Very tired tonight, it has been a long, but really fun day. Up earlier than I really wanted to be, but a friend of mine from the Nahville area wanted to go explore some of the local area, so I was out the door and on my way to pick her up by 10:00. Unfortunatly, it was still raining pretty hard, but we decided to take a nice drive anyway and hope that the rain might stop somewhere along the way. It never did, but no problem, we had a good time anyway.

   Wanted to take her over to Babcock State Park and show her the Grist Mill that is there since she had never seen it. The creek it is on was a raging torrent compared to a couple of days ago. One good thing is that the mill was actually open and running today..... just not while we were there. Actually the building was open so we got to go in and look at all the inner working of the mill. Pretty neat little setup. They were milling some corn into corn meal today, but they had to sift through a couple sacks of corn first to get the right size for what they were milling and that was going to take them until after lunch time to do. So we satisfied ourselves with looking at everything, taking a few pictures and talking to the guy running the mill.

   We drove back toward Fayetteville via some of the smaller back roads and that was a lot of fun. We took one detour down to the New River and the old town of Thurmond. The old RR Station is still there and some of the old buildings. Again, because of the rain, we didn't get out and explore much of it this time. Plus we were a little concerned that the single road into the town might wash out at some point because the creek along side the road was raging and there were several streams of water washing over the road in spots. So we didn't spend much time down there.

   Got back to Fayettevelle and ended up going to a little restraunt in the old town area called 'Pies and Pints'. Very busy when we got there and with good reason. We ordered up a large white pizza with shrimp, artichoke hearts, calamata olives and lots of garlic along with a pitcher of this really fine tasting dark beer that is brewed somewhere there in town. So we spent a couple hours there drinking beer and eating pizza.... I love pizza!

    Dropped her off after lunch and I think we both went back and took naps in order to be ready for this evenings dancing. I got there around 7:30 and it didn't wrap up until after midnight. didn't dance every dance,  but more than enough of them to make my feet sore again. Lots of good calling and music and some wonderful dance partners again. I would say that on the whole the 'quality' of the dancing is maybe not as good as last weekends dance, but there are plenty of people here this weekend who are that caliber of dancer. It just doesn't seem to be reaching that top shelf of dancing for some reason.... Not going to complain to much though because it is still some wonderful dancing going on and it is certainly better than no dancing at all.

   One final thing; I got the nicest compliment from a dancer this evening whom I've seen at dozens of dances before, but whom, for some reason I've never actually had as a partner.... anyway; at one point we did a move in the dance which put her spinning along the line into my arms for a swing and she said that she could always count on me to be exactly where she needed me to be in a dance. That just made me smile.