What I Did on My Holidays, Part the Fiveth

Sunday was a “didn’t do much, really” day.  T had to leave that morning so she could be at work in Austin on Tuesday, so early in the day we drove over to L’s sister’s house and loaded the pickup with the long-case clock, the trunk, the chain-stitch machines, and a few other things and saw her off.  The afternoon brought us torrential rain as Tropical Storm Barry came to pieces over our heads.  Fortunately, the storms moved south-to-north so T, who was driving west, missed them almost altogether.  In the afternoon L helped her mother go through umpteen boxes of books left over from the Friends of the Jarrattsville Library sale and I worked some more on the new computer.

Monday Kelly and Steve drove up from Catonsville, where they now live, and the four of us went to lunch at a Panera in Lutherville.  (M had a previous invitation to go frog-hunting along with her cousins and Gram, and that sounded a lot more fun to her than hanging round listening to a bunch of boring ol’ grownups talking.)  L’s mother recommended the chicken-strawberry salad with poppy-seed dressing, which L ordered and said was as good as advertised.

Sunday night L and I looked at each other and asked, “Is there any reason we should NOT leave on Tuesday instead of waiting until Wednesday?” The answer was “no,” so Monday after Kelly and Steve left we packed the car, and set out early Tuesday morning.  I voted for taking three days to get home, as I didn’t think I could last through another of those two-day marathon drives.

L has had a particular hankering to see the New River Gorge bridge at Fayetteville, West Virginia.  A false start brought us up at a scenic overlook of the river a few miles short of where we meant to be (but very pretty and worth seeing, nonetheless), but a park ranger set us straight with a good detail map that got us right to the visitors’ center at the bridge—fifteen minutes after it closed.  (It wasn’t his fault; we started too late.)  Nonetheless, L and M climbed down the hundred-and-some steps from the visitors’ center to the river, while I waited above with my knees that would NEVER have made it back up.  We might have stayed and looked longer, but M and I both badly needed to find a restroom, and the only ones at the site were inside the visitors’ center.

Bathroom found at a convenient convenience store a mile or so down the road, we started driving west again and ran into a front working its way east across the mountains, half-drowning us with a pissing-down rain that went on for a couple of hours at varying levels of intense.  Then to confuse the issue, fog began forming in the hollers and creeping down toward the highway.  After a couple of hours of that, and a couple of hours of darkness as well, we hauled up in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, thirty miles or so east of Louisville, about 10:30 PM.

Next morning, after a row with the front desk because the previous occupant of our “no-smoking” room had gone on and smoked in the bathroom ANYway (or a guest of his did), I got a $10 discount off the already-low rate, so the room only cost us $36 plus tax.  (Hotel room rates in Mount Sterling just aren’t as high as in other places, some reason.)  We left Mount Sterling getting on for ten, with the goal of getting to Paducah, Kentucky in time for L to see some of the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society there.

Next:  We tour a distillery, and get lost in Paducah.

The normal school unplugged some saline butter for a color balance.  Fnord.