PDY

 I suppose there’s a first time for everything, and tonight I have no idea where to start, so I just will.

There are a couple of milestones to report, both of which caught me completely by surprise. One was finally getting off the I-40 corridor! I’ve crossed that freeway at least 20 times, on my little adjacent roads, but I am now following Interstate 81, which will take me northeast for the next couple of weeks. The second is a change of time zone! I didn’t even know where it was supposed to happen, but it did today, so I’m officially on Eastern Daylight Time!

Apologies for no story last night. Day 58 was beautiful, all 22 miles of it! Had to get over a late start and a frustrating time tending to a banking issue, their mistake, and spending an hour and fifteen minutes on the phone, mostly on hold. All I wanted to do is talk to a live person, as my problem wasn’t a regular “menu” item, no number to press. And when I did, there was still no resolution. I let that frustration affect the first part of what has definitely been a top-ten walk on this trip. It wasn’t until I became aware of it, realized I couldn’t do anything about it while walking along my highway and put it aside, lest it take any more of my day. Weather was gorgeous, temperature perfect, and once I quit fussing about the stupid bank, I enjoyed every ensuing moment. When you can’t do something about it, put it aside, either for a while or permanently.

Yesterday was all about barns, old barns. I’ve spent some of the happiest times of my life in barns all over the country and beyond. As a kid, I lived for the weekends, spent around hay and horses. As a teenager and in my twenties, I have been to and worked in literally hundreds of different barns, all types, mostly in California and Texas, with shorter stints in Florida and Connecticut. Had a great barn in Mexico, of which came some very good horses. Passed dozens and dozens of really beautiful old barns, photographed only dozens, and it was a little sad to see that most of them were not being used anymore. That’s a whole other topic involving industrialized farming and large scale operations that have forced many of the small farms I passed to shut down their operations. Regardless, they’re still beautiful.

I continue to love Tennessee, and that’s probably a good thing, as I’m starting day 27 tomorrow! First it took me forever to get out of Austin, then what seemed like forever to get out of Texas, but that was only 20 days! And to think Tennessee was only a small part of my original route taking me further south through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. No offense to those three states, but I’m really happy I came through Tennessee, in my orange shirt! I never planned on orange, it’s just what I brought, but it is the perfect TN orange and I fit right in! Smartest thing I’ve done without knowing it.

One thing I have noticed here, pretty much across the board, is that people say please and thank you when required, which is always in my book, when asking and receiving, respectively! For the past few years, this has become a big pet peeve of mine, and perhaps because of that, I’ve become quite aware of the fact that a lot (most?) of people fail to say please when asking for something. More people do say thank you, but that is often missing as well. Back in my air travel days, I’d occasionally give my free drink ticket to the flight attendant with a request to please give to the first person that asked for a drink, but, they had to say please when they asked. Would you believe that twice, the flight attendant returned my ticket and said “no one said please”. To which I say wow, such a simple and easy thing to do, takes practically no energy or time and costs nothing, not being used. I think people just forget, because I think we all learned to use those words at some early point in our lives.

Today’s walk to Morristown was a short one, listened to my body. Though yesterday’s walk felt great, yesterday evening I was hurting, didn’t feel right, kind of stiff and my joints hurt. Fell asleep at seven, woke up for a few minutes at eleven, back to sleep until nine this morning. Might have had something to do with a sub-par fast food meal, only thing available, or something that wanted to make me sick, but happy to say my little 8 miler and long afternoon have erased all ills and we rock on tomorrow, with Virginia in sight (almost).