Home Again, After 1953 Miles Of Interstate Highways---Thanks Dwight David Eisenhower

7:50

It's strange to get up in my own house after twelve days on the road but it's easy to get back into routine, coffee, NPR, take a couple of dawn photos, and write my blog.  It's warmer than I thought, 38º, a dreary morning of grayness, both sky and lake.  Ah Chautauqua!

We worried yesterday about more ice on the roads and were not sure whether to leave early or later from our Hampton Inn. So we left some neither early nor late which seemed to be just right.  Before we left, we saw the terrible freezing temperatures in Indianapolis, causing all kinds of accidents, the kind we witnessed the day before in St. Louis.  Fortunately, by the time we left for home, 8:30, all the roads were either treated or seemed dry, so we made it without incident around Columbus and down to Cleveland via # 71.  The weather report indicated snow and ice in the Erie area in the early afternoon, so we rarely stopped, making it home much quicker than usual, in five and a half hours when it usually takes us much longer.  And the roads were fine, even on #86 through Chautauqua County, a relief I must say.  This entire trip always seemed to have a weather hazard hanging over our head even though we never ran into a problem.  Perhaps waiting a day to leave for Euclid, then another day before leaving for Lee's Summit made the difference.

A Dreary, Wet Welcome To The Lake

Everything seems fine in our house and yard, always a worry when we get home.  We quickly unpacked the car as it began to rain just as we finished.  And even though it was a sickly looking afternoon on the lake, we were glad to be home and settled for a couple of weeks.  I quickly got back into routine reading some before taking a late afternoon nap.  How delicious.

Neither one of us felt like fussing with dinner, so Evie got some turkey meatballs out of the freezer, thawed them, then put them in a store bought pasta sauce and we had dinner.  We obviously have missed a number of our TV series, so we started with Homeland.  It was probably the most tense, best written, and scary episodes in four years of the show.  Evie, especially, could hardly move as the prisoners were exchanged.  We then watched the new series, The Affair, and it, too, really grabbed us, with its turns, tension and character driven plot.  So we had two hours of tense, emotional TV, so we lightened it up the last hour, with Stewart and Colbert.  I finished the first book of a series of Department Q novels, The Keeper Of Lost Causes, by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, which I really liked, in the same order as Joe Nesbo and Henning Mankell.  And I started another novel set in England called Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes, and I am really into it as well.  How nice to have something to read that you so enjoy that you put off eating or sleeping to keep reading. The first line of the New York Times review of this book tells you all you need to know about it. "When I finished this novel, I didn’t want to review it; I wanted to reread it." 

Looking back, we had a wonderful trip, spending a night with the Holzheimers in Euclid, a weekend with Evie's sister, Elaine, and her family in Oak Park, and a week in Lee's Summit, with our son Tommy and his family.  How lucky we are to have family we enjoy and can visit.