It took about two days of gainful employment up north to formulate a doable plan to get my arse back down south. Step 1 is to spend a week or so bumming on New Smyrna Beach. Step 2 is to go and watch Spring Training over on the west coast. Step 3 is to come back north and do the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade with family. Step 4 is to go back to NSB for the Holy Day itself. And Step 5 is the only forward-looking step in the whole affair: visit places and decide where you want to live you worthless bum.
Step 1-a: Haul ass down south. Made the entire trip from Maryland to Florida in one very long day, 15 hours more or less. During the majority of the trip I thought: I’m doing in one day what took me three weeks last July and What a strange thing it is to cover the entirety of the Civil War in one day’s drive.
I started my day taking the back-country route to pick up I-95 in Fredericksburg. After leaving my domicile just north of Antietam Battlefield, I drove down I-81 through the Valley Campaign of 1862, turned left into Mosby’s Confederacy, right just south of the battlefields of Manassas and connected with ’95 at Fredericksburg. Chronologically we’re up to December of ’62 or May of ’63 depending how you look at things and except for starting at Antietam things have almost happened in chronological order. Moving forward I passed through Chancellorsville, Spottsylvania and the Wilderness, cruised through Richmond and Petersburg and finally crossed into the Carolinas. I stopped at a rest stop near Bentonville, passed by the exit for Charleston and slipped through the Savannah suburbs.
There you go. The entire Civil War in one very long day. And now I’m here and Christ, do I need a beer.