It always seems to get really busy just before I leave for a trip – and it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a business trip or a pleasure trip. This time it was pleasure, but there was business to tend to beforehand . . .
Gary was adamant that his new candy machine just had to move from beside the front door in the store to the back before I left. So Zoe and I loaded the pallet jack into the truck and brought it to the store, where Gary announced that he would watch the puppy, while I moved the candy machine. Jeanette Alley had some fun with her camera while we were moving and was kind enough to share the photos.
I spent Easter Weekend manning the floor camera at church (five services). As soon as the last service ended, I headed home, finished packing, took a walk with Ryan and Zoe, and then headed south.
Along the way, I texted this photo to Ryan – and he knew immediately what it was. This is a corn nugget from Sonny’s Bar-B-Q – I am not a foodie, but these things are really good and Ryan loves them. The nearest Sonny’s is 140 miles from our house, but there was one next to a gas station in southern Kentucky where I filled up, so I grabbed a takeout order to munch on the road. I spent Sunday night with my friend Ben in Tennessee, and then we got an early start Monday morning on the rest of our trip to Western Georgia.
Our friend Jack was flying from Dayton, and we planned to pick him up at a small airport in Columbus, GA. About 7:45 a.m., he called to tell us that his flight from Atlanta to Columbus was going to be delayed – on the original schedule, we were barely going to have enough time to make our first tee time. Since we were only five minutes from the Atlanta airport when he called, we just picked him up there!
The photo at left is from underneath a pear tree at the highest point on the Meadow Links Golf Course at George T. Bagby State Park near Fort Gaines, GA, and at right are several of the gentlemen in our group of 12. After a cold, damp spring, three days with temps near 90 and no rain felt wonderful. We were right on the Georgia/Alabama border, which is also the Eastern/Central Time Zone border. From the dining room in the lodge, if I faced the lake my phone would change to Central Time (picked up the signal from a cell tower on the Alabama side), and if I faced away it would go back to Eastern time. Imagine 12 guys sitting around a table asking each other, “What time does your phone say?”
We try to get cabins on these trips, but sometimes only lodge rooms are available, which makes for tight quarters when we get together to play cards or a board game in the evening . . .
Yankee Ingenuity in action – how to turn a freezer of homemade ice cream when you open the box 700 miles from home and discover that someone decided to use the ice bucket to store seed pods over the winter. Yes, that is the motel room trash can (and the ice cream was great) . . .
We stopped at this barbeque joint along the road a few miles south of Columbus, GA – good stuff. Then we dropped Jack off at the airport and I told him I would race him home (not likely since he had two quick flights and I had 600 miles left to drive!). But we started to wonder as we drove through Atlanta and he called to tell us his flight from Columbus had been delayed by threatening weather.
No kidding – this was the radar long after I had dropped Ben off at his house between Chattanooga and Knoxville. When we got to Chattanooga, the rain was pouring, tornado watches were out, and just north of Chattanooga I saw what I thought was a big piece of paper floating down out of the sky. As we got closer, I realized it was a six to eight-foot-square piece of drywall. Saw a couple more of those soon after and we assume they were from the devastating tornadoes that struck in Alabama. By the time I saved this radar shot, I was past the heavy stuff and drove through light rain the rest of the way home.
Meanwhile, Jack’s flight from Atlanta to Dayton was delayed over and over again – first because of the weather, then because they couldn’t find relief pilots when the original ones were going to go over their daily service time. I ended up beating him home by an hour . . .
