The heavens declare the glory of God;
Psalm 19:1-2
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
Friday was a driving day. It’s always exciting to climb in the car, get out of town and begin an adventure, but then I begin to remember just how much I-95 there is! Fortunately Rebekah and I enjoy road-tripping together and it doesn’t matter what the road is like, it is just good to ride side by side.
Then, after a late lunch at our favorite “Birds Nest” restaurant in Florence, followed by a shockingly expensive gas fill-up, we turned to the west on I-20 and the drive became significantly more interesting.
Traffic was heavy and round after round of thunderstorms threatened, but somehow we threaded our way between them and experienced very little rain. Instead, the intense and varied atmospheric activity provided close to three hours of the most spectacular skies we have seen in a long time.
I was driving, so no photographs. But we got to enjoy everything from massive towering cumulous and cumulous nimbus formations, to low puffy cotton-ball clouds in the foreground – both white and gray, to sharply defined shards of the sun’s rays, to scattered light of every shade and hue as if God had flicked a handful of wet paintbrushes across the sky, to rainbow sunbursts, to wispy, feathery cirrus clouds, to dark thick banks of nimbostratus, to layered combinations of everything all at once, brilliant and expansive, stretching from the descending sun in the west all the way north and south across the horizon.
Like I said, a two to three hour show that did not let up until the last rays hit the edge of the Earth and fell back over the western horizon just as we rolled into our hotel.
And so, tedious as it can be, we really did enjoy the long drive, cutting a forty-five degree angle right through the southeast – to the dulcet tones of a little ZZ Top as we headed down the highway and into, poetically, La Grange.
Today we plan to ease our way down to the Gulf Coast and Pensacola Beach. I’m thinking we should probably crank out some Jimmy Buffett tunes as we do.
Love and peace, always – DEREK
