Moving East

January 8, 2007

On the road again. We fuel at a Flying J close to this po-dunk park. It’s my job to get out and direct Dave close to the pump in the truck bay, then I go in to the counter and order 65 gallons. Most pumps won’t let you self pay for more than $75; we usually get $175 per stop. Today I found a new Stewart Wood book for Dave plus a real find, an audio tape of Ronnie’s letters to Nancy Reagan for $3.00. Rachel, the executive secretary at the Electric Coop in Jackson, Georgia says she “lives to walk where Nancy Reagan walked,” so she will probably like this tape. Don’t ask me how I remember stuff like this from a year ago … how could you forget!?!

One hundred miles down the road and we’re in Texas “hill country.” “Hill” is a relative term. The road does undulate a little and we’re seeing scrub oak. The wind is behind us for a change. We’re down to 1,000 feet elevation. This area looks a little like northern California except there is no aerial perspective, no mountains in the distance.

It starts to green up after we get through Ft. Worth and Dallas. We’ve seen two Christmas tree farms, lots of pine trees. I’ve counted 8 Wal-Marts in 275 miles. Lots of Baptist churches, all you can eat catfish. I think this is east Texas.

January 9, 2007

Tyler, Texas looks a lot like the Willamette Valley. Nice town of 83,500. Close to Kilgore, Texas, home of the cowboy rockettes. Weather is spring-like this morning. We’re only 60 miles from Shreveport, LA and starting to see standing water in the ditches.

We’re disappointed not to be doing the Shreveport-Bossier KOA. When I called them from Carlsbad to let them know we were on our way, they said they had given the job to our competitors and it was done! Obviously, something fell through some cracks in the communication between the park and the Southeast Pub office … maybe we can get it back next year.

We take a nice alternative by-pass around Shreveport. It’s beautiful, but BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, it’s concrete. The slabs are set just wrong for our wheel base, so the Bird literally bucks down the road, slamming stuff around in the cupboards. We hate it!

We’re in pine country here. I-20 cuts a wide swath through stands of pine. Lots of little lakes, a couple of big ones. Louisiana is only a couple of hundred miles across, so we are aiming for Vicksburg, Miississippi.

Mom’s Diner reeled us in for lunch at exit 52. We find it hard to pass up a “Moms” anywhere. This one validated our faith in the cafe of “good eats.” Mom’s was really jumpin’ today, filled with working guys. The cooking people are all black, and our waitress made little Annie Fannie look like a stick. What a cute girl! She knew a lot of her customers and sassed most of them. There’s no sass like black girl sass. It’s happy talk. The diner clatter was punctuated by the fries hitting hot grease every 5 to 7 minutes. It covered conversation. We laughed at Dave’s burger – bigger than the bun, it was irregular, a sure sign of the hand-made pattie! My BLT was pretty pedestrian by comparison, but the waitress was worth the price of the meal. Plus it was next door to Stuckey’s and we got a pecan roll for later.

East of Monroe, LA we lose the pine trees. The road is now lined with some other kind of tree, no leaves, standing in bayous. The egrets are very white against the dark water in this late afternoon sun. Only three Wal-Marts today. I played 40 games of solitaire on the dash and won three.

The highway death toll in Louisiana is 40% higher than the national average. Today’s Shreveport paper says they are considering some road maintenance. Coming from New Mexico, where the death toll is even higher, and the drunk driving problem seems to be the reason, I wonder …. The paper also recounts one local recall petition and an incident of gunshots through the windows of the new mayor’s home. Holy cow!

We’re at the Magnolia RV Park in Vicksburg, MS. At 5 PM it’s 52 degrees; we might fire up the grill. After three and a half days on the road, I’m tired, but Davey stays strong. We’ll be in Georgia by Thursday and will probably aim for the Bluebird factory at Fort Valley, to see if they can do some repair work for us. Our next job is Skidaway Island State Park at Savannah. They are expecting us but we are not on a deadline, so we may get the repair work done on the way. Fort Valley is about one day away from Savannah.

Traveling this way is not a lot of fun, but it is interesting. If we found some place we really wanted to explore, we would stay a day or two. We are both looking forward to exploring more civil war sites while we are in the south this year. I plan to re-read Andersonville and Killer Angels. If anyone has suggestions of a good civil war read, let us know.

Love to all,

Sam