Half of the last 10 shots I took before I turned around and left.

We've been up since about 8am EDT. It's 80-something, 70% humidity, a storm drifts far off over the Atlantic. Morning coffee with TFS before we went back to work - her trip much much shorter than mine though. Good-byes, as always, take longer than we think they will.

I packed up and hit the road for the first leg of my trip back - a 5-hour drive back via I-40 past Raleigh-Durham. It's really more like 6 hours at the posted speed limits (65 or 70 mostly), but the highway patrol seemed to be busy with others than me. :) It's a birds-nest of asphalt and concrete and paint lines and lanes and trucks and motion. Like NASCAR, but at the speed that they do left-turn corners (at Bristol Motor Speedway anyway) a couple hundred times, with thousands of largely-untrained other drivers, over hundreds of miles, with a route to choose through that birds-nest.

from a Hardee's on my first day in Bristol.

Speaking of birds, I have my last fast-food experience at a Smithfield's Chicken 'N BAR-B-Q in Newton Grove, NC. I order a "platter" and a "large" Coke. The platter is a good bit of cripsy-fried chicken and fries and coleslaw and hush puppies, but the Coke is a 44-oz behemoth I have to sit straight at my table to reach the straw with my lips. I lug it with me back on the road again after a gas-up. Back up to speed, it's back through the thicker birds-nest passing Raleigh-Durham, through a couple hairy moments in some rain before Charlotte, and then my digital British friend guides me into Charlotte Airport to bring the little red Rio back into circulation for other people's adventures.