Here's a morning shot of the bicycle and motorcycle in the truck at the Days Inn motel in Athens Alabama. I hit the road around 9:00, after eating the hotel breakfast and watching the start of the Tour de France on television.
It was a beautiful day today. The scenery heading north out of Alabama and through Tennessee was spectacular ! I ended up driving 550 miles, stopping for the night in Minonk Illinois.
Passing through Tennessee, I saw a billboard for a familiar landmark, the Jack Daniels distillery. I have been a Tennessee Squire for many years, and it took a lot of willpower for me not to take the 75 mile detour over to Lynchburg today !
This is a shot of an interesting memorial at the Kentucky welcome station.
While at the rest stop, I decided to make a reservation for tonight at the Motel 6 in Rockford IL. My original plan was to make it all the way to Wisconsin today, but it was a little bit too far.
A while later, as I was driving north on I-39, the sun went down and I started feeling sleepy and tired. It was already 8:30 pm and I decided I needed to stop 100 miles short, in Menoken IL, at a different Motel 6.
As I was signing in at the new motel and canceling the Rockford reservation, I realized that I had stayed in this motel on my trip last year - on day #62, July 30, 2013. That was a very important day for me ! Here is what I wrote in my Blog about it on last year's bicycle tour -
"Here I am on the overpass pointing to tonight's Motel 6 in Minonk."
... and here it is, the really, really big news of the day !!
I sent the following email to Tallahassee Community College tonight, saying I plan to retire at the end of the month - Yippee, it's official !!
So there you have it, this is the place where I made the decision to retire from teaching last year. Wow, what a great year it's been since then, I've been to a lot of places and I've had so much fun !
I'll end now with a few shots from today's sunset as I was driving into Minonk ... Goodnight !!
