My target departure time of 10 AM was pushed to near 11 as I waited for everyone to wake up and say their good byes.  Some partings were stronger than others with this being my favorite:

 

Chris Dodds volunteered to drive and I received some blessed sleep allowed by fatigue and a driver who didn’t consider the car a mechanical analog of the ball in a game of Pong.  Once we started leaving West Virginia after I had switched to driving again, the weather got much worse and I averaged 45 MPH or less over much of the Appalachian Mountains due to snow, heavy rain, freezing rain, and more snow.  My back hurt terribly and I was very happy to be home before 2 AM making the whole trip last just shy of 72 very eventful hours.

My first task after emptying the car was to start uploading pictures as I’d taken over 700, a new record for me for a weekend, and I was very excited to see how some had come out, especially those from the initial meetings on Friday evening.  I almost started to cry when the camera showed a “card not formatted” error and no device in my house could read the card.  I believe that card, and the images on it, to be dead.   Damn.  I then got a call that two of our group were stuck in Florida in a traffic jam caused by an exploded fuel truck.  Damn.  I found that our home dishwasher was broken.  Damn.