Sitting in traffic Sunday at Bermuda Run, I finally started timing the number of vehicles funneling off Interstate 40 to bypass the Yadkin River eastbound bridge.
The best I measured was 24 cars a minute. The worst, 13.
Meanwhile, there must have been a thousand backed up on the interstate. Their wait must have seemed endless. Motorists who had carefully timed their trip by usual traffic times must have been very late.
I drove over the rehabilitated bridge on Monday after the work crews had left. The bridge deck is now very smooth.
Maybe that job won’t have to be repeated for many years.

Reading Books On The Beach

We returned to the beach last week, this time without grandchildren. It was wonderfully boring. Elizabeth and I sat under the umbrella with our toes in the surf most of the day. While it was raining cats and dogs at home, the beach was nearly rain-free.
Our biggest excitement was watching the full moon rise — waiting for it to clear a cloud bank on the horizon.
I finished three books. I read a historical account of the 1415 Battle of Agincourt between a woefully outnumbered English invasion force led by King Henry V and the mighty French army clad in heavy armor.
The British had a secret weapon: Mud. The French assault mired in a fresh-plowed field and became easy targets for the English archers. King Henry V’s inspiring message to his troops was immortalized by Shakespeare:
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
Then I turned to Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, recounting his adventure on the Appalachian Trail. Unlike so many other authors who have walked the trail, Bryson gleefully skipped over two-thirds of the 2,100 miles, but he got more adventure than he had imagined …