Final post for this year!

Since I'm home, it must be time to blog again. I left Saturday morning and spent Saturday night through Monday morning with Bill and Carolyn Allison near Milner, Georgia. Carolyn and I were best friends throughout junior high and high school. It was the first time I had been to visit them except when Carolyn and the kids were in Eddyville while Bill served in Viet Nam. We had a very nice and fun visit. I got to visit with each of their kids and one of Brianna's sons and his wife.

Getting to their house was another experience. I was privileged to be among the "northern migration" on Saturday. That meant that MANY of the people who had been in Florida for the winter (like me) were headed home. I have no idea how many Michigan and Ontario plates I saw. The fun part was the SIX traffic slow-downs I got to be in. Two of them involved having 3 lanes funneled into 2 lanes and shifted over to the southbound lane. These each were at least half an hour long while we were going under 20 mph with frequent total stops. The other 4 weren't quite as slow but were still only about 40 mph for a while.

Sunday at church they had a representative of Jews for Jesus who gave a presentation on the Passover celebration and how it relates to Christ. It was extremely informative and interesting.

Monday I drove to Hendersonville, Tennessee and spent the evening and night with my niece and her husband, Chris and Mike Fiscus. They took me to a Japanese restaurant and I had never been where I watched them cooking my food. It was quite interesting and tasty. After that, Chris and I had a very nice visit, including some catching up and some reminiscing. I guess I must have been in a hurry to head on home because I left my dirty clothes at their house!

Tuesday I stopped in Warrenton, Missouri at an SAS outlet to get some shoes and then headed home. It was 11:15 when I got home and I was in bed by 11:45. It had taken two hours to cross St. Louis on the north side because of a wreck. There was a lot of stopping and waiting there also.

On the negative side of the trip, there were all the traffic slow downs that I'm not used to and also 3 encounters with fire alarms, all of which were false alarms. I do certainly plan to go back next year. In fact I have my name on a couple of lists for places to stay other than motels. In Florida the other places really aren't much cheaper than the motels. They know people will pay to be where it is warm in the winter. I even talked to some people from Saskatoon. Now that is a long ways from Florida.

Of course the positive side was the warm weather and southern gospel concerts. I saw at least 3 concerts every week and the weather was much better than Iowa's weather! It was the coldest winter Florida has had in a very long time, but it seemed great to me!

I'm not sure if I will ever get everything unloaded and put away or not. I really need to dust and vacuum too. Had I thought about it, I think I would have hired someone to clean just before I got home.

Have a nice day, and it is nice and warm here. Thanks for getting rid of the snow for me before I came home!