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Just to let you all know that I have made it back home. This time I thought that I was getting ahead of the game by splitting up the travel days. Usually the East bound Sunset Limited train runs very late, often many hours. That means I miss the northbound connections from ville. So, rather than fuss with changing reservations from the train during the times of limited cell phone connectivity, I put the northbound leg on the next day when I booked the trip. I'm sure you can all see where this is going. The Sunset Limited arrived in Mobile only 20 minutes late and in ville by about 2 hours late. That meant I could have made the connection, especially since it was running late. However, I was sick of hearing people conplaining about how late the train was (this wasn't late it was a miracle that it was so fast), I decided to stay the night in ville anyway.

That might have been a good thing since the next morning, Tuesday morning, my right eye went a bit funny. It was about 5:30 in the morning and I was awake when there was a weird flash and what I could swear looked a bit like a bleed in that there was a smear going downhill. However, when I opened my eyes, it wasn't very noticable. This episode was over very quickly. I spent the next few hours lying on my back, which would cause the gel sack in the eye (the vitreus humor) to rest its weight on the back of the eye. It made sense that if the retina was trying to tear or detach that the pressure might help fix the problem. Anyway, I stayed still until the eye doctor's office here at home opened and I called them and set up an apppointment for Thursday. There really wasn't much else I could do since by then my vision was clear and there didn't seem to be any more pressing problem. Getting anything done in ville would have meant going to a hospital and an extended stay in a hotel at the very least. I still would have done so had my vision been bad or had I had an obvious retinal tear (I've had one before and know what they look like). I spent the next hours until check out mostly lying on my back. After check out I stayed in the lobby for several hours and read. The reading gave me a good gauge of how my eye was doing. If things started to go funny somewhere, I would very quickly see distortions in the print. Nothing happened though.

The train was late getting in that night, which was not a bad thing. A big thunderstorm had brewed up and it came right up the tracks. ONe train had just pulled out when the storm hit. The rain and wind was so bad that even though there was a large covered area outside, the rain was blowing all the way through it. The storm look pretty scary as it approached and I had actually called home and got my mother to watch the weather channel to see if there were any alerts. In the mean time, I took some pictures and video of the approaching clouds, though I don't know yet how they came out. The train headed north had some bad delays due to track repair, which meant there were long stretches were the train could only go about 5 miles per hour or so. No problems with the eye from all the bouncing. There were a few flashes at first, but I think those might have been as much from nerves and expecting to see them as anything.

So here I am home looking at over 300 emails. I'm not planning to do anything strenuous until after I see the eye doctor tomorrow. Most likely he won't find anything serious, but it wouldn't surprise me to have to have laser surgery again to fix a retinal tear. I'll let you know how that goes.