I didn't go to work the last two days. My son Mike didn't have school, so I could allocate my absence to the childcare project, but really I just needed a break. The relentless influx of emergencies and urgent projects had been taking their toll, and it was just time to get away irrespective of the disaster of the day. My daughter Stefanie had been in Vegas for a conference the beginning of the week and needed to drive to Pikeville for a meeting on Friday, so I asked her if she wanted company. Mike had the option to come along, but opted to stay at his mother's.

It's a two-and-a-half hour drive from Lexington to Pikeville, and then Stef was going to be working until about 3pm, so I surfed the web looking for something to do in the general vicinity of Pike county. I'd been there before a couple times when I did software support for IBM in the eastern half of Kentucky, but it had been almost fifteen years since my last visit. I knew about Jenny Wiley State Park, but was looking for something different and ran across Breaks Interstate Park, about thirty minutes south of Pikeville.

Breaks' webpage says that it is one of two interstate parks in America, spanning the Kentucky/Virginia border. I googled interstate parks to find the other one and found one in Minnesota/Wisconsin and another one in New York/New Jersey, so I'm not sure which one Breaks is discounting; they're both Yankee parks. The park also claims to be home of the deepest gorge east of the Mississippi: the Grand Canyon of the South.

After dropping off Stefanie at her office at 9:30am I drove through downtown Pikeville and stopped at the local McDonald's for some breakfast - a known quantity. I was mulling over my options considering that I had over five hours to kill, it was overcast with a somewhat constant drizzle, and the temperature was struggling to reach fifty degrees. I looked out the window past Stef's car dwarfed among the pickup trucks and SUV's in McDonald's parking lot and noticed the highway signs at the end of Hambley Boulevard enticing me either north back to Prestonsburg or south towards Elkhorn City. I figured I might as well make the trek south since it had been even longer since I'd been in Virginia [insert double-entendre here].

Mist and fog hung low amid the mountains as route 80 wound south toward Breaks. Spending too much time holed up in my home in a subdivision and my job in an office makes me forget that my heart and my soul were not meant to be constrained to the needs of the business and the self-inflicted disaster of the day. My thoughts, my heart, and my vision expanded like a flower exploding from a bud as the chains of the daily rigueur crumbled and the mountains embraced me. I stopped at the river overlook and drove by the grave of the Unknown Confederate Soldier as I made my way to Virginia.

The wet, overcast weekday made my entrance to the park a solitary venture. Once into the park other sojourners crossed my path, but my stops were mostly isolated. Rain drummed lightly on the roof of the shelter as I perused the park map deciding just how far I dared to tread into the umbrella of fall colors which also blanketed the trails. The sky was more white than gray and the paths were more wet than muddy, so I selected a half-mile trail to one of the river overlooks, zipped up my jacket, and started into the forest.

I had looked over the park rules which strictly admonished me not to feed the bears, so it did occur to me that I was alone in the wilderness far from my home with no one particularly aware of my whereabouts. Yet I felt comfortable and at home, my cares and worries gladly escaping as I meandered the forest path. The skies were overcast but bright, the rain was light and accompanied the journey.

Leaves showed the colors they had hidden all summer beneath their green veneer and clouds added mountain ranges above the dark horizon. I dumped my concerns there and they floated away as nothing and dissolved in the mist. I returned from the mountain oasis slightly damp and greatly unburdened. It should not be so long between visits.