Back to Being a Buckeye

We're back in Ohio, parked at a campground and living in our trailer so that we don't allow working on Mom's house to overwhelm us as we did with Denny's dad's house last year. It will be a 50 mile round trip drive to get to Ketterburg, so we'll spend a night or two up there while we're working and them come back to work on the rig which has been sadly neglected. I've already scheduled a carpet cleaning, after which we'll haul in the two new LaZBoy recliners that we've had sitting in Mom's garage since March. Then we'll wrassle the mattress and memory foam topper from "our" bedroom at Mom's and switch them out with the set here in the rig. All sorts of muscle-y work will be going on here at the campground, plus whatever work we start doing on the house itself.

The trip up was uneventful, thankfully. In Kentucky we passed the remnants of a horrible accident involving a semi-trailer and by the looks of the cab of the truck it may have been a fatality. Crews were picking up whatever it was the trucker was hauling while a wrecker tried to deal with getting the truck and trailer off the roadway. Surprisingly, accident scenes like that have been rare for us, despite many miles on the road over the last ten years. For that, I'm grateful.

We also had lovely springtime scenery on the way up. Gardeners are aware of "growing zones" or "planting zones"; areas of imaginary demarcation for the best plants to grow in a particular area based on their hardiness and ability to withstand whatever temperatures are in that general area. Driving from the Gulf of Mexico in southern Alabama up to southern Ohio you can see the different rates of growth in the same vegetation; redbuds that were almost totally leafed out in green foliage in Alabama were just starting to bloom in Kentucky.






My favorite spot along I-65? Between milemarker 77 and 78 on the northbound side of the interstate where you'll find this sign: It's not the world's best shot, but at highway speeds the sign is hard to snap clearly.

Tonight, we're dining alfresco; steaks cooked on the grill and a tossed salad. Simple and simply divine. A nuthatch searches for his dinner on a tree nearby and an early butterfly provides a spot of color among trees still bare of buds, much less leaves. We may light the tiny tiki torches this evening and enjoy the stars before the temperatures drop too much. Life feels good right now.