30,000 Orange Barrels

On last night’s trip up to the mountains to spend the night, there was construction on US441 between Clayton and Dillard, GA. We must have past 30,000 of those orange construction barrels as the Emperor past through the 30,000 mile mark.

Yesterday morning I washed the car because we had a MMC event in the early afternoon. This was our Senior Drive. One of the Club members is the Administrator of the Elmcroft Assisted Living Center in Martinez. He and I concocted a scheme in which the Club would come over and take the residents who wanted to go on a top down Miata drive instead of their usual Saturday 8-passenger van ride. We had a perfect day for it too, lower 70’s and a cloudless blue sky. We had 5 cars and 5 passengers for the first trip and when 4 more people showed up, we did a second slightly shorter trip for them. The one fellow who I drove was so appreciative that I was embarrassed by it. This is definitely an item we should do at least once a year.

When we got up this morning in the north of Georgia it was in the lower 30’s and there was a layer of frost covering the car. We wimped out for the first couple of hours of driving. The leaves didn’t cooperate in the whole picturesque, blazing fall color, Norman Rockwell painting we had hoped to see, but you take what you can get and we got extremely patchy color. We even did a 20-mile segment of the Blue Ridge Parkway in hopes, but the colorful vistas never materialized. There was one short stretch of NC 215 coming down off the parkway that in a matter of minutes we went from bare trees to patchy color to green. Never the less we had a wonderful time in our 24 hours of the mountains. We got in a night away from home, a short hike in the woods, a look at a beautiful twin waterfall and miles of twisty roads.