08-21-2020 Paducah to Atlanta

The Drury Hotel is pretty wonderful.  They require face masks every time you go outside of your room and they have coffee available in the lobby twenty-four hours a day.  We head down the hall for breakfast and follow the arrows into the dining area.  There is a menu posted on the wall and the server behind plexiglass will put anything you request into a styrofoam container. There are scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, sausage patties, fresh fruit, oatmeal, yogurt and blueberry muffins.  In another section there are containers of prepackaged cereals and individual bottles of milk.

This is a quilt!  After all, it is Paducah!

We take our breakfasts back to our room and watch Emerson’s Water Communion service on YouTube.  Rev. Deborah is such a joy to listen to.  Her sermon is touching and smart and even funny!  She covers so many topics and weaves them together flawlessly.

 

And we’re off…We really are just planning on getting back to Atlanta, without any stop offs for “touristing”.  And that’s too bad because we pass the Purple Toad Winery!

 

We’ve had such wonderful weather for the entire trip, it was almost guaranteed that we’d have rain on the ride home.  And we do.

                      Nashville in the drizzle.  Doesn't the AT&T building look like Batman's cowl?

                                                                    It never got any bluer than this!

 

In the afternoon we realize that we’ve missed lunch and stop at a Wendy’s for chili and salad.  It turns out the chili is enough and we take the salads home for dinner.  There is only one other customer in the dining room and he’s at the far end of the room.  The kids working behind the counter are all wearing masks and we feel perfectly safe ordering and eating.  There are no trays;  everything comes in a paper or plastic bag, so there is nothing to wash and reuse.  I guess the environmental damage is the price we’re paying for safety.

                            Notice the plexiglass behind the registers and the bags on the counter

 

A bit further down the road, the rain changes from slightly scary to outright terrifying and Ginger finds the next exit, although I’m not quite sure how she does it.  We pull into a gas station and wait for the heavens to quit spewing. 

 

We’ve been playing hopscotch with NPR ,chasing stations up and down the dial.  When we finally get WABE we know we’re close to home. And half an hour later we pull into the driveway.  Nick has fixed spaghetti sauce and Ginger makes the pasta.  And our salads are plenty for the four of us for dinner.

                                          Harriett remembering that she was worshiped in Egypt.

 

Ginger and I clean up and then we watch Stephen Colbert before calling it a night.