Visiting family...

We've been to Alabama to visit our son and help him with a few things.  Glad to see he's alive and the house is still erect.  It is a nice little place.  We put 1800+ miles on the truck which cost us about $390.00 in gasoline.  That is about double what it used to cost us for real gas, i.e. without the ethanol scam gas.

Had to clean up the camelia blooms...

We did a little yard work as the weather was pretty good towards the end of our visit.  But, mostly, we moved in some furniture we'd brought down from Virginia including my old desk.

I put the desk together myself in 1969 from a flatpack Mom ordered from a company that advertised in Yankee Magazine.  Given absolutely no help, I put the drawer pulls on upside down.  Even though I discovered the error afterwards, I didn't ever bother to change them.  Now, 43 years later, they are still there. 

We also got to spend a lot of time with sister-in-law Sue and her husband Mickey and Mickey showed me the cool planes he's working on.  This included a compeletely stripped down Pitt acrobatic home-built, a 1952 (if I remember this date correctly) Piper, and others.

We also got to visit with and serve chili at Mickey and Sue's church in Atmore, Alabama.  They actually thanked us for helping with their Valentine's Day/Chili dinner even though we had a great time. 

The actual travel to and from was blessedly trouble free.  Even though the truck now has north of 108,000 miles on it we had no problems there.  We didn't have any delays either although I think we narrowly missed a couple of possibilities on the way coming and going.  I guess we were due some good "luck" as we'd had all sorts of problems on last year's visits.  As usual, we stayed in La Quinta in Sevierville, TN as our midpoint.  Pet friendly, nice staff, clean rooms, good chow available relatively close by (well, we do know where to go) and a Bass Pro Shop store to visit.  Can't beat that. 

The desk in David's office...

When we got home we found some projects nearing completion and a couple of neat things in the mail (which had been delivered rather than held by the post office).  More about that later!