summer travels

i started out in columbia, south carolina, heading north and listening to alice cooper's "school's out." but before i left, my friend robin said i should start a blog to chronicle my summer travels. robin doesn't know about my previous attempts and failures at keeping up a blog or about my aversions to the way one-person blogs can get. but i liked robin's idea and so here we are. the title comes from the beginning and end of "light in august." i like it--the book and the quote that afforded me the title. and that's usually how blogs go for me; i find a title i like and then i create a blog and then desert it once i start to be tired of myself. the whole internet is littered with my abandoned yet well-named blogs. if they were children, i'd be in jail. (i just watched "gone baby gone" and it seems to be trickling down to my similes. uhhh. creepy movie.)

anyway, i'll post my travel photos here, along with whatever i have to say about them. i'm one-quarter of the way through a trip from south carolina to nebraska and then to california. then back to nebraska. and then back to south carolina. this will all take place between may and august. and in a car--nothing glorious like a bike or a grease-powered dune buggy (i wish!), but i'll do my best to keep it lifely for you nonetheless.

so here's what we've seen so far:

these are a few pictures of the interstate in south and north carolina. there are a lot of wild flowers along the highway. they're pretty nice. they always make me think of ladybird johnson, who i know had to do with the planting of wild flowers along state highways. i learned that on cbs sunday morning when i was a kid and i've thought about it ever since. thanks, ladybird. also here's the james river in richmond, virginia. the view is from hollywood cemetery--burial ground to three US presidents and one confederate president, whose grave is picture below. that's jefferson davis.