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31
May 16

Fists and blades

Here we are:

We are here. So if you’ve been reading, you knew we were moving. Today we’ve arrived. We’re in Bloomington, Indiana. The Yankee and I will both be starting at Indiana University’s Media School in time for the fall. We’ll be together. No more week-long commutes. No more 142 mile one-way trips to work. No more lots of silly things.

But we’ll get to all of that another time.

Right now, almost everything we own is on a giant truck and due here tomorrow. We drove up the two cars, which were loaded with the cat, three of the four bikes and not a spare inch of extra space.

Seriously. We’d set aside an area in the old house of stuff that was going with us — things we’d need, things the moving company said we should take ourselves and enough stuff to survive a day or so without our belongings — and somehow we managed to get every bit of it into the cars. If you’d asked me to fit eight more molecules into either car I would have had to quit after the third one. But we’re here.

Scenic drive up, too:

We hit the local Kroger. That place is huge.

Tonight we’re staying in an Airbnb. There is honeysuckle out front:

Tomorrow our things arrive and we sign the paperwork on our new house. Apparently we’ll now do both of those things simultaneously. How that’s supposed to work, we don’t yet know. But, hey, that’s just another thing. We’re so used to housing weirdness at this point (You should hear about our selling experience, criminy.) that it hardly even registers. By noon tomorrow we’ll just be down to unpacking.


30
May 16

The Natchez Trace

We rode our bikes in three states today. We started in western Tennessee and cut the corner off of Alabama and pedaled into eastern Mississippi and then back into Alabama on the Natchez Trace. (Grab a map, this makes sense.) The Trace marks the old forest trail which ran about 440 miles Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee. It was used by Native Americans, early European explorers, American settlers and traders from all over until well into the 19th century. Today, the path is marked by a closed access road that generally follows the original Trace. It is a great place for scene rides. Perhaps one day I’ll get in the entire route.

But, today, we got in a little over 50 miles of it. I took photographs.

Here we are after having worked through a few miles of Tennessee:

If you’ve ever wondered, Tennessee gets its southern border, and consequently much of the northern borders of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi from the 1663 land grant from King Charles II and North Carolina giving up their lands west of the mountains in 1735. All of the state borders around here were surveyed and established by John Coffee, a lifelong friend of Andrew Jackson’s, who was also a general in the War of 1812. He also negotiated some of the native American resettlements. (Bet we view those differently these days.) He has counties in Alabama and Tennessee and at least four towns across the south named after him. He lived around here and was considered a founder of the city. There’s a chance some of my ancestors knew him. A Walmart stands next to his family cemetery.

The weather was perfect:

The scenery was lovely:

We crossed the Tennessee:

The roads were quiet. So quiet that, twice cars from the other direction stopped in the middle of the road to talk to us. One lady asked us to move a turtle she’d seen in the road just a bit ahead and another guy asked for directions.

The Yankee, making her way into Alabama from Tennessee:

And here she is going from Alabama into Mississippi:

As for the cat, she’s settling in nicely.

She’ll go back in the car tomorrow. So will we.


27
May 16

Leg one is done

We’re at my folks. We’ll be here for a few days. Here are some pictures from the afternoon’s four-hour drive.

Allie, The Black Cat, likes Whataburger:

No surprise there.

Mexico was enchanted by the giant ship in the bottle, which was the huge crab’s plan. The country was never the same again:

Because the rule is that when you drive within 20 miles of a Trader Joe’s you take a side trip to Trader Joe’s. I don’t know why that’s the rule, but that’s the rule.

We had dinner tonight at a Mongolian stir-themed place called Genghis Grill:

I fit right in.


27
May 16

Goodbye, Auburn

You sleep and eat in safety in it, but a house is, really just the place where you put your memories for awhile.

This was a pretty good house, then. Except for the part about being on a haunted burial ground.

But there’s another house waiting, elsewhere.

Goodbye, Auburn.

It’s been real.


25
May 16

More outdoorsy pictures

The Yankee and Matt. He threw a flat right there, and that was basically the end of our ride.

And this was the next-to-the-last ride here. But we’re not going to make a big deal about that. I’m kind of tired of it, and … some other thing … about it. I started riding bikes as stress relief and … some other thing. And then it became about exercise and then, finally, I discovered that there was a freedom thing to it. But I only noticed that because I really started noticing the sites. Here are some sites: