Off to pick up the coach!

"Honey, would you hold mine for a minute?"

Our shared retirement journey does not begin until June, but we left today to pick up the coach in Mobile, Alabama. The Alpine is waiting patiently with it's present owners, David and Margaret Hickson, to discover if it likes us and wants to be our new home when we arrive there this weekend.

This is just our first night on the road, and yes, it's New Year's Eve.  Our friends at Hope Church are partying the night away even as I type, but none of them would be surprised to learn that the two delicious cones shown above, which we found in a wonderful ice cream shop in Hagerstown, Maryland (The Big Dipper, just over the bridge on Route 11. Been there over 30 years) is about as wild as we'll get today.  In fact, and don't tell her I told you, it's not 8:00 pm yet and Mona is settled into a great book in her jammies! But hey, that's how we roll!

And for me, beyond the joy of getting my ice cream cone back from Mona after I took the pic, was a lovely late afternoon stop in Williamsport, Maryland, on the Potomac.  This is both the site of a Baltimore and Ohio Canal bridge and shop, but also the spot Robert E. Lee crossed the Potomac in June, 1863, in his attempt to split the union through Pennsylvania. And it is the same spot, about two weeks later, where he led his bedraggled army back south in the rain after the hard defeat of Gettysburg.

As I looked up the almost unchanged Potomac Street from the canal I felt the 150 year old eyes of the original inhabitants, almost all southern sympathizers, staring from their curtained windows despairing of the parade of drenched soldiers slouching past in the downpour.

-Ken