Category: Uncategorized
-
Southern Sojourn Day 8: 20 May 2022 Danville KY > Chattanooga TN
My last stop in Danville is breakfast at The Early Bird: avocado toast with poached egg—a combo unheard of in the Danville of my first acquaintance in 1984, when even fresh seafood was impossible to get and dry Boyle County necessitated planning way ahead to buy anything alcoholic. I head south on 127, the route…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 7: 19 May 2022 Danville KY
A day of lucky little breaks and long-time friendships renewed, starting with a visit to the Constitution Square gift shop in search of postcards, a commodity increasingly hard to find. Success: I spy lots of Ephraim McDowell House cards, honoring the surgeon who performed the first abdominal surgery on Christmas morning, 1809, removing a 22.5-pound…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 6: 18 May 2022 Danville KY
I quote from the pamphlet available at 105 E. Walnut Street in Danville: “Constitution Square Historic Site was the birthplace of Kentucky’s statehood. In 1776, Kentucky was still a frontier and a county of Virginia. The Wilderness Road, blazed by Daniel Boone [thanks to Fess Parker, a girlhood crush], led pioneers through the Cumberland Gap…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 5: 17 May 2022 Charleston WV > Danville KY
While at the standard free Comfort Inn breakfast in Charleston WV, I again complimented the manager on his pleasant and immaculate establishment—the opposite of its forbidding exterior appearance. Overhearing me, another guest chimed in, similarly impressed. The manager then elaborated on the motel’s complete renovation, and how every day through COVID he and his family…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 4: 16 May 2022 Woodbridge VA > Charleston WV
Packed the car and left Woodbridge, phone functioning (hallelujah), about 10.30 and drove west through the Shenandoah Valley under magnificent clouds and light rain, shafts of light breaking through the blue and grey, making the hills preternaturally green and lush, miles and miles of that fresh green breast of the new world. I’m singing “Oh,…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 3: 15 May 2022 Arlington & Alexandria VA
Woke early in my Woodbridge guest quarters at 6.30, panicking, bowels loose at the thought of having no working cell phone for the entirely of my odyssey. Somehow managed to talk myself down, and after a light breakfast followed by a few more futile attempts at fixing my Galaxy S10, I gave up, determined to…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 2: 14 May 2022 Princeton NJ > Woodbridge VA
The day began with coffee in lieu of the free breakfast Marriott did not provide once I negotiated a tricky left exit into the Delaware welcome station, “Home of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”; left exits as political statement? Surely not. Traffic got heavier and faster, the traffic patterns more complex, the closer I got…
-
Southern Sojourn Day 1: Madbury NH > Princeton NJ
Google maps are great, but how do you contradict the GPS assistant who wants you to take the shortest route when you want to take the longer, less trafficked, and MUCH greener route through the Hudson River valley and across the Tappan Zee (“Tappan” after the Native American sub-tribe of the Delaware/ Lenape people, and…
-
Home again
Leaving Philadelphia at 9 am on 31 May as the temperature climbed to 96o, I arrived back home in Madbury NH to 55o temperatures at 5 pm, three years to the day since the final hours spent with my darling husband David. I awoke alone this morning to the silence of a house with only…
-
May the 4th be with you . . . .
Mark Hamill, George Lucas, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford Those, Dear Reader, were the days. See “Empire Laid Bare: Making the Original Star Wars Trilogy–in Pictures” in THE GUARDIAN, 3 December 2018.View post to subscribe to site newsletter.
Georgeann Murphy 