Monday August 16th 2021

It was partly cloudy with a gentle breeze most of the day. The temperature peaked in the mid eighties. To the north, in the direction of Memphis, there was a lot more cloud cover. The TV news reported that there rain showers in the Memphis area. Just before sunset the sky to the north went from cloudy and gray to dark black. The weather that had lingered to the north all day was approaching this area. As I’m writing this blog entry it has been raining for about half an hour.

Weather is one of the reasons I’m here. Tropical systems Fred and Grace constrained my travel while they figured out where and when they were going to hit land. My intent is to move north and east from this area. As of last Friday, Fred was going to hit somewhere from the Florida Big Bend to Bilox Mississippi and Grace might follow it a few days later. I didn’t want to move right into their paths so I extended my stay here until the middle of the week.

Fred made landfall this afternoon near Panama City Florida. Its northbound path will take it through eastern Alabama, western Georgia and eastern Tennessee. Most likely I wouldn’t have been far enough east to be in the worst of the storm, but why take the chance. Grace currently has a more westerly path that takes it toward Mexico. The newest storm is in the Atlantic east of the Carolinas and isn’t expected to have any impact on the mainland USA.

My next issue is finding a place to go from here. Once again I’m having a difficult time finding a place for the weekend. One of my options is extending here through this coming weekend and work on a reservation for the weekend eleven days out through the holiday weekend to follow. I need to step out of the box and broaden my search criteria. This whole summer I haven’t had a good handle on travel planning and reservations.