Yesterday was a travel day. March 6-10 is our reading week, and I can do the school work that needs to be done from anywhere, so I planned to get up early and head down to our North Carolina house.
I'm usually up early, but the night before a travel day, I often have trouble sleeping. I knew that the day might be stormy so I gave up on trying to sleep, and I was on the road by 3:45.
The first few hours of the trip were clear, no rain or fog, which is good, because the roads around DC can be hard to navigate in the rain and fog. Once I was out of range of WAMU, I switched to a West Virginia station, where I heard about school closings and delays because of winter weather. Later, the station out of Harrisonburg, VA told me that there was a winter weather advisory for the Shenandoah Valley starting at 7 a.m., and the possibility of ice in the higher elevations.
I thought about the fact that I was in the Shenandoah Valley, and that I would be climbing in elevation. I was expecting wind and rain, not snow and ice. Happily, I didn't ever get snow or ice and not much wind or rain. There were periods of not much rain, but lots of previous rain blowing up off the road, but from the 18 wheelers, not the wind. The clouds were never far away as they obscured the mountains for the whole trip.
I was surprised by how many people drove through the gray, gloomy day with clouds descending on us, and they didn't have their headlights turned on. Long ago, in the first college composition class I ever taught, a student argued that all cars should come with daytime running lights, a feature which then seemed futuristic and over the top. Now I think that they should be a feature that can't be turned off manually. Let the default be light.
I have now made this trip 9 times, and yesterday was one of the first times where I thought, I have been driving this car for hours and hours, and I'm still so far away! Usually I'm thinking, this drive is so pretty, and I'm making such good time.
Still, it could have been worse. As I left Harrisonburg, I noticed that the interstate was shut down on the northbound side. I kept moving, and soon enough, I was pulling into my driveway. We unloaded the car, and I went back out to get a few groceries. I was still expecting storminess, but while we did get some rain, it wasn't as bad a storm as what people on the other side of the mountain experienced. We ate a late lunch/early dinner, and settled in for some TV--the comforts of cozy domesticity, which neither one of us has experienced in awhile.
It's been a strange phenomenon that when I'm here, I have trouble remembering that seminary exists, and when I'm in my seminary apartment, this Lutheridge house seems like a hazy dream. Let me do some work on the papers that are due before the end of the week-end: the less formal weekly response for Church History II and the paper on Buddhism for World Religions (happily, I've written the more difficult part of this paper).
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