Today is the pre-travel day before the eight and one half hour trip to beautiful Starkville, Mississippi. What in hell were their city fathers or founders thinking when they named the place Starkville? Talk about a tough place to recruit football players. How they get a kid to come there instead of Gainesville, Baton Rouge, Columbia, Nashville or Athens is beyond me. It is not near anything and has nothing to recommend it to a testosterone filled eighteen year old boy looking for adventure. Well, there are the co-eds. Mississippi has produced some striking young ladies and as I remember beautiful girls are fairly important to young men. (and old men)or so I have heard.

We will leave around eight in the morning. The question is do I follow mapquest and go through Alabama via Montgomery and then West or do I choose the slightly longer route via Atlanta and Birmingham. Google tells me the Atlanta route has far better highways but I am yet to drive I-75 when construction wasn't a significant impediment. What has the world came to? I am actually debating over two navigation systems that I did not know existed a few short years ago. Then, of course, I can simply type the address of the motel in the GPS and follow the instructions. Heavy rain is forecast along the whole route.

Enough of the travel talk. Oh and by the way, the good looking baby in the picture is my first Great-Grandchild. Am I proud? You bet I am. My son, the baby's poppa, tells me I should be proud because without me none of this would have been possible. I believe that my dad, his dad and his dad's dad live on through all of the children, grand children and now great a grand child. My dad died in Viet Nam before he ever saw his grand children. It is left to me to also look for him. He would be proud of them and they of him.