This is not where I was supposed to be. At 3:30 a.m., I left Athens headed for the airport, a weekend conference in Miami on the calendar. After two delays, they cancelled my flight due to a lack of pilots – and I became one of the masses without air passage this week. The airport was teeming with hostility – over the course of the last three days, thousands of people were delayed or stranded due to Delta’s inability to deal with Wednesday’s weather delays.

Planning was poor, communication was worse and the front-line staff took the brunt of everyone’s anger, anger that should have been directed at upper management.

With no way to go, I was home for lunch. It did mean I could wander south in the evening for my kid’s spring concert, at least.

Amazing the difference a day can make.

Violent storms were predicted across North Georgia, high winds and heavy rains. No major damage, but it was not a good day to be outdoors.

The gardens on campus are popping … and the pollen is everywhere.

Damp day on campus, but it broke for a while.

The Mrs. has returned to the stage, taking a small part in our local Town and Gown community theater’s production of Calendar Girls. (That’s not her, that’s the director, Terrell Austin.) I was there for the preview and a cousin came in to town from Birmingham for the closing show.

With a gap between the curtain falling and the cast party, spent some time wandering the neighborhood around the theater.

In the fall of 1991, I ran my first road rally with my high school mentor, Vern Robertson. He’d told me tails of comic adventure for years and he launched me into a quarter century of wandering the backroads of America.

When I moved to Georgia 12 years ago, there weren’t any events of note down here. I drove or flew north a few times a year to compete with my partner Frank Beyer, but as kids grew and life complicated itself, those events spread out more. We went more than three years between rallies.

I needed to do something, so last fall I approached the Atlanta Region of the Sports Car Club of America to ask about organizing an event. The response was overwhelmingly positive, especially since there hadn’t been an SCCA event in Georgia in more than two decades.

On the first day of April, under crystal clear skies and warm temperatures, 30 teams showed up in Athens and then wandered a 100 mile route.

Almost all were novices, so I didn’t to a traditional time-speed-distance event. There were a few timing segmentes, but it was mostly a question and answer run. Which did turn out to be much harder than I had expected … but everyone was laughing at the end, everyone seemed to have a good time.

More to come …