We woke at 6:30 to meet Bill Tyler for breakfast. For those of you who don't know Bill, he is one of our oldest friends from Echo Lake hiking camp. He drove an hour from Nelly's Ford VA in his spiffy blue truck and looked handsome and fit.
His wife Helen is still in rehab with a traumatic head injury incurred last January in a fall. He visits her most every day and is also taking a course at the local university in astrophysical thermobiological metaphysics!
We drove for hours with our books on tape, NPR (when we could get it), silence and watching the rolling hills, sheep, cows, clouds.
As we get further south, (and further from the northeast) we both notice the level of courtesy with everyone we meet. People going 75 mph on the highway keep at least 6 car lengths away, everyone yields at the stop signs, there are greetings when we walk into a restaurant. People seem more relaxed and go at a slower pace. (Cannot find the article which I read recently that said that people in the Boston area are the most time-pressured people on the planet).
We stopped in Abingdon, VA to walk the Virginia Creeper national recreation trail. This is a carefully tended 34 mile trail which took us through beautiful deep woods. About 4-5 miles in, we saw around us, fallen trees, dead vines, rotted vegetation, and piles of bull-dozed mud. As we walked further, we could see dazzling progress. The forest had been transformed into rolling hills ready for golfers and dazzling 4000-5000 sq. ft houses.
It was heaven to finally pull into Chattanooga where we spent the night in a Comfort Inn and had black beans and rice at a local diner.
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