Running With Scissors

Have your ever run with a pair of scissors and not tripped and the scissors didn't stab

you in the heart?  Have you ever gone to a carnival or county fair, eaten a bunch of junk food, went on the rides and not gotten sick?  Did you ever go out when you were a kid, stay out way past your curfew and in the morning your parents didn't even ask you what time you came in?  The common theme here is that you did something stupid and got away with it.

Click on the photo to enlarge

Cathy and I would like to offer a fourth example.  Wanting to leave for Florida, we waited out winter storm "Beth".  Then came the frigid temps that closed schools and roads.  On Thursday afternoon we were sitting around home and at 4:00 we decided it would be a brilliant idea to leave home immediately so we could get through Milwaukee and Chicago during low traffic times.  With the real temperature at -9 and the windchill probably -20 we hooked up the bikes and trailer and drove four and a half hours, all of it in the dark, to Hammond, Indiana but only the last hour was during the snow storm.  However, just as in the previous examples - we got a way with it.

Friday, well, Friday was even worse.  We crept along on the interstate for hours

Notice the bikes?

reaching speeds up to 10 miles per hour.  When you're going this slow it's good to find ways to amuse yourselves so we started counting accidents which included cars in the ditch.  We got bored and stopped counting at 33.   By 10:30 am. we were ready to call it a day and started to look for a place to stay (yes I wrote a.m.).  By the time we found a hotel the roads were better so we plugged away for another nine hours.

We stayed in Tennessee on Friday night which was good because we were able to eat breakfast, pack up and still be out of the hotel by 8:15.  We thought of ourselves as energetic eager beavers who were up and out early in the morning.  If we had stayed in Georgia, just 10 miles away, it would have 9:15 and we would have been slothful!

The rest of the ride to Florida was long but thankfully uneventful.  We were concerned about traffic in Super Bowl crazed Atlanta but all six lanes of traffic moved along nicely.

St. Timothy's in the background 

We reached The Villages in time to wash the salt and dirt off the car, bikes and camper and still make it to St. Timothy's in time for 6:00 Mass.  We'll be staying with Bill Blaney for a couple of nights before heading to our first campsite.  Thanks to my cousins, Bill and Karen Early for sheltering these northerners for a couple of days.