long fin­ished with chemo and radi­a­tion, her immune sys­tem is prob­a­bly in a weak­ened state. Nice the­ory, lousy execution.

The two days fol­low­ing the shot she felt pretty crappy and once that kind of cleared up she devel­oped a cough. The cough is still hang­ing around 9 days later. Even with tak­ing cough med­i­cine the cough has been keep­ing her from get­ting a good night’s sleep. With­out a good night’s sleep Donna has been feel­ing a lit­tle out of it. Not feel­ing up to spend­ing 12 hours rid­ing in the car on Sat­ur­day to get home, after lunch today we decided to head back to the hotel, pack our bags and get a few hours head start.

Our north­ward momen­tum petered out just south of Ocala, FL. When we unpacked the lug­gage tonight we real­ized that I was a cou­ple pants shy a load (and a sweat­shirt and some loungewear.) Ooops, Donna had packed the suit­cases back in Stu­art by emp­ty­ing only the two top draw­ers of the dresser in our hotel room, not real­iz­ing that I had put some stuff in the bot­tom one too.

I called the hotel and explained the predica­ment to the clerk and she said she would leave a note for house­keep­ing to bring the clothes to the front desk. I then called my brother-in-law and begged him to go over to Stu­art tomor­row and retrieve the bag­gage. I expressed the impor­tance of get­ting these items back because one of them is my favorite Levi 501 jeans. These are the ones so are so bro­ken in they are get­ting holes in places that make them almost unsuit­able for pub­lic wear­ing, but the still have a long life ahead of them as “knock about the house” wear.

The trip from New Smyrna Beach to Palm City was rougher than we expected. To make some time and arrive early enough to go to the air­port with sis­ter Sandy to pick up brother Steve, we just went ahead and got on I-95. It went pretty well for a while, but then the traf­fic den­sity picked up as the morn­ing wore on, so we decided to get over and fin­ish the last 30 miles on US1. Big mis­take, traf­fic was worse. It ended up tak­ing us 3–1/2 hours to go the last 130 miles of our trip.

We are here now and the sec­ond order of busi­ness (after lunch) was to wash some clothes. Sandy and Paul have a nice super capac­ity front load­ing washer that we could stuff all of the last three days worth of dirty laun­dry in in one load. And when the cycle is done you know your clothes are clean because the machine tells you so by illu­mi­nat­ing this handy lit­tle light.

Thanks to the cloudy day we man­aged to keep the top down the whole way from Aiken to Chester­field. We had a nice visit with Donna’s aunt, cousin and spouse of cousin. The cousins had just this year retired from the New Jer­sey, actu­ally east­ern PA, rat race and moved to South Car­olina. After get­ting a tour of the new house we set­tled in for some rem­i­nisc­ing. We thought for lunch we could all go into down­town Chester­field and find a nice local restau­rant to eat at. But appar­ently din­ing options are lim­ited in the town of 1,338, so lunch was had at the local Subway.

After lunch we said good­bye and instead of turn­ing left and head­ing home we went right and headed north to Con­cord, NC. That’s right, Razzoo’s for din­ner. The wait for a table was 15 min­utes, but def­i­nitely worth it, although after we were seated we couldn’t fig­ure out why the wait because there were still plenty of empty tables and it looked like there was plenty of wait staff. Speak­ing of servers, my buddy Mark asked me to pat ours on the butt because every­one of the females that ever waited on us were very young and attrac­tive. I think Mark thought I would get in trou­ble with my wife if I did, well the joke is on him. It didn’t bother Donna at all, but Spence was a lit­tle weirded out by it.

I had Rat Toes for appe­tizer (I saved you 3 Mark) and Donna got the Craw­daddy Fon­due Dip. For din­ner we split a Li’l Side Salad and the Cajun Combo Skil­let. We were so full we skipped desert…for about 60 min­utes. After we got back to the hotel we walked across the street to a Sonic for a Sun­dae and a Blast.

In an effort to burn off a por­tion, a very small por­tion, of the calo­ries con­sumed at Razzoo’s we risked life and limb walk­ing across the huge park­ing lot from the restau­rant to the Con­cord Mills Mall. We then risked our charge card bal­ance by walk­ing all the way around the 1.4 mil­lion square foot shop­ping mall. We actu­ally showed some restraint there, I bought the movie Grand Prix on DVD at FYE and Donna bought a cou­ple of bracelets at a kiosk called Be Unique.

Rest easy Mark, we resisted the “Call of the Rat Toe.” We came into Con­cord on US601 and even though we were 5–6 miles east of Lowes Motor Speed­way the traf­fic was as thick as mos­qui­tos on a summer’s eve. Descre­tion being the bet­ter part of valor we just rolled north into Kannapolis.

After a few false moves we found our motel. I couldn’t beleive that we could find a room this close to the big race on such short notice, but maybe I know why now, it is only a cou­ple short steps up from a dump. But hey, there is wire­less broad­band inter­net, the water pres­sure is great, the AC blows cold air and after man­u­ally hit­ting the power but­ton, the remote con­trol works the TV just fine, so what else do you want for $80.

At the front desk there was a sched­ule for the Kan­napo­lis Intim­ida­tors, class A farm team for the Chicago White Sox, and they were home. We found a local pizza place for din­ner, Flyin Buf­falo and went to a base­ball game, sort of.

Park­ing was a buck and Gen­eral Admis­sion was to be $4 each, but some guy was giv­ing away com­pli­men­tary Gen­eral Admis­sion tick­ets just out­side the gate. He assured Donna there was no catch, so we took them and got in for free. About 10 min­utes before game­time the grounds crew put the tarp on the field. The PA announcer said the game would be delayed a few min­utes as there was a storm sys­tem headed our way. Donna and I imme­di­ately made our way to one of sev­eral cov­ered pic­nic areas, even though it wasn’t rain­ing yet, to avoid the rush later. After about a half hour and no rain we decided to just go ahead and leave as our tick­ets were free. Before we made it to the exit they started to take the tarp up, so we got some seats to watch some base­ball. We made it through two whole innings before our long day caught up to us and we headed for the exit again.

Shows how much we don’t know about Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary his­tory, when an extremely crit­i­cal bat­tle that turned the tide the colonist’s way was fought right here in SC at Kings Moun­tain. Donna and I stum­bled on it while search­ing for a place to turn off the Inter­state in our quest for a newer North Car­olina state map. This mon­u­ment was erected by the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, a larger one is just a cou­ple hun­dred feet away and was con­structed by the US Gov­ern­ment in 1930 when the site became a National Park.

Over these last two days we have dri­ven around 500 miles and at least half of that was with the top down. Good thing it isn’t later in the year or Donna and I would be a lot more sun­burned than we are right now. We are also a lit­tle wind burned too, plus my lips are way chapped. But we had a great time.

What took 4 hours on the way up, with a din­ner stop, took 3–1/2 on the way back without.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna change the power sup­ply on this PC. And it beter solve our ran­dom ugly noise issue or…I don’t know what.

No state parks for Christ­mas Eve, but we did walk a few blocks from Sandy’s house to a small city park. The adults stood around chit-chatting while some nephews-in-law played in the sand and a niece related by vapor swung on the swings.

That night the kids were going to open one gift after Uncle Paul read them Clement Clarke Moore’s “Twas the Night Before Christ­mas.” Donna and Brian were going to open a cou­ple because they weren’t going to be there Christ­mas morn­ing, but one of the rela­tions (who likes to be the cen­ter of atten­tion and in charge of every­thing) pro­ceeded to hand out gift after gift after gift until the tree was empty under­neath. Oh well, at least “Santa’s” gifts to the kid­dies were in another room, so they would have some sur­prises in the morning.

When Donna and I planned this lit­tle Hol­i­day trip we decide to take two days down and one back up. To pick a place to stay that was about half way I used the sci­en­tific method of stretch­ing my fin­ger from Point Aiken to Point Stu­art and looked at a spot about half-way for the overnight stay, unfor­tu­nately that point was in the mid­dle of the Oke­feno­kee Swamp. Went a lit­tle past half, to make the sec­ond day’s dri­ving eas­ier, and set­tled on Lake City, FL. Made a reser­va­tion at the Hol­i­day Inn Express there and started count­ing down the days until I would get a cin­na­mon bun for breakfast.

After we had eaten lunch and gone for a hike in the Lit­tle Ocmul­gee State Park, Donna took out the reser­va­tion sheet for the Hol­i­day Inn Express and went to check the direc­tions to get there. For the life of her, no mat­ter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find US52 nor US378 any­where near Lake City, FL. It was then that she noticed the address on the reser­va­tion con­fir­ma­tion I had printed out, Lake City, SC. At first I thought it had to be a mis­print, but then I noticed the hotel’s phone num­ber and sure enough I rec­og­nized it as a SC area code. DOH!

Got on the cell phone and called Lake City, SC and can­celed my reser­va­tion. Asked the clerk there to give me the phone num­ber of the Hol­i­day In Express in Lake City, FL. There was not an Express, but there was a plain ol’ Hol­i­day Inn, with a vacancy, so we reserved a night there. I wasn’t going to get my cin­na­mon bun, but at least we would be stay­ing in a room on the way to Stu­art, FL not 300 miles away in the wrong direction.

233.0 Miles. Mist­imed our arrival in Fayet­teville and missed the start. We were one block away and could actu­ally hear the announcer count­down from 5 to send the rid­ers on their way. That meant we got stuck in the ensu­ing traf­fic jam. That made us almost miss our next peek at the rid­ers out­side of Car­roll­ton. We had to pull off the side of the road and pow­er­walk about a 1/2 mile back to catch the pele­ton. We did have plenty of time to catch the fin­ish in Rome.

Donna and I are dri­ving up north to Con­necti­cut for my Mom’s birth­day start­ing the 27th. Our itin­er­ary (so far) is as follows:Thursday, Aiken, SC to Bre­vard, NCFri­day, Bre­vard, NC to Lex­ing­ton, VASat­ur­day, Lex­ing­ton, VA to Cum­ber­land, MDSun­day, Cum­ber­land, MD to Williamsport, PAMon­day, Williamsport, PA to New Britain, CTTues­day, Wednes­day, New Britain, CTThurs­day, New Britain, CT to ???Fri­day, ??? to ???Sat­ur­day, ??? to Aiken, SC. So if you live any­where near these places and you see a Gar­net Red Miata zip by, it is prob­a­bly us.

Bur­glar Note: Donna’s Mom is not trav­el­ing with us and she keeps a shot­gun near her bed (with the safety off.)