the 496 mile round trip

I have had so much good fun amusing myself in recent years, I have put over 100,000 miles on my little Toyo. I don't recall just exactly how many it had when I bought it used in 2009, but it has been a good little pony. (Just looked at the bill of sale: 35225 miles on odometer at time of purchase.)

I went to Decatur on Thursday afternoon, (which is about ninety miles from Columbus), after a few hours of working at Publix: you remember... last week, I worked a full week of forty hours, and this week, I had a great big whopping eight hours on the schedule. But that's ok - more time for me to run up and down the road. My plan was  drive to Greenville on Friday  (nearly 150 miles from Atlanta) and spend the day with my penpal. I know that does not total up to 496, but close enough for the math impaired...

I got up early on Friday, and - this is the part I hate - that dreaded perimeter I-285, twelve or fourteen lanes wide of people who left home ten minutes late and trying to make up for lost time. But I got out on the interestate in the dark and the rain, with three million others, all splashing their way to work, and Me. Making my way out of town on on to SC. Happily tooling along at about 71 m.p.h., when suddenly we all stop, and spend the next hour traveling at 4, or 9 or 13 m.p.h. At one point I asked a semi truck driver if he knew what was going on - but he could not tell me why we were creeping, stopping, creeping again. I finally got to the 'crisis' and saw a big RV, the size of those huge boxy winnebagos in the ditch, nose first. Imagining how it could have happened in the dark, on a raining, slick highway, pulling another box on two wheels: a trailer of all things, and sliding across the pavement with no way to avoid the inevitable. The two hour drive took over three hours to get to Greenville.

We had a good visit, my 89 year old pen pal and I. Talked about nothing all day. I left at four, hoping it would not take for-ever to get back to Decatur on a Friday evening, and was surprised it was such a easy, uneventful drive. But since the weather guy was predicting some really bad rains, I decided to not drive on home in the dark and chance encountering frog-strangling rains, possibly flash flooding. Which meant I had to get up really early this morning to get back to Columbus. Which was not bad at all, once it quit raining, and I got out of Atlanta.

I don't think I am going anyplace at all next week, but there is always working a few hours a couple of days a week at my little Publix jobette, volunteering here and there, doctor's appointments to fill the squares on my calendar and keep me on my toes....