Winding it Down

Since we were staying very close to the North Carolina border in Danville, our first priority before leaving the commonwealth on Saturday was finding a place to hide our Virginia letterbox.  Danville had plenty of boxes, so we decided to look at Martinsville, the nice town where we purchased our old Honda Odyssey.  Unfortunately, neither of the parks we checked was a good match, nor was a local cemetery.

Meanwhile, I discovered that another wood tick had invaded my scalp.  We had learned something from our experience a couple of days ago and this time we used an alcohol-drenched cotton ball to knock him out.  Ken held the cotton ball against the tick with a little pressure for about 30 seconds.  (Think of the old ether-soaked rag held over a victim's face in vintage movies.)
      This method seemed to work much better, and the beastly critter released.  This time instead of tweezers, which make it difficult to grasp the tick without pulling out a clump of hair with him, Ken used a fine-tooth comb to elevate the little monster away from his food supply.  Once we were done removing the second tick in three days, it finally struck us that the hitchhiker letterbox we picked up in Sharpsburg just might be the cause of our invasion.
     
After this, we sort of lost our enthusiasm for hitting the trails for either finding or hiding letterboxes and decided we could slip into Virginia to plant this box when we go to the North Carolina mountains in August.  We filled up the car with gas, tuned the radio to Car Talk, and set the GPS for Charlotte.  After checking in at the hotel, we visited Ken's mother, Erika, who served us a wonderful dinner, and made plans for Mother's Day.
     
Though it's only a couple of hours from Charlotte, Greensboro was a bit too far for Erika to make the trek on her own to check out her daughter Marion's new home.  So we had the opportunity to not only make the visit possible but also to include Erika's friend Anita in our Mother's Day celebration.
     
Marion and Heather prepared a wonderful Mother's Day meal, with help from Emma and Ryan, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time together before we drove Erika and Anita back to Charlotte in a steady rain.
     
On Monday, we had an uneventful trip back to Georgia, arriving home a little after 3:00.  After a stop at the post office to pick up two months' worth of mail, we headed for home and hearth.   Another trip completed.