Saturday was “my” day, and I decided to do a bit of a double feature. I headed south to Canton with Mer to the dollar theater, to see the movie The Vow. The Vow is a story loosely based on the true story of a woman who is in a car accident and loses several years’ worth of her memory, which includes all of her memories of her husband and even being married. The movie explores how the couple deals with the difficulties of being married to a complete stranger, and some other family complications come in as well. It was a very solid film, and I was surprised that it was not more sentimental. It was a fairly thoughtful treatment of the material, and I liked it.

After going home and eating, I took Mer to the new-to-us Cuyahoga Falls Cultural Center. Neither of us even knew we had a cultural center. It turns out to be an old public school building that now houses a small theater and holds several community-focused classes, like dancing and woodworking.

I had brought Mer to the Cultural Center to see the improv group Point of No Return. My friend Brandon had sent me an e-mail from the group announcing auditions. Brandon figured I might want to pass the information along to the students in my improv group, which I did. But it also made me aware that Cuyahoga Falls had an improv group, which I had known once and forgotten. It also turns out that the founder of the group is one of the computer service vendors I deal with – one of the vendors who are in charge of CVCA’s off-site backup. It surprised me, and I was looking forward to seeing my vendor in the group.

Point of No Return has an ambitious schedule:  they practice two hours a week, and have shows about twice a month. They have a suggested admission of $5.00 to help them cover costs. Mer and I got to the show about an hour early because I misread the e-mail (I thought the show started at 7:00, and the doors opened at 7:00). These things happen. I was able to visit some with my vendor, Bob, who was very hospitable.

Mer and I got good seats in the front of the small theater. Point of No Return has about ten members, but on Saturday there were only six people who could perform. Sadly, the audience was small, around twenty people. It was unfortunate, because the show was fun. I had not been to an improv show since going to Vancouver with Mer two years ago, and it was fun to be an audience member. The group did a couple of new-to-me games, and they did some interesting twists on a few games I did know. They have a couple of musicians in the group, and so they involved music in two different games, which is always amazing to me since the actors have to make up the songs on the spot. The skits went well, and Mer and I laughed a lot. It was a fun evening, and I plan on going back fairly soon.

Every year Mer takes at least one field trip to see some literature-related theater. This last Tuesday, we went with almost all the senior class, plus Mer’s junior students, to see Actors’ Summit’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

I was excited to see the play; it is one of the funniest plays in the English language, and the previous week the director had come to CVCA to speak to some of Mer’s students about the play. He stressed the importance of timing and of getting the lines exactly right, since the play depends on sudden reversals of language for plot twists and for most of the humor.

We pretty much filled the theater, and on the whole, the students behaved very well. The director did speak to one student who was quietly talking during the introduction of the play, and that more or less warned the rest of us to keep quiet. The set was simple, with a few pieces of furniture and a back wall/door at the back of the thrust stage. The wall/door could be rotated to a second set to suggest the change of location from a London home to a country home. Over the whole set was the word “Ernest” in two-foot-tall letters, and the lighting designer used lights to highlight the word. I liked the lighting design (the shadows of “Ernest” being cast were subtle and cool), but I thought the word hanging in our faces like that was a bit too much; I thought it would have been more subtle to use just the shadows created by the lights, but it was a minor point to quibble with. The wall/door part of the set was excellent, with good detail.

The casting of the play was very good, especially the two male leads. They stayed in character and delivered their lines smoothly and with good wit, and they played up physical humor without being distracting. The play was wonderfully funny, and it was an excellent production.

After the play, the director and some of the actors had a question-and-answer session with us that lasted about twenty minutes or so. I felt as if our students asked some good questions, and the answers from people involved in making the production were interesting to hear (about learning lines, about set design, etc.).

After we all got out of the building (the theater is in downtown Akron, and is on the sixth floor), we got on the buses and headed to Chapel Hill Mall, to their food court, for lunch. Mer and I got to sit with a few colleagues and chat. We had about an hour total, and were able to spend about thirty minutes talking and laughing. Everyone got on the buses more or less on time, and so it was a Wilde-ly (ha!) successful field trip.

Saturday was Mer’s day, and she did not have plans for a good part of the day, but in the mid-afternoon she called the bluffs of me and Aunt Mary. I had never seen the movie The Sound of Music, and Aunt Mary had never seen Star Wars, and we had a tongue-in-cheek deal where I would watch The Sound of Music if Aunt Mary would watch Star Wars. After years of this, Mer got both movies out of the library, and she wanted to watch them.

We started with The Sound of Music because it was the longer movie and I was afraid it might be hard to stick with if it got late. I enjoyed it. The music was fun and familiar (I knew many of the songs), and although the story line was only loosely based on real events, it was still a compelling story. I liked the optimism and quirkiness of Maria and I liked the stern, no-nonsense Captain Von Trapp. I had a good time finally getting to see a cultural touchstone.

After the movie, we all headed over to Five Guys Burgers and Fries for supper. Aunt Mary had never been to a Five Guys, and I really like their food. I was craving burgers, so Aunt Mary and Meredith humored me. It was a good meal, although Aunt Mary finally had to ask the management to turn down the music slightly in the restaurant since we were having trouble hearing each other, even at the same table.

After supper, I grabbed a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream for me and Mer to munch on during the movie, and we went home to settle in for Star Wars. I was pleased to be seeing it again – it had been awhile, and I had actually been thinking of seeing it again. The only serious downside to the film was the bane of library DVDs – it was scratched in several places, and so froze or skipped in three or four places, but did make it to the end of the film.

I do not know if Aunt Mary enjoyed the film or not, but I was very impressed at how she was following it. She asked several very intelligent questions along the way, and it was not until after we finished the film that we found out that she had never seen a science fiction film before. That impressed me all the more at how well she was able to track with what was going on, especially since so many of the characters do not speak English in the film.

After the film, Mer and I headed home, as it was fairly late. It was a good day – Mer did the right thing by making us sit down and watch the films together.

Sunday was Easter, and we went to church in the morning. It was good to be home in time for Easter, which was the plan, so that we did not have to be traveling all day on Easter itself. Meredith is in the start of her busy season of grading, so she spent much of the day grading, but it was a pretty day, so I asked Mer to join me for a walk on the short walk in a park, on the Daffodil Trail.

The Daffodil Trail is a little over a half-mile long, and it is lined sporadically with lots of different kinds of daffodils. It is very pretty when in full bloom. My guess was we had missed the peak by about a week or ten days, and that turned out to be correct. There were still a few bunches of hardy flowers in bloom, but most had gone by. It was still a pretty walk, and I was glad to get out in a park.

A couple of years ago, CVCA started up a lacrosse club, and it has since become a full-fledged team sport. One of the guys in my Connections group is on the team, and Friday was a beautiful day, albeit a bit cold, so I decided to go to part of a game. Mer used the opportunity to “sports surf” and see bits of softball, baseball, and tennis, as well as lacrosse, so that she could see as many of her students as possible. I remembered to bring a folding chair, and so I was able to sit within ten feet of the field. I had only ever been to one lacrosse game before, and that was twenty years ago in college, so my knowledge of the game is a bit sketchy.

I liked it. I later had to find Jon, my student, and have him explain the rules on who gets the ball when it goes out of bounds (if it is a shot on goal, the team closest to the ball gets it; otherwise, the other team gets it), but other than that confusing rule, I could follow the game pretty well. I only stayed for about half the game; we were winning by a large amount when I left, and I had arranged to meet a colleague at my house so he could pick up some scrap metal to recycle it. With the school year winding down, I’m not sure if I’ll get back to another game, but I did like the competition, and was surprised at how easy it was to follow the ball.

A couple of years ago, Mer came up with the rather brilliant idea of deliberate touring – the idea that wherever you go, you should check it out as tourists. So, we have been deliberate tourists in Chicago and Maine and now Alabama. Keeping with that rule of thumb, I booked us into a Cincinnati hotel for our layover on our way back home from Alabama. Cincinnati had the advantage of being a good day’s drive along our way home, and it was a good-sized city that we had never done more than drive through before. So, even though we would have only a few hours in the city, it seemed a good place to spend the night.

We confirmed that we are inefficient travelers. We stop a lot for gas and bathrooms, and we always eat a sit-down meal rather than eating in the car. It helps us break the drive up. As such, instead of taking seven-and-a-half hours to get to Cinci, we took about ten, and did not check into our hotel until about 7:00 pm. Still, we had about ninety minutes of daylight left to explore, and cities are fun after dark as well. So, we dumped our stuff in our room and headed out.

We headed east along Fifth Street for a few blocks, soaking in the sights. As with many downtowns after work hours, large sections of downtown were almost empty. There was a very pretty square that we passed, and Mer amazed me. As we passed the square, she saw the name of what I took to be a store or a small restaurant. She informed me that years ago she had read about that place, and that they were supposed to serve excellent ice cream. What a memory! She was also right, as we later found out after supper.

We turned down toward the river and passed the baseball stadium where the Reds play. We wanted to get to the river and see if there were any parks, but the river area was largely under construction. It seems as if parks are in process at the moment. We did find a small square celebrating steamboats, and that had stairs to what seemed to be a boat launch onto the river, which would be remarkable, given that the launch was right downtown. I’m not sure it would occur to me to drag my boat to a major city to launch it, but that is what it appeared to be.

By this time, the sun was setting, and so we started looking for a restaurant. We found one quickly across from the ballpark, but it was mobbed, with people spilling out into the small adjacent park. We kept going, and were starting to get a little worried that we would have to settle for a chain burger place, when we came back to the large square on Fifth Street. There were three open restaurants there, and so we got seated efficiently by asking to sit outside. It was a little chilly (in the low 60s), but we were both smart enough to have brought jackets. It was a nice place to eat and watch the square in action. There were a lot of high school students running around with “Robotics Team” t-shirts on, so I assume there was a robotics competition that weekend. It was a good meal in an interesting place.

After supper, we checked out Mer’s ice cream shop. We both got brownie sundaes, and while the brownie was disappointing (it was a flavorless sponge cake), the ice cream, hot fudge, and even the whipped cream (scooped on top by an ice cream scoop) were all excellent. I’m glad she remembered the place.

I wanted to check out more of the city by taking a horse-drawn carriage ride, and Mer liked that idea. We ran back to the hotel to use the bathroom, and then went back to the square to catch a carriage. The ride was very interesting – I never get to look around cities because I am always driving. The driver never talked with us the entire ride, which I found odd until Mer pointed out that the couple in back is probably usually cuddling and wants to be left alone. Indeed, one pedestrian yelled “Congratulations!” at us, so I guess we have that newly married look.

The tour lasted about twenty-five or thirty minutes, and covered a meandering path through the downtown streets. It passed a pretty two-block-long park that was lit by arches of small lights; the park was only fifty feet wide or so, but it was well laid out. We also went through a courtyard of a building that I suppose must be a public thoroughfare; it felt very Dickensian, as if we were in London in the late 1800s. The tour also took us past three huge and pretty churches that were all on the same intersection; if I ever get back, I’ll have to track them down.

We headed back to the hotel, pausing on the way outside a bar that had “dueling” pianos. One of the piano players waved at Mer, even though he was playing at the time. It was one of the few times I wished that I drank so that we would have a good excuse to go in – it seemed like a friendly place with great music. I could not bring myself to go in and have Mer ask for water and me order a $2.00 Sprite. So, we called it a night and got back to the room at about 11:00, and we went to bed. I was very pleased at how much we had seen in just four hours. Not too bad for deliberate tourists.

Ah – for those who do not know, Cincinnati is “The Queen City.” I’m not sure why.

Yesterday was a mellow day here, which was our last full day in Alabama. I went running while Mer slept in, and then I made cookies (while Mer slept). Mer had been up late grading, and so I let her sleep as long as she wanted to. Kelly had some free time, so she offered to take us out to lunch and then show us some of the damage from last year’s major tornado that hit Tuscaloosa and environs. Once Mer was up and showered and ready, we headed over to the 15th Street Diner, which is one of Kelly’s favorites. I can see why – they offered huge portions of good food for very little money. Mer was pleased that she got three side dishes with her meal, and two of those could be desserts. That is our kind of sides.

After lunch, Kelly drove us around to see where the tornado had struck. Much of the rubble has been cleaned up, but not all. There is a lot of new construction going up, but not everywhere. In several areas, there is a clear path of no houses or trees where the tornado went through. It was hard to imagine what the area must have looked like right after the storm. Kelly said that about ten percent of the business and homes in Tuscaloosa were damaged or destroyed.

After we got back home, I took a nap while Mer graded. I woke up when my niece got home, and we played for awhile. I had wanted to show Mer part of the river walk, and so I asked if she wanted to go. She did, and my niece wanted to go as well. That was fine, although Kelly warned us she might get tired on such a long walk. My niece actually did great – we walked the half-mile to the river walk and then went another third to a half of a mile before she started to say she was hungry. As if on cue, Kelly showed up with a bag of Cheerios, which made my niece very happy. Kelly had driven down to the walk and parked right where we happened to be; she had guessed correctly which way we had gone. The four of us walked on for another half mile or so, and then turned around as a huge cloud bank was looming over the river. Kelly called Paul, and he came down with my nephew in the car, so that all of us could leave together to go eat.

Kelly and Paul took us to Dreamland BBQ, which is Paul’s favorite. It is very good. The kids did well at behaving, and it was a good meal. We headed home, where it was bath time and then bed for the kids, and yet more grading for Mer. I booked a hotel in Cincinnati as our Friday destination, which would leave a very manageable four-hour drive on Saturday. I was pleased – I booked the hotel on Priceline, and we got a four-star hotel in downtown Cincinnati for $65. That done, I went to bed, and Mer followed sometime later. It was not a bad idea to frame our Alabama days with a mellow Monday and Thursday.

Yesterday Mer and I headed toward Birmingham, to go to Mountain Brook, a cute suburb of the city, and home to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Back in October, I signed us up to become members of the Holden Arboretum, and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens was on the list of gardens that honored the Holden membership. I was feeling pretty smug about cashing in on our benefits until we got to the Gardens and saw that admission was always free for everyone. So much for being smug.

The Birmingham Botanical Gardens is fairly small at about sixty-five acres, but it is very well laid out. They have about twenty-five separate gardens in the space, from vegetable gardens to local forest trees and plants to a formal rose garden for a fern garden (I am strangely fond of ferns). And, of course, they have the required-by-botanical-guild-law Japanese garden, which was very pretty and was the biggest garden on the grounds.

Mer and I like botanical gardens because they always make pleasant places to walk. We were able to see the entire gardens in about five hours, and that included an excellent sit-down lunch at the cafe. As an aside, our service was excellent; Mer posited that good waitresses become great when they have southern accents – at any rate, our waitress was friendly and attentive.

What surprised me the most about the gardens was how few flowers were in bloom. About ninety percent of the roses were not yet in bloom, and that was true for much of the gardens. The flowering shrubs and tress were in bloom, and the pansies were out in great numbers, but one of the gardeners told us we were about a month early. I knew it was still pretty early in the spring by the calendar, but I had wrongfully assumed that the flowers would be way ahead of summer this far south. However, even with limited blooms, the gardens were still immaculately groomed, featured fountains and sculptures, and lots of pleasant walking paths. For whatever reason, many of the artificial creeks and ponds were dry, but it is still a very well-done garden, especially for free.

After the garden adventure, we drove the short distance to Samford University, a Christian college in Birmingham. Mer has had several students go there, and she likes to have a visual of what different colleges look like. So, we drove through the campus, which is surprisingly large. The campus is beautiful, with all of the buildings made of red brick and in a classic style. There are lots of open spaces, and the university sits on a heavily wooded hill. The main chapel is huge and crowned with a classical-style dome that overlooks all of the sports fields. It is a lovely campus, and I was glad Mer wanted to see it. It would have been nice to get out and walk around, but it was raining, and we wanted to be back home by 5:00, so we settled for the driving tour of campus.

We did get home at around 5:00 and played with the kids, especially our niece, who found it fun to hide coins around the house and make us look for them. We had a meal of good leftovers that we all ate together around an actual table. We then played with the kids some more, and read to them as they went to bed. I read a Spider-Man book to our nephew and Mer read a book to our niece.

After reading time, Mer and I took an after-dark walk to the strip, the nearby street right next to the university. The street was not empty, but was not hopping yet – I guess it was just a bit early. We walked onto the actual campus and saw one side of the stadium, some nice brick houses that are fraternities, and the education building and library. We finished our walk at the big quad on campus, and we walked over to the main library and then back to the carillon. The university is huge; we only saw a small fraction of it.

We finished the evening off by stopping at Cold Stone. We got our ice cream and ate outside. The street was much busier now, and so we ate and people-watched. We discovered a fashion trend that may or may not make it to Ohio – the girls, by and large, were wearing very short athletic shorts and really large and baggy shirts. Once we finished our ice cream, we walked back home, where everyone was in bed. I headed to bed myself, but Mer stayed up for a couple more hours to grade homework.

Yesterday was out first tourist day, and that meant Birmingham. We left at about 10:00 with the aim to be back home by 5:00, which seemed reasonable given that Birmingham is about an hour away. Normally. However, for some reason the state decided that in order to re-pave the northbound highway, they should shut the entire highway down and force everyone to exit at a local exit. By the time we navigated that little turn of events, it actually took us an hour and forty minutes to get to Birmingham. We’ll try an alternate route in the future.

We were going “celebration of big industry” in Birmingham: we were starting our day at the old Sloss Furnaces, and were aiming to finish the day at the world’s largest cast-iron statue, the 1904 World Fair sculpture of Vulcan, which is on a hill in Vulcan Park.

Iron played a huge role in the founding and development of Birmingham. Three materials are needed to make iron – iron ore, limestone, and coal; Birmingham happened to have all three in abundance. When two major rail lines happened to cross in the area in the 1870s, the iron works and mines sprang up pretty quickly, and Birmingham grew very quickly.

The Sloss ironworks were founded in 1882 and produced iron for ninety years, until 1971. The entire operation was then donated to the city as a way to preserve the historical importance of iron to the area. It took awhile for people to get on board, but Sloss opened as an open-air museum in 1983. It is pretty cool – you wander around with a brochure that explains the machinery and the processes, and you go at your own pace. Not all of the mill is open to the public for safety reasons (they don’t let you climb up or down very often), but much of the foundry is open to wandering, and you may go where you like. That was fun.

We had a slightly hot but beautiful day to wander. We learned about how water was used for steam and to cool the furnaces, and how trains unloaded loads of coal, limestone, and iron ore. There were placards that explained how the feeding of the two giant furnaces was largely automated in the 1920s, and how prior to that it took twenty men with wheelbarrows to keep the iron furnaces stocked. There were stories printed up from workers, and acknowledgments that the best jobs were for white people only for most of the history of the factory. Some of the jobs sounded awful – some men worked in the loading tunnel, which was always full of dust from coal or limestone or iron ore. Some men were bricklayers (bricks lined everything that got hot, which was a lot of things), and they said they were at risk of getting stuck in cramped spaces. The men who tended the top of the furnace had to be careful about carbon monoxide. Before automation, some men had to break up the finished iron bars (called pig iron because they looked like suckling pigs) while they were still hot, and had to carry them away. That job was described as the worst, and the information said only one in ten men could even do the job, and then only for a few years. Visiting large industrial sites always makes me glad to work in an office.

How iron was made went like this: trains brought in the raw materials and dumped them in a hopper, which weighed them. The hopper was then moved and its contents dumped into a steam-driven cart that carried the materials up to the top of the furnaces. The limestone, coal, or iron ore was dumped in, and fell toward the bottom. Meanwhile, super-heated air was forced into the bottom. The coal reacted with the air and burned very hot, and the iron ore melted while the limestone combined with impurities. That is way oversimplified; it seems as if the actual chemical process is very complex. But what you end up with is molten iron on the bottom of the furnace, and slag (waste product) floating on top of that. The slag was drawn off periodically to be used in construction materials, and the iron was drawn out every four hours or so. It was an interesting process to read about, and would be interesting to see.

The self-guided tour took us about ninety minutes to complete, and took us around more than half of the full plant. It was all interesting, but a few things stood out. We were able to go down into the tunnel where the train cars dumped their loads; it felt like a bunker, and made me feel for the men who had to work in that crowded (and probably hot and dusty) space. The steam-powered lift that took loads to the top of the smelting furnace is high and steep, and can be seen from all over the plant. The oldest part of the plant held huge machines with twenty-foot flywheels the job of which was to generate the forced air that was then heated and sent into the bottom of the furnace.

And hereby is an interesting story, and one of the lovely odd things that seem to happen to me and Mer when we travel. You cannot actually get into the room with the air pumps, but you can look through a bay door at them. The door is open, but roped off, so you can see pretty well. As I was looking at the two machines I could see, I noticed a few lights and screens set up, as for a photo shoot. I did not think too much about it – I figured there might be some publicity photos or the like being taken. I was rather surprised then to see a woman come around the corner next to the air compressors; she was wearing a Princess Leia-style metal bikini. She flung herself across one of the large industrial air compressors, and a photographer started snapping away. I looked at Mer and smiled, and we chuckled as we walked away. We found out later that it was a photo shoot to help a young photographer build his portfolio. Anyone can get a photo license from the museum with the proper paperwork, and he was using the machines as background. Mer later saw the model changing in to a sexy Robin Hood costume. It was all a bit surreal, and odd things make travel fun.

Mer and I took a bunch of photos of the plant, and of some of the machines scattered around. I’ve always been fascinated by pulley-driven steam shovels, and they had two on the grounds. They looked dangerous to run, with the operator standing (I could not see a seat) near all kinds of moving equipment.

So, we had a good time at the Sloss Museum. I recommend it for anyone interested in history or industry or just in how things work.

After we finished up Sloss, we headed out to go to Red Mountain, to Vulcan Park. The park is home to the fifty-six-foot-tall Vulcan statue, the world’s largest cast-iron sculpture. The sculpture is on a 124-foot-tall pedestal, on top of a mountain, so Vulcan is pretty visible. We got to the park and realized they had no food options, so we made a quick dash out of the park to an Italian deli for a quick bite; then we headed back.

The park is free, but it costs six dollars to see the small, but excellent, Vulcan museum and to go up to the outside observation deck on the tower. Mer and I tried the observation deck first, but I could not go out on the deck for long. It was open, with a steel grate floor, and my fear of heights kicked in. I fled back to the safety of the ground. Mer stayed up for a short while, and then she joined me. We looked around the park and used the location signs to locate specific Birmingham sights, including the Sloss Museum. We also got to read some of the history of Red Mountain, which was rich with iron ore.

We proceeded to the museum. The museum is only four large rooms, but they do a nice job. The first room explains how iron is made, and how it was central to Birmingham’s growth. The second room was the history and construction and renovation (in 1999) of the Vulcan statue. In brief, Vulcan was made for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, as a way to advertise Birmingham’s iron industry. It was made in a shockingly short time (just nine months), and was a huge (ha!) hit. The statue then lived at a “temporary” site on the fairgrounds in Birmingham for thirty years before being moved to the current park. The park was “modernized” in the 1960s, with the original tower being covered in marble and all the grounds being paved over for parking. The pictures were a sober reminder of how modern is not always good. The Vulcan statue, when placed on the tower, had been filled with concrete to stabilize the statue, which had been designed to be inside. Over the years, the concrete caused cracks in the iron of the statue, and in 1999 the park was closed for safety reasons, as the statue was starting to fall apart. Happily, the statue was restored and fitted with a steel skeleton, and the tower and grounds were restored more or less to how they were before the 1960s renovation. It is a very pretty place now.

Anyway, the third room talked about how hard the depression hit Birmingham, with an estimated 100,000 of the 108,000 workers in the city out of work. The third room also talked about how Birmingham industry came roaring back to help supply the needs of World War 2.

The last room talked about how Birmingham had transformed to a financial and telecom city. It also spent about half the room talking about the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and Birmingham’s place in that. The four rooms gave a short but solid overview of the city’s history.

After the museum, we headed home. We got back to the house at about 5:00, and Kelly and Paul had grilled ribs and chicken. We all ate together, and then cleaned up. Kelly had a group of friends coming over to play a dice-based game called Bunco. It was a girls’-night thing, so Mer was invited and happy to play. I retreated to the third floor, where I blogged and watched some TV. Once I got tired of that, I went for a walk to Cold Stone Creamery to get ice cream. I very much enjoyed people-watching in a college town on a warm evening – there were people everywhere. Once I got home, Mer and I caught up with each other, and shortly thereafter I went to bed.

We woke up Sunday and showered and packed. Beverly left for church a bit before we left, so we said our goodbyes to her, with the sincere hope of seeing her again soon. We packed the car during intermittent heavy downpours, and drove off in them as well. That lasted about an hour before we drove out of them. From then on, we had smooth driving. Except for the signs to Mammoth Cave. I kept seeing them, and I kept checking on our time, and I decided we had time to check out a cave. So, I pulled into Mammoth Cave National Park, but we stopped at the first cave we came to – the Diamond Caverns. It was smaller, and so could be toured in one hour, which was appealing, since we were on a schedule.

We were on a tour with about twenty people. The path through the cave is paved with concrete, and there are steps for most places with an elevation change. There were a few low spots, but only low enough to make me stoop, and one tight squeeze. The only downside to the tour was the size of the group – with so many people strung out along the path, it was sometimes hard to hear.

The cave was called the Diamond Caverns because the first people to explore it mistakenly thought they saw diamonds in the cave. It has no mineral value at all, but is an interesting cave full of beautiful stone formations. The guide did turn off the lights for us to simulate what would happen if your candle went out back before there were lights, and it is always shocking at how dark dark can be. If your candle did go out, your only option was to wait for the next tour, which might be one to three days in coming. Yikes.

The cave was about a ninety-minute detour in all, but I’m glad to have done it. It was a good stop, and interesting, and it broke up the drive some. We drove for another few hours, stopped for a light lunch at one of the now ubiquitous Cracker Barrels, and we ended up pulling on to my sister’s street just as she and the whole family came back from their walk. That was good timing.

Sunday evening was spent in unpacking the car and then playing with the kids, who are six and three. I also made myself a small supper of grilled cheese. My niece showed me and Mer her room, and then I read her a story, and she went to bed. My nephew was mostly asleep by that time, so we headed back downstairs to the living room. There, the adults all talked and puttered before going to bed ourselves.

In the morning, I saw my niece to the bus, and then went running. There is a fairly new river walk in Tuscaloosa, and running from the house, along the whole river walk, and back to the house was a little more than five miles. By the time I got back, my sister was just leaving with my nephew to take him to daycare. Since Kelly works from home and had a lot of work to do, Mer and I decided to have a mellow day to stay out of the way. I walked to the store to lay in supplies, and then I made cookies. I later discovered that Kelly had given up chocolate for Lent. Oops. Mer graded all day, and made good progress on that. I sneaked in a nap, and so was pretty well rested by the time I went to meet my niece getting off the bus. We played together for much of the evening – doing an “invisible ink” puzzle book Mer and I had bought for her, and then I chased her around while she rode her bike. We finished the evening by reading another story together, and then she went to bed.

I followed not too far behind since Mer and I had planned a tourism day for Tuesday. Mer stayed up and graded a little more, and joined me at some point during the night.

On Friday, I took a half day off to go for a long run of fifteen miles, and still was able to get back home in time to shower and pack and pay bills before Mer and I headed off on our spring break vacation – a much-looked-forward-to vacation! We were ultimately headed to Alabama to see my sister, her husband, and her two children, but we did not want to make the twelve-plus-hour drive at once. Happily, Louisville in Kentucky is about five-and-a-half hours away from our home, and we have a good friend who lives there whom we had not visited in four years. So, Kentucky it was!

Normally, it is a five-and-a-half-hour drive from our house to Kentucky, but we hit several major rainstorms, and we stopped for supper at a Cracker Barrel, so it was closer to seven hours for us. Beverly, our friend, patiently waited for us, so we got to visit with her for a little over an hour before retiring to bed. We met Beverly six or seven years ago when she taught at CVCA for one year. She had moved to Northeast Ohio so her husband could get treatments for his cancer at the Cleveland Clinic. Sadly, the treatments did not work, and her husband passed away, so Beverly moved back to Kentucky and her family after just one year. In that year, Mer and I came to love her – she is a tough but caring teacher, with a way of being blunt without being rude. She is a masterful teacher and a great friend, and so we were happy to get to see her again. In fact, we had decided to spend Saturday with Beverly and not leave for Alabama until Sunday.

We woke up pretty late on Saturday, and Beverly made us a huge breakfast of bacon, biscuits, and eggs. Yum. We then discussed what to do for the day, and decided on a course of action. The most important thing was to be back at Beverly’s by 7:00 so she could see the occasion for a veritable Kentucky state holiday – the University of Louisville against the University of Kentucky playing basketball in the Final Four for the first time ever. Beverly is a huge Kentucky fan, which is good for her, since they ultimately won the national championship.

Anyway, we decided to see downtown Louisville, and then head over to Midway, a town that is home to a girls’ school that Beverly went to for high school. Beverly drove, which was fine with me; I discovered that my seat in her van reclined a long way back, so I snoozed on and off on the way to Louisville. I woke up fully close to the city, and we drove through several pretty neighborhoods before getting to downtown. Once downtown, we parked the car and headed to the river walk.

Louisville is located on the Ohio River, which is huge at that point of the river. The river walk is very scenic, with good views of the city, the river, and several bridges. There was a paddle-boat landing, but the boat that was moored there was not going out during the day, so we did not get a chance to go on board.

We wandered back into the city and checked out the major theater, in order to use the bathroom. It was interesting because the theater had a fair amount of modern sculpture in and around the grounds. I am a fan of sculpture, and so I enjoyed it.

We got back in the van, and I snoozed some on the hour-long trip to Midway. Midway is a small town with one main shopping street bisected by a railroad track. We continued on to Midway College, which used to be a college and high school for girls, but since then has become solely a college for girls. We wandered the grounds, which were completely empty for some reason that we were never able to ascertain. All of the buildings are made of red brick, which Mer and I like, and the grounds were covered with huge trees. It is a very pretty campus. We ended up on the far side of campus, where they have a small horse farm, and so we looked at the horses and petted a few. We crossed back over to the car, and went into town for a late lunch at a restaurant/bar that already had tables reserved for the game that night, even tough it was four hours off.

After lunch, we checked out an Irish import store, and chatted with the clerk, who had been on the phone wishing her father-in-law a happy ninetieth birthday. We concluded our wandering by going into a pleasantly cluttered local artists’ shop, where I managed to knock over a small painting leaning against a wall, but did not damage it.

The trip back was uneventful, and we made it home at around 6:00. Beverly had two other guests coming over, and they all went to the family room in the basement to get ready for the game. Mer went with them to grade, and I stayed on the main floor to blog. I also ran out and picked up a pizza order. To get some idea of how crazy this game was, Pizza Hut had a sixty-minute wait for pizza pick-up, and a ninety-minute wait for delivery. We had put our order in online, so I only waited a few minutes.

Although I saw very little of the game, it was amusing to hear Beverly’s commentary on how things were going. I finished blogging just as the game wrapped up, and Kentucky won, so everything worked out. I was not feeling very good, so I went to bed. My guess is I had been eating too much rich food for too many meals in a row. It was still a very good day, and I am thrilled we got to catch up with Beverly.