Thirty Years Ago

On this night, thirty years ago, in the year of our Lord 1982, yours truly was spending the night in Howard Johnson's Hotel in Charlotte NC waiting to join the United States Army the next day and be all I could be.  I was supposed to have enlisted on the 27th of January, 1982, but my snuff dipping recruiter messed up my paperwork so I had to spend two nights in that Howard Johnson's instead of one.  With extra time on my hands, I made some phone calls to assorted friends and family.  All in all, no one cared all that much that I was about to step into a new life.  I told Mrs. Howard just now about this date in my history joking that, by having to spend the extra night in the hotel, I was being given one last chance to make a run for it.  She told that if I had run that I wouldn't be here where I am tonight, with her.  And she's probably right.

Destination: Mount Airy

A five hundred and fifty-three mile round trip in the silver bullet took Connie and me to visit Mom and spend a little time together.  The bullet has more than 200 thousand miles on her, but she still runs like a Timex Watch.

It was a lot colder in Mount Airy than it was here in Augusta, but it wasn't that bad.  This morning, you could see a little snow on the south slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  You needed a heavy jacket and some gloves.  But the weather was very tolerable for this time of year.  Our trip had been planned for almost a month, and it was always conditional upon the weather.  There have been a lot of mid-January's where snow and ice hampered travel up and down I-77 in the northern part of North Carolina.  But this trip was trouble free.  Worse thing that happened was Connie spilled coffee all in the front seat ... because I ran over a curb exiting Starbucks in York, SC on the way home.