Believe it or not, but Lisa and I have been back home for about an hour. We pulled into the driveway around ten to five in the AM. What a very difficult journey home it’s been. The vacation was awesome. I got to spend time with my Slattery cousins (they being the children of my dad’s kid brother Shaun) and their spouses. We saw parts of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlotte, Asheville, and the Appalachians. There was lots of walking and hiking and shopping and sightseeing and eating and… there was lots of things done. But I’ll get to all of that later when I have the time and can post photos.
As for the drive home… well, it started out nice enough. We took our time this morning as we left earlier than we could have hoped. So that left us with time to explore the sights of the Blue Ridge Parkway more and slowly make our way north. Unfortunately, our first attempt to connect to an Interstate failed when we spent an hour traveling on the absolute most windy and treacherous road I’ve ever seen. That left us stuck on the Parkway with a maximum attainable speed of 50 MPH. Once we finally started making some real headway in Virginia, the wonderful authorities there decided not to mark a 7 mile backup due to an accident. After missing a possible exit that would have only had us backpedal 30 minutes max, the next 2 hours were spent crawling, and sometimes parking, due to a tractor trailer mishap. Thank you very much Virginia. Then we managed to hit 3 24-hour gas stations in Pennsylvania that were all closed, which almost sent us into a panic as both of our cell phones were dead!
Somehow we pulled through this mess, and now I will finally head to my own bed to get some real sleep. Good night… er… morning.