Leaving Duck and Arriving Home

We had been waiting for a call from my doctor all day Tuesday to find out when I can be referred for hernia surgery, and I kept checking to see if he had received my message.  Martha, who is very good at pursuing things like this, finally made a few "deep" calls into the Mission Health Care system and discovered that my doctor was on vacation for two weeks.  So, after a few more calls, we were able to get an appointment to see the PA in his office on Friday morning.  We decided to start packing and leave earlier than we had planned.  Martha is a very organized person and did the bulk of this work on Tuesday evening.

"Out last dinner at the Outer Banks," she said.  "Where do we want to go?"  We looked at the menus for Red Sky Cafe, Aqua, the Roadhouse Grill, and other restaurants, and finally decided to return to our favorite place for dinner out here (see post of April 20), Our Own Little Dining  Room.  We had all of our favorites, steamed peel & eat shrimp (which I peeled and we took out to the dune-top deck to enjoy), scallops, and crab cakes.

Wednesday morning, we had the car loaded up early, Martha dragging the heaviest suitcase (mine) down the stairs because I am not supposed to lift anything heavy, and we were on the road by 9:30 a.m.  We had enough time to stop in Manteo for a light lunch, and although we passed several traffic jams bumper-to-bumper in the opposite lane, we had fair skies and good travel to the Brookstown Inn in Winston-Salem, the virtues of which I have extolled on this blog in the past.  "Where is Sally?" I asked at the desk - the hotel cat who showed up here several years ago and is a fixture.  We found her outside in the only place a cat would be, high on one of the old cotton mill's beams, half asleep, where she could watch everything going on below.

It was warm and sunny in Winston-Salem, and the next morning I did my Tai Chi out in the parking lot beside a glorious red azalea, gazing at one of the old log cabins in historic Old Salem.  It was a good way to begin the final leg of our journey, and we arrived in Highlands late in the afternoon.  I had taken a photo of the walkway to our back door when we left, and the change in less than three weeks was remarkable.

The apple trees are in full leaf, the grass is knee-high, and the relatively rare Carolina Silverbell tree off our back deck, which blooms for a few brief days toward the end of April, is dangling its little paper-white bells.

I'm not sure when this blog will resume again.  The upcoming days are likely to be filled with doctor's appointments and hernia surgery, which would not be a good topic to dwell on in this blog.  But I am certain that in one week - or two, or four, or six - Highlands Roadrunner will be back on the road and back on his blog again.