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Our snowy return--thank you all for sharing our travels!

The Return

Today we returned to the island. We made a couple of side trips between Portland and Rockland, and so approached the snowy coast via Route 17. The skies grew heavier and heavier as we approached the ferry, and the snow started to fall just as we boarded. We arrived home in the midst of falling snow, and can now vouch for all the stories you've heard about the incredible layer of ice that blankets everything. I have a very strong urge to flee, back to warm dry Texas!

Covington Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati Ohio, has a beautiful river walk, including these swanky light posts.

The Quarry Chapel is just up the road from Annie and Jeff Robinson's home in Gambier Ohio.

Yesterday we drove through the beautiful rolling fields and high mountain passes of Kentucky. We took a break from driving to visit Mammoth National Park, where we arrived just in time to join a group leaving to tour an area in the cave called Frozen Niagara. I didn't have time to return to the car for my camera, so you'll have to

wait for Phil's descriptions of rock formations and interesting underground creatures.
Soon after we entered Kentucky, a mysterious white substance appeared on the ground--a dim memory is trying to surface in my mind, but there seems to be some kind of block there. Later in the day, white things appeared in the air as well--still, my mind refuses to recognize them.

Day 41

Bags of trail mix left 6

Gin Scrore Phil 2175 Elaine 2170

Heading North now, in Nashville visiting brother Dave and family. Some reflections on the south:

Trees: The most beautiful trees I've ever seen anywhere. Modest homes, antibellum mansions or grand estates, each shaded by Live Oakes whose prodigious green crowns draped in Spanish Moss suggest such gothic mystery that Stephen King might step from behind one at any moment, such timeless elegance that so might Vivian Leigh. It wasn't just the Live Oakes though. In Texas and in the plains of nearby states another oak, leafless this time of year (not all southern oakes lose foliage during the winter) extends one wildly expressive silouette after another heavenward. No two are the same and some, often those forced in some alternative direction by wind or obstacle, or forced to mutate by lightning or other circustance seem to have a great deal to say. It've often difficult to keep one's eyes on the road. Fortunately, there often being no one else on the road for as far as the eye can see, that's no big deal.

Good beer: non-existent

Roads: more often than not these beautifully maintained thorofares are so relentlessly straight for so long that the prospect of a curve reveals itself long minutes and longer miles in advance and is cause in itself to shake Elaine loose from her reverie at the prospect of excitement.

Good bread or in many cases any bread whatever: unavailable

Ribs: Tremendiously varied from region to region. The best was had at Fox Brothers in Atlanta.

We spent a blissful last two days of camping in Arvie at Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Alabama. This is a sea turtle nesting beach, one of the last unlit beaches on the gulf coast.

We are in Atlanta as I write, visiting with Peter and Kelly Richards. Kelly and I toured the Terra Cotta Army exhibit at the High Museum yesterday, which was pretty amazing. Last evening, Atlanta was under a tornado watch, but this area was gifted with much needed rain as part of a dramatic thunderstorm.

The bridge across Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans was too intriguing to resist--twenty something miles of bridge, and finally the city appears, ghost-like on the far horizon. We managed to get lost in a maze of roadways through the city, saw a great deal of the devastation left behind by Katrina, and narrowly missed getting caught in an early Mardi Gras parade.

Last night brought us to Gulf Shores, Alabama, to an enormous state park with over 400 rv sites, and frequent signs that say "do not feed or aggravate the alligators." The beach across the street is spectacular!