Forecasts are like country roads...

...you just never know what's around the next bend, but you can always find something beautiful in whatever is before you...so we have some rain coming, and colder temperatures, but it will help the leaves to continue their transformation...photographs on overcast days can be superior to those taken on sunny days...rain is a good thing for the fall yard work we've done and grass seed sown, and to knock down the dusts and particulate matter...the chilly weather takes many of us back to childhood memories of raking giant leaf piles and jumping in them, trick-or-treating when it was much safer and far different than today's concerns...those Friday night high school football games where a stadium blanket comes in handy...going to a pumpkin patch and picking out that special one for home...hayrides...good stuff, all.

Driving the backroads is often times medicinal, isn't it. Most of us are happy to avoid the congested traffic and eternal rushing that city life gives birth to. We yearn to drive slowly with the windows down, knowing we have the freedom to stop and marvel any time we please. The road pictured above is called East River Road, in extreme southwestern North Dakota just below the Southern Unit of Roosevelt National Park. In the 40 or so miles I drove along it, listening to the constant songs of Meadowlarks, I encountered just 2 vehicles. Hard to imagine that here in the East. Antelope sprinkling the horizon and vales...sage bowing in the incessant breezes there...the occasional Golden Eagle majestically surveying the terrain from high above...'medicinal' becomes an understatement.

This coming weekend I have to travel to Cleveland for the National Weather Association conference next week. I know I'll be torn between hoofing it on I-77 and wanting to turn off on a sideroad in West Virginia and dawdle a while. It's a taste you never forget...and to paraphrase the line made famous by Lay's Potato Chips, you can never drive just one...