We are visiting my sister and her family in Alabama. It is about a 12-hour drive, and I can’t do drives that long anymore, so we decided to break the drive up. About five and a half hours into the drive is Louisville, Kentucky, and that seemed a good distance, especially if we left after I got home from work. As a great added bonus, we have a friend and former colleague who lives in Louisville, so we could stay with Beverly and visit (and save on a hotel room).

We left Ohio about 4:00, and had a nice day for driving. We stopped just south of Columbus around 6:30 to eat  at a Ruby Tuesday. We had a gift certificate, so the meal only cost $10. I had a really messy, but really good, burger, while Meredith had some Mexican egg roll things with a salad bar. It was a welcome respite from the road.

We used the last of our daylight getting through Cincinnati. I had never been through Cincinnati before, but it looks nice. It has the Ohio river, and lots of hills, and the downtown looks fairly happening (at least while going 55 mph), but is small enough to look manageable. Maybe some weekend I’ll swoop Meredith away for a two-night stay there – it looks fun.

We finally got to Beverly’s house about 11:00. Her mailing address may be Louisville, but she is a long ways from downtown – we never even saw it. She must be a good 20 miles or more from the actual city. She lives in a very nice development, and I do not often describe developments as “very nice.” The houses in the development are all brick, and while there may be similar models, the same style houses are not side by side, so it does not look like a cookie-cutter development. They also have a lot of trees there, and that helps enormously.

Beverly is a wonderful Southern lady – she is hospitable, funny, and no-nonsense, She always makes me laugh with her stories and opinions. She loves her students, but puts up with no foolishness. While at CVCA, she told a student that she had thought he was a good-looking and smart kid, but she had changed her mind – now she thought him lazy. She encouraged him to try harder, and he did. Beverly can pull off stuff like that – she is a really good teacher.

Even at that late hour, Beverly took us on a tour of her lovely house. It has a fireplace, and lots of windows, and high ceilings, and lots of open spaces. Our bedroom had a lovely bed with a huge headboard (and the bed turned out to be very comfortable!). Everywhere we went, we were followed by Beverly’s 15-year-old Persian cat, Yossarian.  Yossarian may be the most mellow cat I have ever met – he let strangers (me and Meredith) hold him, and he just purred up a storm.

After the tour of the house, we talked and laughed until 1:30 in the morning. It was good to catch up with Beverly – she is good people.

Beverly insisted on cooking us breakfast in the morning, explaining that “it’s a Southern thing.” We had Beverly wake us up about 7:30, with my goal to be on the road by 9:30 or so. Beverly got us up at 7:30, and Meredith and I both took showers, and we chatted with Beverly while she made biscuits from scratch. We ate a great breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and biscuits, and we chatted more. I took a quick look at Beverly’s computer (it had 70+ spyware programs on it), and we got on the road. At 11:00. Beverly has too many good stories to tell to get on the road at 9:30.

We stopped about 12:00 at a Dairy Queen for a pick-me-up (and to get gas). It was quite a happy cultural experience. The DQ had a smoking section, and it was twice the size of the non-smoking section. The older lady who took our order had a thick accent, and she was very nice. All the people working there had thick accents, and the people ordering from the drive-through had accents. As Meredith said, it is nice to see in this age of chains and mass-media that we still have local cultures.