It was after midnight before I got to Louisville in Kentucky. At this point, the night skylines of the cities have become a blurred memory from lack of sleep and having an upside-down schedule, driving at night and sleeping during the day before. It was a long night, punctuated with approaches into cities along the way on I-65 before changing onto I-71 in Louisville. Just outside of and going into Cincinnati, Ohio, there was a heck of an industrial smell. It reminded me of the paper mills back in Oregon, but I didn't think it had that metallic taste in my mouth (maybe I wasn't around here long enough for it to develop). Anyway, I pressed onward to Columbus. At 4 30 AM, I started to see light ahead of me, and I wondered, "Does Columbus really give out that much light?" As I got closer, I realized that it was dawning! At 4 30 AM?! I couldn't believe it! (I later asked my aunt, Panna if people actually went to work earlier because of an earlier dawn, and she said no, they just follow standard schedules) The very early moments just before sunrise had an echo to a much earlier feeling when I was a child. The feeling was a new, fresh start, like it did when I was in kindergarten that year, already into late October when I would feel the clarity of the sharpness from the cool, fresh air of the morning. It was cool outside this morning. So far, no further car problems at this point.

I finally arrived at the meeting point and waited for Panna to meet me. We smiled, waved excitedly, and got out to take a long hug that was waiting for a very long time. It had been since I was a baby, and I don't remember it. It was "finally." We connected in person. We were in Sunbury when we met. Sunbury is still a rural area to the northeast, complete with older houses and small streets. The downtown area has that traditional square area with a courthouse in the middle (I think that's what it is).

I followed her out to the cabin where she lives. Her daughter's family live further back in the forest in a log house, surrounded by trees, including maples, possibly birch and ash trees, and several others I don't know. Many of these trees stand over 30 to 40 feet tall, maybe as tall as 50-60 feet tall!

A caution out here is poison ivy, so they mainly stay on the rutted driveway. Anyhow, the forest here is beautiful, majestic! It's so quiet, and out here, you can hear the cicadas expand and contract in volume in an ebb and flow from different parts of the forest during the day, and the crickets will take over during the night. Here is Panna as we approached the log house.

The log house is beautiful, with pine-decked walls and floors. The living room has a very high vaulted ceiling with tall windows and a skylight window. There is an upstairs and a basement, but I haven't seen it yet. In the third photograph, to the left of the garage, is a tree-house-like structure covering a wood-burning water boiler that provides heated water for the house during the winter.

I was able to take my shower and go back to the cabin and take an hour's nap. The smaller, single-floor cabin is a log style with the interior completely of a light pine wood board style. It is beautiful and smells wonderful every time I step back inside!

I noted the construction details because I want to build a nondestructive, easily removed facade shell of this cabin in the apartment back home to help with boredom and more importantly, insulation against extreme temperatures in Houston. There are several water catch barrels under the rain gutters on one side of the cabin, and this water is used to water the flowers and garden. The cabin has a great compost toilet. Panna has two cats, both girls and fun to play with if they'll let you touch them.

We had some urgent business to attend to; my car. I needed to find out about the AC and the engine problem, so we dropped the car off at the mechanic and went onto other things. We drove around the area, a farming/rural area. Here's a photograph of a weeping willow tree.

We went back to the cabin and ran into a friend of Panna's. She invited us out to her family's property, where there is a pond with bass, catfish, and blue gill. One bass is HUGE, over two and a half feet long! Food was put out for them, and that's when we saw them. I tried to get photographs of them, but the light on the water surface kept tricking my camera.

We saw weeping willow trees out there, and they looked like women's hair, as Panna put it. We got under one of them.

Around the pond's shallow waters at the edge are these cattails.

The lady showed us her garden, about 50 feet square. We sampled some of her fresh peas, which were OH so fresh and sweet!! We went around the pond, sampling small and large varieties of wild black berries. Dee-lish!!

We went to the barn, where there were THREE Jeep trucks! Two were pickups and one was an SUV (like an overland type), dating possibly from the 40s and 50s. I wanted to get the photographs of the two inside, but it was simply too dark with no windows. I did get one of the one outside under the overhang. I noticed it was cool on ground level inside the barn, unlike the heat upstairs, where they were building an upstairs living area. We looked out the windows over the property. Beautiful!

Later in the day, we went out to the goat farm, where we saw goats, some of which were milk goats, and one about to drop some new babies! Some goats were huge, over three feet tall at the back. I didn't know they could get that big! We saw chickens out there as well. A highlight was seeing an old IH Farmall tractor there. It had been restored and is used there currently. These have not been made for several decades! And there's the dog to keep an eye on things.