On April 13th, 1985, Jody and I were married; this was our 16th wedding anniversary.  To celebrate, Jody and I went out to breakfast in Helen, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.  During our prior trip to Helen, we had scouted out the breakfast possibilities.  They were fairly grim: most folks who we asked unenthusiastically said, "Well, Mamie's is pretty good..."  They were even a bit apologetic, as if it were their own personal fault that nowhere in Helen was there an outstanding place for breakfast. 

Jody and I settled on Betty's.  They had their own bakery and thus had some pretty decent pastries; in point of fact, I ate 3 apple strudels.  We like espresso-strong coffee.  The stuff to be had at Betty's was decidedly weak, but adequate.  We sat at the counter, watched the rain that had begun to fall that morning, talked, and read the paper, all in a quite atmosphere.  It was grand.

After breakfast and grocery shopping, we headed back to the girls and the trailer. This was a travel day -- we needed to be at the Raleigh-Durham North Carolina airport at the crack of dawn on Sunday, so we needed to do some miles.  Jody picked us a marvelous route through the Appalachians all the way to North Carolina.  We crossed Northeastern Georgia and all of South Carolina traversing the soft rolling hills of the Southern Appalachians.  It was a fabulous drive through numerous dogwood patches, past summer homes made entirely of weathered hand-hewn boards with tin roofs and large porches with rocking chairs, lots of ponds, and even a recently-dead roadkill wild turkey big enough that I had to drive around it rather than over it.

It turns out that Raleigh has no campgrounds or RV parks -- or at least none we could locate.  Jody found us a nice place in Asheboro, the "Deep River RV Park".  It was $10 a night, but over an hour to the airport, so we would have to start really early Sunday to get Joya on her plane.  She was going to a 3-week long course with EnCompass called "Journey to the Heart of Purpose" where she, along with a dozen or so other teens, will build a sweat lodge and then take a lengthy whitewater river rafting trip.  She was very excited.  We were going to miss her.

We did not get in to the campground until after 8:00 PM, and so with the unhitching chores and dinner, that was the day.