Two Graduations, A Couple of Museums, Twenty One Days On The Road And Now 'Once More To The Lake'

We Could Be Any Where In The US 

It's now after 6:00 and I am sitting the breakfast room of the Hampton Inn, drinking my coffee, wondering if I should head back to the breakfast bar for a biscuit with sausage gravy.  None, alas, only omelets and sausage.  It looks like a sunny, warm day, a good day for a long, eleven hour drive back to Chautauqua Lake.

Leaving Dallas

Yesterday, the day after Memorial Day, we left Dallas early, getting up around 5:30 because we wanted to get a good start before traffic and, hopefully, getting to Nashville 10 hours later, before rush hour (almost made it except for that darn stalled truck in the middle of the road). We got out of Dallas easily and the road to Nashville was long and flat and boring until we got through central Tennessee when we began to see some rolling hills. During our our drive through Arkansas. we saw vast fields on either side of the road with puddles of standing water and green shoots, reminding us of rice fields in China.  I later found out that Arkansas leads the US in rice production so those were rice fields.  As one of the rice farmers said:

“I fell in love with it,” he says. “Growing rice came easily in Arkansas. The prairies are flat which makes it easy to flood, and water is plentiful. Rice requires water in the paddies, which is the land between the levies. There’s a natural topography to the land on the prairie that fits perfectly for rice.”

Crossing The Mississippi, Again, In Memphis

We hit Nashville around 4:45 and once we started on #65, we ground to a standstill as I mentioned earlier because of broken down truck.  Fortunately, we soon started moving, albeit slowly, and arrived at our dated Hampton Inn in the suburb of Goodlettsville, just about the time that my GPS suggested, 4:45,  10 1/2 hours door to door.  We checked into our Hampton and were exhausted after our drive, so we decided to fore go a restaurant and instead, just relaxed in our room and got a take out Thai dinner, a Panang Curry from a restaurant across the street.  It was exceptionally tasty, so it was a good choice.  We now know what it's like to watch regular TV with the commercials, or junk TV as I tend to call most of the major channels.  It was hard to avoid news about Trump or the Gorilla and the child on almost any of the news channels but we tried.  So we went back to the tried and true, Chopped.

We were both ready for bed by 9:30, 10:30 EST, so we decided to see if we could  get to sleep earlier than usual and get an early start although it's not a big deal when we get to the lake.  Just so it's before dark.