On The Road Again 2008: There's No Place Like Home

Day 51 Dunedin Fl to Summerville SC
480 miles

The End of The Road!

We met friends, Gin and Bob for a brief visit, coffee and pastry and to thank them again for our trip to Busch Gardens before we left Clearwater. Jim really likes the area and is talking about spending some time there next winter...IF we still have the RV.

The weather again was on our side. It was

amazing how all the storms (and earthquakes) missed us by a day or two on this trip. The worst weather was the at the very beginning of the trip coming out of Nashville and even that cleared up within about an hour. The only thunder that we even heard was during the night in Houston. Unbelievable.

We took I275 to I4 to I95. Traffic wasn't all that bad for a holiday weekend. Orlando...well, anyone who is familiar with Orlando knows that there's always a traffic problem. So we just crawled through the city for a half hour or so. Just a little west of Orlando we encountered biblical swarms of love bugs. There's always a lot of them in Florida this time of year, but they were so thick for a while that he had to keep using the windshield wipers so he could see....it was like black snow. Only these little boogers stick!

I remember when we lived on St. Simon's Island in the early 90'sthe love bugs were bad that year. Here I was the only 'Yankee' around the proper southern ladies. One of the new neighbors from the NC mountains (where they didn't have love bugs) asked me if they bite. I told her, "No, they're just a nuisance...anyway they're too busy screwing to bite anybody!" Geez, you should have seen the looks I got.

After Orlando, the ride was easy. We like to take Rt9A around the east side Jacksonville instead of the I295 bypass to the west side. I think it's shorter and soooooo much more scenic.

Florida and almost all of Georgia are three lanes wide and it makes such a difference in traffic. One thing a bout Florida is that they have a much better highway system than most states. The highway project in Georgia (110 miles of I95) was started before we moved down to St. Simons in late 1991...and it's almost done.

We were happy to see the* Welcome to South Carolina *sign...although we always joke that it means 'welcome to SC...now you lose a lane of interstate'. We need a lot of highway improvements. They're always about 10 years behind, sigh.

Everything was so GREEN. We did have leaves and blossoms when we left but it's more lush now. This has been a great year for gardens, cool nights and frequent rains. Usually we're getting into the muggies by now.

The last 45 minutes of the trip was on country roads and we finally snaked our way into our subdivision. The yard looked great, and to my delight my oldest son had planted a garden for me! I'd felt so bad that I wouldn't have any garden tomatoes this year because I wouldn't be here to tend to it...but he planted and has come over to take care of it. What a great surprise!