For me, coming back home is the second-hardest part of taking a trip.  The hardest is leaving home.  There’s always lots of anxiety about what I may have forgotten, and whether I’ll be able to recover from it if I did.  For this first big odyssey with Ollie that’s especially true since it’s for such a long duration and because I’m using a mode of travel that I’ve never used before.  I set aside almost the entire week before I left to take care of the many details that need to be taken care of when you’re going to be gone for two months.  I’ve never been gone more than two weeks, so this is a big adjustment.  By the time we left, I was as ready as I think it’s possible for me to be.

   As the saying goes, the best battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy, and so it was with this trip.  The night before I was scheduled to leave, I received a message from the Harvest Host site that was to be my stop on the first night out.  Their place had suffered significant damage from a tornado that went through the area last Thursday, and they wanted to let me know that they were going to be pretty busy taking care of that, but that I was welcome to stay.  At first I told them that that was no problem, I’d still see them as planned.  As I thought about it though, I realized that having some goof and his dog sleeping in their parking lot was not what they really needed at this time, so I made other arrangements. 

   It turned out to be a classic case of lemonade from lemons.  We made last minute arrangements to stay at a place called Northfield Vineyard in Sparta, TN, and it was just perfect.  Mark Ray, the owner, met me in the parking lot.  His is a little, down-to-earth winery in a spot where you wouldn’t expect it.  While there are other farms around, there are also newer, suburban-type houses and a school bus storage yard across the street.  The farm has been in his family since his great-great-grandfather, and he and his wife are as nice and as genuine as they come.  Since there was almost no one else there, I asked if Ollie could run around, and they were fine with it.  His one reluctance was that the adjoining farm had a donkey that they got specifically to kill the coyotes that come around – apparently that is a common donkey skill-set – and that the donkey, being a donkey, isn’t particularly discriminating between coyotes and their domestic cousins.  I took his advice and made sure Ollie stayed away from donkeyland. 

   Mark did have a great dane named Beau with whom Ollie made fast friends, and they spent much of the evening chasing each other around the acreage.  He (Mark, not Beau) asked me if I wanted to join his wife and grown children and a couple of neighbors in a weenie roast they were having after the winery closed.  I did, and it was a truly pleasant evening with those people.  At the end of the evening, Mark shook my hand and told me to make sure I stopped by if I was ever in the area again.  Just a reminder that there are good people everywhere, and it’s cool when you come across them.

   Since I was boondocking, I didn’t have an electric hookup and didn’t feel like firing up my generator for such a short evening.  That meant that the slide on my trailer did not operate, and so I had to sleep in The Lotus Eater’s kitchen.  I never did get the cushions set up right, and it was so damned cold that I thought I was going to freeze overnight.  There was frost on the windshield of the truck today when I woke up after a series of about thirty fifteen-minute naps overnight. I felt like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

   We were on the road again by 6:30 this morning, with a much shorter day of driving in store.  Ollie showed much progress from yesterday.  I made him a nest in the back seat and buckled him in with a harness for this long adventure, and he just couldn’t get used to either the restricted movement or the demotion from first class to coach.  He rarely settled down over the 440 miles of yesterday.  He wasn’t frantic, and he behaved himself, he was just not at home.  While he didn’t want to get in this morning, the difference in his behavior once he did was dramatic.  He settled right down and slept for most of the way today.  He really is a good dog.  I also think that he was pretty tired from the long day yesterday and long night of cold, irregular sleep.

   We arrived in Asheville at 1:00 p.m. today, just in time for check-in.  Lots of setting up to do, and I’m not in practice, so it takes me longer than it should.  We drove around some later in the afternoon, but we’re both pretty tired, I think.  As a matter of fact, Ollie went right in the trailer when we got home and fell asleep, rather than sitting out by the fire with me.  That didn’t last long, as the smoke from the fire set off the smoke alarm in the trailer.  The new battery I put in it clearly works.