Goin' Home

Our trip to see the kids in Missouri was awesome!

And visiting with our old friend Margaret was awesome!

Catching up with friends we haven’t seen in years was awesome!

Going on to Iola, Kansas and visiting with cousin Suzy was awesome!

Having Mike’s brother Cork meet us in Iola was like the frosting on the cake. The best part. (I bet you thought I was going to say awesome, didn’t you?)

And it was so very nice to meet Dee, Cork’s companion, for the first time.

But it was time for us to head for home.

We started at first light and took new roads. As you can imagine, my clicker finger went to work taking lots of road pictures for you.

Tunnel! The kids used to love going through the tunnels when we traveled from Indiana to Maryland to visit their grandparents. They even knew the names of the different tunnels. I always think of them when I go through one.

We passed a parade of firetrucks. I briefly wondered where they were going. This guy saw my camera, grinned and waved to me.

My phone dinged. Then it dinged again. Replies to my morning love note were starting to come in.

Don’cha love technology? I do. I remember the days before computers and internet and they were a lot…different. I was going to say lonelier, but in truth, I was never lonely and you certainly can’t miss what you never had. I love being able to greet my siblings and friends with a morning love note. I’ll include my plans for the day. Or maybe what’s planned for lunch. Sometimes the antics of our critters. But always, and most importantly, telling them they are thought of. They are loved.

And most of the time they reply.

It just makes me feel more connected.

One of the replies came from my beautiful old friend in West Virginia. Trish and I used to be thick as thieves. We spent so much time together.

That got me to thinking. We were taking a different way home… Would it take us anywhere near West Virginia?

I used an app called Distance Between Cities and calculated what the difference in miles would be. It only added two hundred seventeen miles and what’s a couple of hundred miles when you’re gonna drive twenty-five hundred anyway?

I ran the potential conversation with Mike through my head and prepared myself for what I thought would be his answer.

“Mike, can we take a side trip?” I asked.

“Where?”

“West Virginia.” I hurried on. “It’ll only add a couple of hundred miles to our trip.”

Mike was quiet. I knew better than to push him.

I was quiet, snapping pictures of the landscape that passed before my window. I didn’t get my hopes up because I was sure he was gonna say, Let’s do that another time. And that would’ve been okay too.

“Put the address in the GPS.” I was shocked and grinned. I didn’t have a physical address for Trish, but I knew the town and put that in.

I’m not much for surprises. They can go terribly wrong. And the last thing I wanted was drive a couple of hundred miles out of our way and find out she wouldn’t be home that day.

“Wanna have lunch with us?” I texted Trish. I knew we wouldn’t be there that day so I thought I’d better tell her when. “Tomorrow?” I added.

“Is this meant for me or someone else?” she replied.

I laughed. It’s probably the last thing in the world she expected. We’d lost contact more than thirty years ago but found each other again on Facebook in 2018. Since then, we’ve talked many times about visiting but it never happened.

“You!” I think she must’ve fainted because I didn’t hear anything back from her in (what seemed like) a long time. I tried again. “What do you think?” Still no reply. Maybe she doesn’t want to see me. “Are you up for it?”

“Where and when?” she finally answered.

“That I don't know. We're 710 miles away from you. I'll have a better idea when we'll get there in the morning.”

“Awesome!”

There was a little of the excitement I was looking for. My thoughts turned to seeing my old friend again and my only regret was that I hadn’t brought her a gift. “The only gift I'm bringing you is me because I didn't know we were going to stop and see you!” I told her.

I read her reply to Mike. “That's the best gift you could ever give me!”

“No. I’m the best gift!” Mike said and I laughed.

Through Kentucky there were lots of horse farms.

This picture had a road sign in it and I hated it. It ruined the picture. I almost didn’t use it then decided I’d ‘erase’ the road sign.

I only took one picture of this barn quilt and wouldn’t you know, it had a light pole running right up beside it! I decided I’d take that out too. Not too bad, huh?

We passed some kind of memorial but didn’t stop.

Sideways lights.

Signs full of holes.

Trish has a son named Scott. Wouldn’t it be crazy if he’d tagged this underpass?

“Scott’s wife is Diane,” Trish told me.

Oh, well. So much for my flights of fancy.

“What’s with the fencing just in the middle?” I asked Mike. Then I thought it was to keep jumpers from jumping in a river. “Couldn’t a jumper die just as easy if he jumped from over here?”

“You’d think so,” Mike agreed.

We saw several of these. Then we got off the highway onto another road and saw the fence was above the road.

“It’s to keep people from throwing things down onto cars,” we guess.

The roads were windy and twisty and we started passing coal mines and tipples.

“What’s a tipple?” you ask.

Let me tell you a story about that.

Trish was living in Indiana and at one point decided to move back to West Virginia. I was missing her and took a trip to see her. West Virginia was like a foreign country to me.

“Everybody talks funny,” I told her.

“They don’t talk funny, you do!” she said.

Going past a coal mine, I asked what those things were.

“It’s a tipple,” she told me.

I had to ask her like thirty times for the name before I could remember it.

I hear my oldest and much adored and most beautifulest sister Patti laughing. I did the same thing to her with one of the names of a cactus in Arizona. And I still remember the name of it, too. Ocotillo.

Anyway, a tipple is used to move coal around.

I admire his parking skills.

Much like Pennsylvania, the roads followed creeks and streams. Only here the hollers are so narrow they built on both sides of the creeks. We started seeing lots of little bridges.

Our GPS told us to turn. Right on the corner was this car.

“Must’ve been a heck of an accident,” I said. It wasn’t until I was looking at the pictures on my computer that I see another car in the creek.

We turn onto the road and it looks like the road had been flooded, and the dirt plowed off.

A train carrying coal passes overhead.

The road becomes very narrow and one car has to pull over to let another pass.

Then we start to see evidence of the devastation that struck this holler. Every twist and turn brought more sights of heartache. Houses destroyed. Bridges swept away. Cars carried away and wrapped around trees. We were horrified.

There were points along the way where it looked like there wasn’t anything to support the blacktop.

“Whatever you do, stay away from this edge,” I told Mike.

A relief center set up to aid the flood victims.

Then we were out of that holler.

A deer mailbox.

I was looking a little bit ahead, at the pictures I want to share with you, and I see this is the day we got to Trish’s house.

Wait a minute, I think. What happened to the sunset pictures? I took a whole bunch of sunset photos reflected in the side mirror — and I took those the night before we got to Trish’s!

I went back to my photos file and see I missed a whole day of pictures! OY! More than eight hundred road pictures!

Since I don’t know what to do about that, I’m just going to forge ahead. If you have any suggestions as to what I should do, let me know.

We passed areas that were covered in a sea of green. It was eating everything!

“What is that stuff?” I asked Trish.

“Kudzu,” she said.

We get into Iaeger and it’s sad to see a dying town where a prosperous one once stood.

Our GPS took us across the tracks and out of town.

It wanted us to turn on to some little dirt road that looked kinda scary.

“I don’t wanna go down that road,” Mike said.

“I don’t either. I think we’re lost. I’ll call Trish.”

“Go back to Iaeger,” she told us and stayed on the phone with us until we pulled into her driveway.

She lives up one of them there hollers with a single lane road.

“We’re so far in the holler that we have to have sunlight piped in,” she quipped.

I laughed. “And the road’s so narrow there’s no place to pull off,” I told her.

“Yes, there is,” Trish said. “There’s lots of places to pull over.”

I guess it takes a practiced eye.

Trish lives in a warm and snug tiny house. Her youngest son, Ben, lives in another tiny house behind hers. And they have another that functions as a craft shed. I’m only a little bit jelly.

We walked around outside and admired her unique and rustic landscaping.

“There’s a lizard,” Trish said.

I took his picture like I’ve never seen a lizard before.

“There’s another one,” she pointed.

“Where? I can’t see it.”

“I’m not surprised. It’s smaller than the first one.”

“What are these things?” I asked about a flower.

“Touch-me-nots. You touch a pod and they explode,” Trish answered.

I did. It did. “They don’t look like my Touch-me-nots.” I guess different plants can have the same name, although in my ordered world that wouldn’t happen.

Another flower I'm not familiar with.

“What’s with all the toys?” I asked.

“They were left behind in a trailer we tore down. I’m thinking about using them in my landscaping.”

“Look at those leaves! They look like they were cut off. What are they?”

I can’t remember if Trish told me or not but because of their unique shape, it didn’t take me long to find them on the internet. It’s a Tulip Tree leaf.

“Want me to show you what we used to do with them?” Trish asked.

She took a leaf, stem and all, broke the stem off and held it in her mouth as she folded the leaf. She took a piece of the stem and used it to pin the leaves together. Then she did it on the other side.

"Now you have a basket to hold berries.”

She held the basket out to me. How very clever!

Inside, Trish’s tiny house feels warm and cozy. She’s snuggled down and surrounded by things she loves. Memories, arts and crafts, gifts from the kids and grandkids, and even this gal has given her a few things to feather her nest.

Her painting of a sailboat took second place in an art contest. Isn’t it fabulous!

Bondi wanted to play with Trish’s Chinese Crested, but Yodi is older and didn’t want to play. She jumped up on the bed where Bondi couldn’t get her. Once things settled down, she got down and tried to get in Mike’s lap. Dogs love Mike. He reached down and pet her.

“Is there any place around here to eat? We could go get dinner,” I suggested.

“We could go to Spike’s,” Trish suggested. “I’ve always gotten good food there.”

“Mike, don’t look!” I warned as we left the house. I love her snake-skin wreath on the porch, but Mike hates snakes. He says he gets nightmares whenever he sees one.

At Spike’s we ordered the special. Hamburger steak, baked potato, salad, and a bun. It was okay but Trish was disappointed it wasn’t better.

“It was okay!” I told her. “I’ve had worse.”

“And I’ve had better,” she said.

Her youngest son Ben chose to eat his loaded hot dogs out at the picnic table.

After we ate, I went and got Bondi from the car. Ben loved on her while we said our goodbyes.

“What was your favorite part of our visit?” I asked Trish.

“I loved everything about it except it was too short. You hugged me so tight that I was getting short of breath but I didn't want to let go.”

I do tend to hug like I love. Fiercely. I tend to be more careful with older people. Trish is older and has COPD but my joy and delight at seeing my beloved old friend again overtook all sense of reason. I hugged her and hugged her and hugged her some more.

I whispered in her ear, “I’m sorry for all the bad things I did.” Things like being a snooty bitch, taking her friendship for granted, and sometimes for having taken advantage of that friendship. I’m not the same person I was then. I only hope I’m better.

“I don’t remember that much bad stuff,” she said.

I almost said that she was a good friend for not remembering the bad stuff, then I had another thought. “If you were truly my friend, you wouldn’t remember any!”

We both laughed. She knew I was just joking.

“I’m sorry I hugged you too tight. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It only hurt when you let go.”

And eventually we had to let go and Mike and I hit the road again. One more night on the road and we’d be home tomorrow.

Oh my gosh! There were so many churches! Some little towns had no businesses. Just houses and as many as four churches on the same street! I don’t know how many are still in operation, but this one doesn’t appear to be.

We came to a section of road where there was a wall in front of the house and not much room to get your car off the road. How would you like having to climb these steps every time you brought something home?

Then it transitioned to these brick structures between two sets of steps. If it had only been one or two, I wouldn’t think about it too much, but everyone along here had one. What do you think they're for?

It looks like the house threw up.

Two more tunnels!

Our last night on the road found us at busy hotel. Out near the dog walking area was a high wooden fence — and cats. I saw two or three different cats. I suspected someone was feeding them. And I heard high-pitched, sing-song women’s voices, talking and laughing. I couldn’t understand their words. It seemed to be coming from behind the fence. I just had to know what was there. I minded where I was walking as I went past the fence and saw this on the backside. A garden? I wonder and climb higher on the hill hoping to get a peek inside the courtyard.

I met several other pet owners. A guy with a blind black Lab. “He’s very shy and won’t do his business if anyone’s watching,” Lab Daddy said. He went way to the other side of the dog walking area.

A lady with a friendly dog.

Another lady with a not so friendly dog. “How does your dog do with small dogs?” I asked from a distance.

“Not well,” she said and came toward me.

I’m holding Bondi in my arm and I’m wondering if I’m going to get bit. She was almost upon us before she saw Bondi.

“Oh! I didn’t see your small dog.” She quickly hustled her dog away.

Back in our room, the TV wouldn’t turn very loud. Mike called the front desk.

“That happens sometimes. I’ll have to come back with a master remote and turn it up for you.” And he did that.

“What happens if I turn the TV off. Will I be able to adjust the volume?” he asked, but how would I know?

Fearful he wouldn’t be able to, he tried to sleep with the TV on. It wasn’t working well for him so he finally relented and turned the TV off.

In the morning, the sound was stuck on low again so we couldn’t watch the news before we left. Technically, we couldn’t hear the news.

It rained. I think this was the first rain we’d had all of our vacation.

It didn’t take long till we were out of it and I was back to taking pictures.

We didn't see an accident. We're guessing they were painting the stripes.

Traffic was backed up for miles!

In Pennsylvania, I knew we were on the road that goes past the Statue of Liberty that sits in the middle of the Susquehanna River. I’d no sooner thought about it than we were passing it. There’s a story about this that I won’t go into, but if you Google it, you can read it.

I had many more pictures picked out to show you but there’s no room for them. And let’s not forget that I’ve got a folder with over 800 road pictures from this trip that I haven’t even sorted yet!

What am I going to do!?

I don’t know, but —

Let’s call this one done!