One month and 4 thousand miles later

We finally pulled into Milwaukee yesterday, after logging just over four thousand miles on the minivan and a few hundred on the bikes. All in all the trip was without incident, other than the missing cd case. At some point between Detroit and Charleston our cd case, which held all of our almost 200 music cds, disappeared. Whether it was stolen or somehow misplaced, we can't say. But it's really too big to just vanish, so we are clueless, and now cdless; thank goodness all our music has been loaded onto the Ipod as well as the laptop and our external hard drive. Hopefully one of these will make it more than two years til our return, though I really wish we still had the hard copies of years of work and buying. The external hard drive is stored in our safe deposit box, so that should still be OK when we return; next week I need to go to the bank and stuff the box with all the silicone gel packets we've accumulated.

So yesterday was exactly one month after we drove out of Milwaukee; it was also the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa.

We stayed in Chapel Hill for a week with Alyssa; about 5 days after her cataract surgery. Her vision continues to change, and we are hoping she'll adjust soon to having one eye with a tri-focal lens. She is busy still working with Intrahealth until the end of August, when she'll move out of the house where she is renting and cat-sitting (do all the Fines know how to get into animal-sitting or what?). She will depart in early to mid September for Mauritius for her Fulbright program. While we were in NC we went for several bike rides; there are more serious cyclists in the area surrounding Chapel Hill/Durham than there are here in Milwaukee! And it's great riding country. We did drive one day to an adjoining county for a ride that we found online. It was ok, except for the couple of times we were chased by dogs and the redneck who threw ice at us as he passed in his Confederate-flag adorned pickup.

On Saturday June 10 we left Alyssa after cycling with her that morning. We headed only an hour and a half south to Southern Pines, where some friends live in horse country there. I hadn't realized this was adjacent to the community of Pinehurst where golf is king. After spending the night we drove west on Sunday. We stayed overnight in eastern Tennessee, near some lakes and what looked like might be nice cycling territory. And it was. We cycled on Monday morning for a couple of hours in the slightly hilly area, and no dogs or rednecks!

After checking out we headed west and north to Land Between the Lakes, a national recreation area in western TN and KY. Here we camped for the next 3 nights in two different campgrounds so that we could cycle the Trace and other park roads. It was finetastic! On Tuesday and Wednesday we rode most of the Trace and several other backroads. The Trace is a road with no commercial traffic and low speed limit that runs the length of the area. In fact, traffic was extremely light; we think the fact that it was just mid June and mid week helped. It was very hilly and hot, so we got a good workout.

This past Thursday morning we packed up camp and headed north towards Milwaukee. While looking at the map on the way to Peducah we noticed that the town of Charleston, IL was right on the route, so I called an old Yellowstone buddy with whom we recently reconnected, and found him and his wife inviting us to stay overnight. It was perfect since we weren't scheduled to be back here in Milwaukee til yesterday, the 16th. The night in their log cabin house in the woods was an unexpected bonus. Then we finished up the drive, four thousand miles and one month later, yesterday afternoon, where we checked into our dog-sitting home for the long weekend. It feels good to be---home? Even with these SC licenses and voters' registration cards, Wisconsin is home and it does feel good to be here, til we leave again!!

And maybe before we cycle out of here on Wednesday we'll have our staging packets from the Peace Corps, with our departure information and airline tickets to whatever city staging will be held in. We hear from others in our group, now about 17 strong and growing, that staging will be in Philly and possibly not departing until July 24, which is one week later than we had been told. This is when that most important of all virtues that the PC demands -patience- must be practiced!