Yup, we’re home. This photooo was taken earlier this evening after we dumped off our stuff (to be dealt with tomorrow) and hoofed it over to our beloved neighborhood steakhouse. The one where the bartender we hardly even know yet remembered that we would prob’ly want ‘hattans while we waited for a table to open up. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.

Not that we didn’t have an absolutely wonderful time on our rocket trip to the beautiful south. Thanks? Lemme see… Rey in Knoxville. Sam and jcb in Atlanta. Cap’n Ed and The Beautiful Susie and Rose (dog) and their rescued box turtle but I fergit his name…, Brother John and Jax Junior (dog), and Snooty (manatee) in Bradenton, FL. Pengo, Corey, and Simcoe (cat) in Gainesville. And again Sam and jcb in Atlanta on the return trip but alas not in person that time. We are blessed to have so many wonderful friends and relatives.

We launched from Chattanooga this AM after a beautiful Ruby Falls cave tour. I’ll blahg about that experience another day along with some other things like the sinkhole and the alligator and other various bits and pieces that I haven’t managed to weave into an intelligible story yet, not that I am EVER capable of weaving anything into an intelligible story.

April is a perfect month for a Florida road trip. The high tourist season is over so the traffic is manageable and we encountered very little except for our trip through Atlanta at rush hour. It was hot in Florida but not unbearably so. Beautiful? I have no words.

And yet. When we got on the road after the cave tour this morning, I punched “home” in on the GPS. The estimated time that came up was 18:57. I think our VERY loose plan was to stay in a hotel one more night and arrive home tomorrow (Sunday). But… 7:00 PM? Hmmm… Assuming we actually got home at around 7 (and all bets were off on that), we could dump off our stuff and walk over to Knight’s. As opposed to trying to figure out something to do today that would place us about halfway home and THEN finding just the right kind of hotel. Not cheap enough to be seedy but not so expensive that we would waste money on a place we’d be staying in for fewer than 12 hours (hmmm… niche business anyone?). And then a decent place to eat, not just some chain restaurant along the freeway or at a mall although we are not snobs and will eat utility food if need be. Just that we tend to eat very little during the day while traveling but like something decent for the evening meal.

Anyway, I took over driving in southern Kentucky and we decided to hang loose on the issue. If we thought of something interesting to do, we would stop. If not, maybe we just might push on through to the Planet Ann Arbor. Home. Of course we did end up going all the way home. If you know us, you might guess that. It was probably a good thing. We did not encounter severe weather but I ended up driving for *hours* in heavy rain. The screenshot below shows what we went through in Ohaaaaao. Note that it was (thankfully) too cold for funnel clouds to form. 44 degrees. No. We did see lightning once.

But, while we were eating over at Knight’s, I saw all kinds of tornado warnings in Kentucky on Twitter, some of them along our I75 route. As far as I know, nothing devastating happened but I am glad we weren’t staying somewhere down there overnight and that our drive through KY was relatively uneventful.

I did NOT fergit that Mouse celebrated a birthday yesterday. I texted her yesterday morning to tell her there was a big box for her sitting in her childhood bedroom. As big a box as it was, it wasn’t a fancy gift and she knows that we can do more shopping or whatever whenever she wants. I did fergit to blahg about her birthday. I’m not sure she cares and maybe she would actually prefer that her birthday not get broadcasted on this blatherous bunch of you-know-what. I know that I am not all that happy when people call my birthday out, although I will respond graciously.

Anyway, here is one of The Commander’s fave photooos of Mouse on a long-ago birthday. She was two and various people gave her articles of clothing for her birthday. Of course she put them all on at once. My brother and his family gave her the cute little outfit and she literally took off the clothes she was wearing to put it on, right in front of God and everybody. That’s what two-year-olds do, roight? [wink and grin] Oh, and there is a gratuitous shot of Mouse aka Speedy Water Janet Pop Mousey Mushroomears…

Oh yeah, our actual arrival time tonight was 7:13 PM. Not all that much off the GPS’s original estimated time of 6:57, considering that we drove something like 600 miles today.

G’night, KW. Love you all.

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