The most exciting thing that is likely to happen to me this week looks like being my physical therapy appointments tomorrow and Friday. Maybe the PT who’s also an English major will be there, and we can swap literary allusions while I do my exercises.
I haven’t gone to get any bedding plants yet—maybe next week—but I did get all excited and buy a new weed-eater, so now I can trim around all the inaccessible parts of the yard where the mower just won’t fit.
One piece of forward planning I want to get on with is planning out the middle part of our vacation in June. L and M are going to Manhattan for three or four days with L’s mother, and L flat refuses to take me. She says that if downtown Baltimore makes me feel claustrophobic (it does) there’s no way she’s going to try to deal with me in New York. So instead, I’m going to run around central Virginia and chase railroads. Years ago a man named O. Winston Link made a magnificent series of photographs documenting the last years of steam power on the Norfolk & Western railroad, which was the last Class I railroad to operate steam—they didn’t quit until 1960. I want to go to some of the little whistle-stop towns where Link shot and see how they look almost sixty years on, maybe even stand in a couple of the places he stood to work, if I can find them. The first step of all this, of course, is making a list of the towns, and sitting down with an atlas to work out how to get from one place to the next. I’m going to start in Roanoke, which was the N&W’s headquarters, and work outward from there. It could lead me as far down as western Maryland, West Virginia or western North Carolina before I either give up or run out of time. (For that matter, if I get to western Maryland I might go ride the Western Maryland Scenic from Cumberland to Frostburg.)
8 Responses to A bit of forward planning