On Sunday morning I am on the road again, starting a drive of 5 1/2 hours to Alachua, Florida. Alachua is a small community near Gainesville, which is home to the largest campus of the University of Florida.
I am going to visit a friend who was in Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity with me at Rollins College. Like me, he grew up living in suburbs. Unlike me, he now lives in the country. Fortunately, he gave me good directions to his house. It’s not exactly a place one tends to locate by using the street address.
This is the road on which he lives.
Although it’s too small to detect in this photograph, on the right edge of the road a turkey buzzard in pecking at the remains of a dead armadillo. Despite the opportunity to become a wildlife photographer, I drove on.
This is the driveway to his house, which sits on five acres.
Here is his house, where he lives with his wife and two dogs, one of which appears at his side in the below photograph.
Their view of their backyard.
They also have five or six chickens. I don’t know whether they consider them to be pets or produce. I think he said they are Rhode Island reds, which sounds to me like the name of a minor league baseball team.
Here we are, relaxing before piling into the truck to drive into town for dinner. We’re the two in the back row.
We discovered that there are few places to dine in Alachua on Sunday night. As a result, I got to visit High Springs, which has an estimated population of 4,000. We enjoyed a fine meal at the Great Outdoors Restaurant.
After returning home we had enjoyable telephone conversations with Al and Beth, who have been our friends since college. They live in St. Louis and returned today from a vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
