We're off, once again, like a herd of turtles, or possibly even sloths. Tim got held up a bit at work, then when we were trying to leave we kept having to go back into the house for this or that—water the plants on the deck so the caretakers, who at least arrived on time, don’t have to worry about it, locate Henry so we’re sure he’s not in the house (he was under my car in the driveway), then fix the garage door which doesn’t close properly because I once backed into it due to not giving it enough time to open fully before I left. It works for a few months at a time, then works its way off the track and Tim has to coax it back on. Eventually, however, we got out about half an hour after we wanted to and about the time I figured we would.

Next hope: to arrive at campground in Tennessee by 7:00 . GPS predicts 5:55 arrival; I said I’d believe it when I saw it. As it happened, we were moving merrily along until Tim noticed that a traffic warning light was flashing with instructions to play radio 1610 for more information. The more information started out fairly benignly, saying that there was construction for four miles about 5 miles ahead. It then went on, in that atonal computer voice way that it has, to add the comment, as if afterthought, that there was an accident southbound at mile marker 75 (about 12 miles ahead of where we were) which "stopped traffic in all lanes."  Hello. One would think that such a problem would get more dramatic play. Such is the computer mind—we are obviously a long way from artificial intelligence. Consulting the very old-fashioned , but obviously still useful, paper map, I plotted an alternative route (translation: I suggested to Tim that he take the only other road that headed the way we were going), which we did. This was a two-lane country road called, on the map, “A Virginia By-Way,” whatever that means. In our case, it meant an extra 45 minutes. Still, roadnow.com confirmed that traffic was stopped southbound where the computer voice said it was, and nearly two hours later (as we were crossing into Tennessee,75 miles past the accident), it confirmed that traffic was finally moving at 5-10 mph.   45 minutes is less than the minimum 3 hours it would have taken us to get that far had we stayed on 81.

Continued in Tennessee entry...click "next!"