I drove home for Thanksgiving.
Here are some high points of the trip, 
All leading up to that first glimpse of home. (That lighter green patch is the top of our hill.)
It usually takes me between five and six hours to drive home and I’ve been doing it four or five times a year for over six years now. This time, since the weather was nice and the traffic was light, the drive was rather relaxing. Partly because I is a country boy and going from suburbia to the country is always enjoyable. I would much rather see this out my car window,
then this. (Pretty good for shooting one-handed out the window of a car traveling at roughly the speed limit.)
Also, it’s five or six hours where I can listen to music I enjoy or just spend time thinking and plotting. Stories, that is.
Along the way I found some old friends. When I worked at the truck stop years ago, they piped in country music. Now, I don’t have anything against country music, but after hearing the same song two or three times a night, day after day, week after week, it does get old. But fortunately, there was Megarock. It was about the only station the little radio behind the counter could pick up and kept me … well, not sane. I guess it kept me from loosing my sanity faster. Another factor that slowed the loss of sanity, was 97.9X. The tape player in my old car started eating my tapes, so I only had the radio to listen to on my early trips home. I have to admit, I think most radio stations suck. It’s hard for me to find a station that plays music I would actually want to listen to. But 97.9X played enough that it helped the miles pass. Of course, on this trip, I listened almost entirely to CDs. Isn’t technology wonderful?
But I don’t look forward to all the landmarks of my trip. There was a woman who broke my heart, and I just happen to drive by her hometown. After all these years, it’s still kinda hard not to think about her each time I see signs letting me know how many miles I have until I’m past it.
Worse then the painful landmarks are the no longer landmarks. In our front yard we had a really tall tree, probably over 100 feet, which had been around for much longer than I’ve been. But it was dying, so my parents had it cut down. My mom had told me about it, but pulling into the driveway I was still like, There’s something wrong.
On the drive up, there is a place where I hit the last traffic light. (This is a picture I took of it on my way back because I didn’t think of taking one on my drive home.) Barring five or six stops signs – most of which have white borders so they’re optional – the last 200 miles or so of the trip is open road. What also made it memorable is there was an ice cream place named Walt’s Super Cone (or something like that, I don’t remember exactly what it was now) with a giant ice cream cone sign. I found it amusing because I know a Walt. But, a couple of years ago it closed, and the building was empty for awhile, but on my last trip home I saw that there were new owners. Now, it’s Skipper Dippers with an empty cone sign. (You can just see it in the photo, it’s the red and white striped thing.) Now, I know a lot of dips, but I don’t know any Skips. But it was a reminder that nothing last forever, and live goes on.