Virginia to North Carolina

          I left Virginia around 9:30 yesterday and had another three hours to my sister Jo’s. People were so helpful, both at the motel and at at the convenience store/gas station where I stopped for water.  At the Quality Inn, I guzzled down four glasses of orange juice before I left.  The orange juice was the bright spot of breakfast. The eggs sausage that I tried didn’t taste like real food, so I threw most of it away. I should have known better: hotel breakfast buffets don’t serve real food.  I ate peanut butter and rice crackers once I got under way.

          The drive through the Shenandoah Valley and southward and was stunning. The mountains loomed larger and larger.  As I passed them by, I fantasized about hiking the Appalachian Trail, saw myself trekking with a backpack, imagined the various ways I could do it, with or without a car.  I’m still hoping I can do that, looking forward to doing it, in fact.  Perhaps I’ll have to do it in two or three stints, but after seeing the beauty of the mountains from a distance, I know I want to experience them firsthand.

          My sister Jo doesn’t have a spare bedroom anymore.  She took down the walls and the doors between the two small bedrooms that and made one large music room.  After I’d been there for a bit, she pulled out an inflatable single bed and pumped it up.  It was a beautiful thing, and so comfortable--but it kept losing air, how much we didn’t realize at the time.  As I sat in bed with my computer on my lap, I could feel the mattress going down just a tiny bit every few minutes.  No problem.  I’m sure it’ll last until morning. 

          Around midnight, I woke up with my butt on the springs and my feet and head in a V.  Always trying to find a way to get along, I imagined that I was on thin ice and that spreading my body over a larger area  would spread my weight and allow me to sleep through the night,  As I tried to adjust my body, the mattress flipped me over like a pancake and I landed on the floor.  I lay there laughing softly, and, reaching for the small flashlight that I’d put on the floor, scuttled on my crutches across the room and turned on the light.  After a few minutes, I called in a low voice, “Jo?  Jo?”  I heard her answer and called, “I think we need to make alternate arrangements.” I ended up on the recliner for the night, which wasn’t a hardship, and sleep through until 7:00.  We both had some good chuckles over that during the day, Jo musing, “I wish I’d been there to see you flipped like a pancake.”

          I spent a while yesterday cleaning up her computer and fretting that it was so slow to download anything.  Ah, little did I know.  By 8:00, the modem had gone south, and all the coaxing and rebooting wouldn’t convince it to come back. But there was more.  When we went in to YadkinTel, I found out her plan was 1/2 MB!  Are you kidding?  That’s over dialup speed, but just barely!  Anyway, the modem is dead, there’s no internet, and now I know why she had such a great price on her internet.  Tomorrow we’ll go exchange the modem and hopefully get a modem that works.  In the meantime, I’ll have to go to the Mocksville Library every day or two.  A half MB is not enough to download and upload what I need.  Ugh.

          Now there’s a scary thought.  We went by the library and there are several steps up to the door.  This is not going to be a fun prospect, but it’s better than not having internet access.  Oh, I am a child of the techie generation!