Back Home After Week's Travel and Visits in Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia

It's good to be back in Gainesville after a week of car travel in which we went first to Kentucky to visit with Melissa's sister and then to Tennessee to stay a couple of nights with a friend from her elementary school years.  Naturally, I've come up with a few items for discussion here on this blog and will, from time to time, address them.  I will make one observation up front: the weather seems to have anticipated our journey by misbehaving on the road...and at our destinations...in some of the worst ways possible.  I don't suppose it was reasonable to expect blue skies and temperate temperatures for this brief time...the weather hasn't exactly been very cooperative the rest of 2023, either, with regard to my participation in local scheduled running races.  Much of the drive to and from...mostly on 1-75...was spent in the rain, with an ugly two-hour (very) slow crawl on Day One just after we crossed the Florida-Georgia line.  Then, the morning after our first night in a bed-and-breakfast in Lexington, Kentucky saw a light deposit of powdery snow everywhere outside...the coldness would prevail until we got into Nashville later in the week.  We got one good, rainless day there with reasonable temperatures and took advantage of it...more on that later.  But Friday morning when we set out on the road homeward, the rain took off again and kept us company to varying degrees all the way back.  And it's definitely good to be back...