Still raining hard this morning when I got up. No real reason to go out in it too early so I just stayed in and read my book for a couple of hours, and drank near endless cups of hot tea while watching the rain drip from the leaves on the trees.

    By 1:00 I was feeling a bit cooped up and decided at least a drive would be better than nothing. Wanted to head for Roanoke like my original plan for the day, but when I started up Emma, my GPS, she failed to find any of the multitude of satellites that had to be up there in the sky. Given that everywhere you look in this country looks pretty much the same, all trees, and the highways are little more than two lane roads, poorly marked at that, it didn't seem prudent to try navigating all the way over to the big city. My thought was that I would most likely find my way there, but then wouldn't find my way back. The thought of wandering around this country in the dark, often with fog on the road, didn't exactly thrill me. Okay; so I'm a bit of a scardy cat, or as I like to think of it, mature and smart. At least that is what I'm going to keep telling myself.

   So with that in mind I just went out to the nearest highway and turned left towards a town I could actually find on a map. Turned out that it took me directly to Martinsville where I had a very nice, late lunch before wandering around the streets for a couple of hours. Ended up in the public library there for a couple of hours catching up on the news and watching a show on the computer.

   It finally started to clear up a bit this evening so once I made it safely back to the park I had an hour or so to go out and take a walk along the lake. Very pretty this evening once the sun came out. Saw a couple of deer and lots of very colorful birds, cardinals, indigo buntings and such.

    Have been very happy with my latest roof patch using duct tape. So far it has only leaked about a 1/4 cup of liquid in over 48 hours of pretty constant rain. Still more than I would like, but I feel I'm on to the cure now, and will give it a more permanent fix once it stops raining and warms up again.

    Hope to actually make it into Roanoke tomorrow if everything goes as planned. I also have to figure out when I'm going to get my laundry done though. It's now been more than two weeks since it was last done, and while I still have more than enough clean clothes for at least another two weeks if needed, the ones that are dirty, include the ones from two weekends worth of dancing. I am so glad they are stashed under a pretty air tight bed, but they need to be taken care of soon!

    Tonight I have a couple of pictures from my drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway yesterday. They were meant to show the ground fog and rain amongst the trees. Not sure if it really shows up very well, but I like them.

Blue Ridge Parkway Overlook near Floyd Virginia

 April 7, 2013

The ground fog was just pouring over the mountain and through the trees when I took this picture. It doesn't really do it justice since there is no movement. But it still looks neat enough with the trail heading off into the distance.



A similar scene in black and white. I thought the fog might show up better, but it didn't.



Looking out on a wet hillside and valley through the rain. It looks more like a fall picture with all of the red, but that is just the color of the new leaf buds on some of the trees.

More ground fog pouring down the side of the mountain.

One last view.