On The Road Again

I have been doing a whole lot of driving and Shirley has been a champ. I left Arlington Saturday and got on I-20 heading east. Texas is broken into four geographic regions. Dallas/Ft. Worth is North Texas. El Paso and Amarillo is West Texas. Houston is in South Texas and East Texas missed out on the well known cities. North Texas looks a lot like Oklahoma and Kansas, lots of grass and scrub. The country between Dallas and Houston has a few more trees and is hilly. I guess out in the west Texas town of El Paso (thanks Marty Robbins) it becomes more arid and desert-like. East Texas starts off grassy but soon turns into very heavily forested country. There are conifers mixed with lots of deciduous type trees. The terrain is quite hilly. As you get closer to Louisiana it starts getting swampy. In East Texas there are a lot of critters and they seem unable to cross 6-lane freeways. I think some conservation-minded person should develop a pedestrian class for possums and armadillos. It would appear there is about a zero percent chance of a successful highway crossing for both species.

East Texas gives way to Louisiana, America’s Wetland. My Gawd, what a swampy state! What do you call people from Louisiana? Loosers? I drove on I-20 to Shreveport, which is not a port, by the way. I took I-49 south to Baton Rouge, saw no red sticks, but I did see a port when I drove over the Mississippi River. I think that made me officially in the East. I was prepared for New Orleans and had a supply of beads in case anyone flashed me. Unfortunately I missed New Orleans because I connected with I-12 east. If anyone wants beads, let me know. I continued across LA where there are miles of highway which are elevated to get across the swamps. The highways are even rougher than California and Shirley took a beating. I guess all the repair money goes into elevated roads, not pothole repair. My Gawd, what a swampy state!

There was no real noticeable difference between coastal Mississippi and Louisiana. I spent the night in Gulfport in a little RV park on the Biloxi Back Bay. I took photos all along this section of the trip but they really suck. Sunday morning I drove to Biloxi and past Pascagoula, MS, where my first Navy ship, the USS Canopus was built. I drove into Alabama and through Mobile. There were some really nice buildings on the skyline but again, the photos sucked. I hit Florida mid-morning and drove through the capital, Tallahassee, which is home to the Florida State Seminoles. I stayed on I-12 until I-75 and headed south to Gainesville, home of the Florida Gators. The weather had been really nice until I turned south. It started sprinkling, then showering, then raining, then RAINING, then dumping so hard cars were pulling over because the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. I finally got to Ocala and said enough is enough. I found an RV park and set up camp. One of the residents gleefully let me know the area was under a tornado watch. Great, I really want to be in a trailer park during a tornado. Don’t trailer parks spawn tornadoes?

Hopefully I will survive and will continue to Miami in the morning, a mere 300 miles away.