I hate flying – really – Home again at last!!!!

I’m back from the extremely lon-n-n-n-n-n-ng drive from Tampa FL to Cookeville TN and it is done, fini, over….. My mother is safely in Cookeville with her baby sister however. and that was the point. Thank you all again for your kind words and support and well wishes. I flew out of the Nashville, TN airport back t my home. Nice airport and a ton of interesting shops. For some odd reason, my flight went to Orlando and then all the way back up the east coast to home. Weird. Good thing: I had checked in online and had A1 on my boarding flight. Bad bad thing: The flight from Nashville to Orlando was 45 minutes late and I barely made it running the length of the airport to board last.

GOOD THING: I sat between two very fun and charming people on their way from Epcot home. Friendly, interesting, upbeat – I was delighted that I chose to sit in the seat between them. They did not sprawl everywhere and take up space – considerate. Perfect co-travelers.

I will be posting some stories from this trip, recipes, and some pictures. Alabama is the queen of beautiful and clean rest stops. I stopped at several obvious tourist traps to give mama and I a break from monsoon rains, bumper to bumper traffic, direction signs in cities that did not match up to my roadmap nor to the information they posted.

We passed through roads with cotton fields on either side of us, cows placidly grazing on hillsides, roads cut through mountains of striated granite, incredible blue skies with cotton clouds, bbq joints (all of them famous), softly rolling hills awash with wild flowers, wide slow moving rivers, Krystal hamburgers (It’s a Southern thing), molasses and golden cane syrup made by a 90 year old man who still raises his cane, grinds it, and cooks down the cane juice, restaurants that tout cat head biscuits filled with fried fatback for 99 cents, fields of lady, crowder, blackeye and pink eye peas waiting to be harvested and taken to market along with the last of the tomatoes, okra, and butterbeans.

But east or west, home is the best. I’ll be catching up with y’all yet again….thank you again and it will be good to talk with you soon.