Little Rock North KOA, North Little Rock, AR
Friday, 20 October 2023
Buffalo KOA, Hurricane Mills, TN
Saturday, 21 October 2023
There:
Murphy KOA, Murphy, NC
Sunday, 22 October through Sunday, 12 November 2023
Travel from:
Newberry KOA, Kinards, SC
Monday, 13 November 2023
Montgomery KOA, Montgomery, AL
Tuesday, 14 November 2023
Meridian KOA, Toomsuba, MS
Wednesday, 15 November 2023
Shreveport KOA, Shreveport, LA
Thursday, 16 November 2023
Travel to:
Friday, October 20th
After leaving Mt. Pleasant at 7:15 (I figured it'd be a long day), I drove through some very flat land, crossed the border into Arkansas, then crossed the Red River. Signs told me I was passing the turns for several places I'd been during my month here, such as Bill Clinton's Birthplace, Crater of Diamonds State Park.
I'd planned to take a break at a rest area so Dext wouldn't be uncomfortable if I ran errands in Little Rock before taking him out. The rest area came where I thought it would, and we all stretched our legs.
Back on the road, we passed Arkadelphia, "A Great Place to Call Home," and the turn for Hot Springs National Park. A highway sign warned us to "Stop Speeding Before It Stops You."
In Little Rock, my first stop was their recycling drop-off center, where I got rid of a lot of my collection, but I never could find the bin for glass recycling, though online they'd said they take it at that location. Still, it was nice to get rid of what I could.
Then I somehow took a wrong turn, though I never did figure out what I'd done wrong. Anyway, I was definitely not where Google had said I'd be, and I finally had to stop and look it up on the computer to get myself back on the right road. Which led us to a really nice dog park. Very large, and we were alone for quite a while, though finally another dog came in - and didn't want to meet Dexter. Too bad. This park was unusual in not having any regular seats for people, instead providing quite a few rocks of varying heights. That made the park look attractive, but since I found only 1 rock that was regular seating height, I didn't think much of its convenience. The park also had a couple of places for dogs to get wet, though it wasn't warm enough while we were there - not that Dext likes getting wet. While we were parked there, we went ahead and had some lunch - Lily complains if I'm late with the food.
From there I did quite a bit of driving around town to go to a CVS, a Kroger and a PetsMart. At the CVS I was hoping to get my vaccinations, but they said they had a personnel shortage due to a pregnancy. I wanted to stock up at these stores because we had two more days of long drives ahead (no time to stop for errands) and I knew Murphy doesn't have much selection
We crossed the Arkansas River and came to the Little Rock KOA. By the time I'd dumped the waste tanks and taken Dext to the dog park, it was 3:45 and I was pooped. But I couldn't stop there because I needed to store all the supplies I'd just bought and get us ready to hit the road in the morning.
Saturday, October 21st
As we were leaving the Little Rock area about 8:00, we passed several car dealerships with enormous US flags. That day they were at half-staff, and the flags were almost touching the ground.
Most of the traffic for much of the day was semis, and one that wasn't towing a trailer apparently got carried away with his freedom and cut across me so closely he almost hit me. It was scary.
I had again planned a stop half-way along the drive at a rest area, and this time I had to cross the road and circle back to get to the West Memphis Welcome Area, still in Arkansas. We ate lunch there and stretched our legs and got back on the road to cross the Mississippi River and enter Tennessee.
The Tennessee Highway Department needs to work on their directional signs. I went past multiple signs that said "3 right lanes closed," except there were only 3 lanes in the road. After several miles of these weird warning signs, my 3-lane road suddenly got compressed into 1 lane and, at the same time, we got 1 lane of feed from the left and 2 lanes of feed from the right. Then the far left lane ended and then the 3 right lanes closed. It was all probably fine if you lived in Memphis and were used to the traffic pattern, but for those of us passing through it was hard to navigate.
Farther along the road I came to numerous signs warning of road work that turned out to be nonexistent - not even just paused for the weekend - just nonexistent. But there were way too few signs warning of steep downhill slopes and sharp curves. TN drivers really should talk to their highway folks.
I passed huge fields that were covered in white, as if cotton were still growing. And maybe it was, though I'd have thought the season was over.
The highway along here was designated Tennessee Music Highway and runs between Memphis and Nashville.
I passed the turn for the Casey Jones Home and Railroad Museum, and I remember this place from my month in Tennessee. And I crossed the Tennessee River/Kentucky Lake (per the sign). Something else I remember from my time in this area was the Land Between the Lakes National Recreational Area, which straddles Tennessee and Kentucky and includes land between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. It's a beautiful area but I didn't have time to stop this trip.
The Buffalo KOA is a fairly small campground built into the side of a fairly steep hill. It was only 2:30 after we'd gotten in and I'd taken Dext to the dog park, so we had time to squeeze in an extra walk later on before supper. After flat east Texas, we weren't used to walking on those steep hills, but the exercise was good for us.
Sunday, October 22nd
Even Google said today's drive would take 5½ hours, which I figured meant it would take me 8 or 9 hours. Plus I'd be losing an hour by crossing into the Eastern Time zone. With all that, we left the campground before 7:15.
Tennessee has a town called Bucksnort (that's Bucky's real name).
Because today's Sunday, there was very little traffic until we got part way around Nashville, which made for a pleasant drive. We stopped at a highway rest area for a break and for lunch, and then took off again, finding a stretch of 4 miles with a 6% grade. My ears popped twice on the way down.
Near Pittsburgh (TN) we passed the Lodge Museum of Cast Iron. Sounds interesting for some trip when I have more time.
Near Chattanooga, the highway dips down into Georgia for a short distance and then pops back up into Tennessee. And a little ways farther along the road we came to Cleveland (TN) and stopped at a dog park I'd found online. It turned out to be very nice and we stayed for a half hour.
On the way out of town I stopped for gas, paying $2.79/gallon, which is the cheapest I've found in a long time. Then I came to a bridge with a clearance of 10' 10", which I was pretty sure I couldn't do. Fortunately, the city was prepared for trucks that couldn't go under the bridge and had clearly marked a truck route. Actually, they marked it for several turns and then abandoned us to our own devices, but I got it figured out. If Google has a setting that lets me request bridge clearance information, I haven't found it yet.
From this area, the highway became very scenic and, in fact, part of it's designated the Ocoee River Scenic Byway. The road follows the Ocoee River and is a heavily treed area, with many of them showing some fall colors - about the first I've seen. This was a sunny Sunday afternoon and folks were out in full force. This is clearly a very popular recreational area, and I saw lots of people with kayaks and other recreational gear. A series of TVA dams that I passed creates some of this recreational opportunity, and I saw a long section of whitewater. The leaves were falling and swirling across the road in the wind, and it was all very picturesque. We were passing through the Cherokee National Forest.
At the North Carolina state line I saw a sign that said, "Manteo 563 miles."
And we got into the familiar Murphy KOA campground at 3:40, with the staff giving us a warm welcome back, which was nice.
There
Again I spent my first week here being sick - not being able to keep food down, so low on energy I could barely make the distance for Dext's walks, resting between any tasks I did before doing another one. Very strange. I felt great once it had finally passed, though.
I had to leave the campground several times during our stay, because of wanting to churn the contents of the waste tanks before I emptied them. I really believe that practice has kept me from having the problems I hear other people have with their systems. So one day I drove into Andrews, the first town on the way to Asheville. I saw one cornfield all cut down while others still had corn standing. Andrews has a nice rest area on the highway that Dext and I both enjoy, so we stopped there, and I stopped at the grocery store for milk. Back in the campground I dumped the waste tanks, filled the water tank, and filled my propane tank. That pretty well took care of my energy for the day, but it was very pleasant.
On another day we stopped at the recycle center, where they take everything but mixed paper (oddly) and then went into Murphy. Dext and I walked a short distance along the town's Riverwalk, and we stopped again at a grocery. The low temps forecast for the week were in the 20s, so I fixed a pot of Brunswick Stew and made a batch of cornbread in the microwave. It was enough food to last me for at least a week.
There were 2 pots of begonias that (I think) my next door neighbors set outside by the playground to get sunshine. Whoever put them out, they forgot about them, and the first night of below freezing weather did them in. The neighbors had already left the campground, so I looked to see if they could be salvaged. I had to go into town to the Tractor Supply, which advertised gardening supplies, except they didn't have much to choose from and I practically had to shanghai one of the staff members to get any help at all. But I ended up with the smallest pot they had, a saucer, and some potting soil that said it was good for cuttings. Back at the campground, I found that there was almost no hint of life in most of the contents of those 2 pots, but I did find a few possibles and stuck them into some potting soil. It's been so long since I last did that I could barely remember what to do, so I'll just hope for the best. Here's what I ended up with.
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We'll see how it turns out.
Somewhere I heard about a book called Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win WWII. It sounds really interesting and will go on my reading list when I finally get a home.
On another trip to Murphy, I stopped at the post office to pick up David's latest batch of mail. And after waiting an hour (they were really understaffed, it was lunch hour, and half the town showed up) I learned there was a glitch built into the General Delivery system: if I need David to get a tracking number (the only time we didn't have one was when my mail got completely lost in North Dakota), then the post office takes my General Delivery envelope out of the General Delivery area and instead puts it with the packages set aside for the PO boxes. I have no idea why, and all they could tell me was "this is the system." So instead of being in a small batch of mail (General Delivery) it gets stuck into a very large batch of mail (all the packages for all the PO boxes at the post office). I don't know why this made sense to someone.
And on one trip we covered all the bases: went to Andrews to get the kitties' claws clipped ($15/cat), went to the Andrews rest area, and went into Murphy for gasoline ($2.99/gallon) and groceries and the Riverwalk. The vet, by the way, told me Jimmy weighed 9.0 pounds and Bucky weighed 9.3 pounds. Jimmy eats a lot more than Bucky and was actually bigger than Bucky a little while back, but I guess nature's taking its course.
The western North Carolina NPR station is Blue Ridge Public Radio; the daytime host (a woman) apparently thinks all their listeners have an IQ of about 35 - she manages to squeeze out a syllable every 5 seconds or so. (You try looking at your second hand and talk like that and you'll see.) It drives me so crazy I'd change the station if there were another NPR station available.
One day we were having some desultory rain, and when I opened the door to check the weather before walking Dext, Bucky got out - and went straight under the RV because of the rain. I left the outer door open so we could see him - and then Jimmy found the handle to open the screen door, which meant I had to do some extra supervising to be sure he stayed inside. All this was before I'd even made my coffee, which I proceeded to do, figuring I'd start the daily routine which Bucky would know meant breakfast soon. I saw him looking in the screen door but ran when I went to open it for him. So I left the screen door all the way open and carried Jimmy around while I finished making my coffee and sure enough, in he came. Of course there wasn't the usual rejoicing when the Prodigal Son returned because he immediately picked a fight with Jimmy, and then with Lily - and all this was before 4:30 AM.
And then because of the rain, Dexter refused to go out until I finally insisted at 8:30, and even then he made it clear he didn't want to do this. Poor little guy was sick for days, aside from the weather. He apparently ate something way wrong because he completely emptied his system out of both ends and then didn't have a bowel movement for 3 whole days. I fed him chicken and rice for several days and he finally got back to normal.
It took absolutely forever but I finally found the old photo editing program - it was labeled "Legacy" - which I needed because I couldn't use the stupid "updated" version of photo editing. I spent ages searching for an alternative online and found several online downloads, all allegedly free, but they all required sign-ins and personal info, none of which I wanted to provide. I'd been trying to edit that video I took of the kitties playing with that new toy because my original video was supposedly too long to upload to the blog. The "updated" editing program wouldn't let me do it, but eventually I found the old version and got the video edited, thank goodness. I'd've hated for you to miss that.
I also finished several blog posts, and I worked out the routes I'd take back to Texas.
And while we were here, Daylight Savings Time ended, which meant we gained back the hour we'd lost when we changed to Eastern Time. None of the critters had ever adjusted to Eastern Time, so that worked out fine because now we were back where we would have been.
I really like it here. This campground is very comfortable, there's lots of pleasant places for Dext and me to walk, and there are basic services in the towns. Sadly, though, I really can't consider settling here permanently because I need a town larger than 5,000. And the nearest CVS and PetsMart and well-stocked grocery stores are in Asheville, which even Google says is 2 hours away. But I love staying here, was almost on the verge of tears when we had to leave, and look forward to figuring out when I can come back again.
Travel from:
Monday, November 13th
We left Murphy campground just before 8:00 because I wanted to stop at a tire shop before leaving town. The tires felt wrong and didn't sound right when I took it into town the other day, so I figured I should at least ask somebody to check the air before I got on the road.
And sure enough, all 6 tires needed air - not a lot of it, but they still function better when they're properly inflated, so I was glad we'd stopped.
Much of the first part of today's drive was through sparsely inhabited country, and I saw several deer alongside the road here and there.
I stopped at a gas station on the Georgia state line and paid $2.85/gallon, which was cheaper than in Murphy.
Google had a little practical joke in store for me: it told me a T intersection was coming where it didn't, and didn't tell me a T intersection was coming where it did. That latter sent me on a 3.6-mile round trip wrong turn, and it would have been more but I just had a feeling I wasn't going in the right direction. Google had also failed to mention the road signs I'd see and specifically not only failed to mention that the road I most needed was US-76 but instead telling me lots of other highway names that there weren't signs for. I don't know how they come up with their directions, but I do wish one of those programmers would come out and road-test them occasionally.
For much of the day the road was a narrow 2 lanes with no shoulder, and at one point I was going uphill when suddenly 2 cop cars were behind me with major lights-and-sirens going, and I had absolutely nowhere to pull off. Finally near the top of the hill I found a side turning, pulled over to let them pass me, and very quickly after that they both turned into a driveway. I saw them continue up this winding wooded driveway with their lights still going and wondered what could be happening at someone's house. A crime? A medical emergency? It was bad, whatever it was, and I felt sorry for the folks there.
We weren't in Georgia long, driving through the Chattahoochee National Forest, and then were in South Carolina and passing through the Sumter National Forest.
After driving 2 hours, we all wanted a break and I hadn't seen anywhere to stop but finally pulled into the almost empty parking lot of the Holly Springs Baptist Church, established 1828 (which was actually quite a while ago). Several signs there said they were a collection point for Samaritan's Purse Operation Christmas Child. I looked this up and learned they collect shoeboxes people have filled with small gifts to send to children around the world. These are dropped off with a $10 required "donation" (do people really not understand the meaning of that word?), and donors are encouraged to "'pray without ceasing' (1 Thess. 5:17) for the child who will receive your box."
As we drove today, I noted a lot of churches - most of them Baptist until we got farther into SC. We passed through Townville, and I concluded the people who named that place had a meager imagination.
I'm sorry to say I saw a dead fox by the road. But there were lots of pines at the rest area we finally came to, and the air smelled really good.
SC has a town named Hickory Tavern. In Laurens, I saw several houses and other buildings in what I guess is Victorian, or maybe Gothic Revival, style - you know, with the towers and turrets and gingerbread.
When we got to the Newberry KOA I found they'd given me a completely different site than the one they promised on the phone. They told me someone else had reserved it, but I whined a bit, and they checked their records and discovered that I had, in fact, made my reservation before the other people, so they gave the site to me. Less than half an hour after I'd gotten in, the other people showed up, which meant I'd gotten the site I wanted by 2 strokes of luck - first in being the first to call, and second in arriving earlier than the other folks. If I'd come in later, it wouldn't have mattered that I'd made the reservation first because they'd have already been in it.
I came here for 2 reasons - one was we'd spent several very pleasant days here during our month in South Carolina and I wanted to come again (it was pleasant again, though wintery this time), and secondly because when I was here before I'd taken one of their DVDs. The owner had told me last summer I could take what I wanted (they have a huge selection) for free, and I took Remember the Titans. But I only wanted to watch it a few times, not keep it permanently, and I didn't want to spend the postage mailing it back, so we came instead and I dropped it back off.
Tuesday, November 14th
Knowing today would be a long drive, I decided to leave last night's campground just after 7:00 (sunrise at 6:59). Since deer are often out early in the morning, we saw several - including one that had just been born this year, grazing right by the road on a blind curve - I barely avoided him/her.
After stopping for gas ($2.99/gallon) we spent most of the morning on more narrow 2-lane roads with no shoulders. This lack of room was a problem when an oncoming driver, probably on his phone, started heading directly for me and swerved back into his lane just in the nick of time - and I had nowhere to hide.
A Great Blue Heron rose up and flew across the road pretty close to us. Didn't I hear somewhere that that's good luck?
The radio told me that today in 1960, 4 federal marshals escorted 6-year-old Ruby Bridges as she integrated a school in New Orleans. This is one of my favorite Norman Rockwell paintings:
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| "The Problem We All Live With" |
We crossed the border into Georgia again.
Based on what I could see in the front yard, a family with young children lives here, and I imagine the house is glad to have new life in it. For being 230 years old, it looked in pretty good shape, though I'd guess upkeep would be an ongoing problem.
I'd planned to drive as far as a dog park in Madison, GA, before stopping, but after 2½ hours on the road, we were all more than ready for a break. In the town of Washington, I pulled into the empty parking lot of the First Methodist Church, and Dext and I walked around the block. That turned out to be lucky, because a house we passed had a sign saying it was the Liberty Inn, built in 1793, and Washington's oldest original building.
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| Liberty Inn |
The streets in Washington were very narrow (reminded me of Philadelphia), and I thought this must be a very old town - which I've learned that it is: founded in 1774. I passed the Wilkes County Courthouse and a historical marker titled "Jefferson Davis." I was curious enough to look it up and learned that, per the marker, he'd "hoped to negotiate a just peace" and passed through this town just a few days before his capture by Union soldiers. His capture before opening negotiations "ended his hopes for a new nation, in which each state would exercise without interference its cherished 'Constitutional rights,' forever dead." The quotes are from the marker, which was erected in 1957 - a period when Southern history was being frantically rewritten to justify the treason of insurrection. Davis's treasured Confederacy failed in the war at least partly because those states did exactly what he claimed to want: exercised their right to refuse to support the Confederate government.
I found the dog park in Madison without much trouble and concluded it was an afterthought. It was located in a corner of a city park with very nice baseball diamonds and other play equipment, but the dog park was fenced off with chicken wire and had gates that were your basic metal farm gates. But it was a big area with lots of trees, and Dext and I had a nice walk around it (I had to follow him in case he made a deposit, which he did).
We had lunch there and connected with interstates - I-20 & I-85 - for the rest of today's drive. It was along this area that we crossed back into Central Time, gaining back the hour we'd lost with Daylight Savings Time.
Georgia has a town named Social Circle. And one named La Grange.
Twice on the highway we ran into traffic slowdowns, both times resulting in it taking 5 minutes for me to drive a mile. I could walk that fast. Once it was for a police car stopped with a pickup and trailer; the other was for a car parked on the shoulder with people moving around it. I have no idea why those things would cause these slowdowns. But I was lucky - we passed several much longer backups heading the opposite direction.
I saw a Georgia license plate that said "BLESS U." And I'd say we all needed that because GA drivers seem to be as bad - or worse - than TX drivers, such as making lane changes at high speeds.
We crossed the Chattahoochee River and were in Alabama. After driving all day, those last 20 miles once we crossed the river seemed to go on forever. And though we got to the campground at a reasonable hour (2:30 on Central Time), it somehow didn't feel very relaxing. It was drizzling, so Dext and I didn't stay long at the dog park. He wanted to meet the 2 big dogs at a nearby campsite, but the owner said it wasn't a good idea so he had to be disappointed. The campsites and all the roads were made of large-sized gravel, which Dext finds hard to walk on, so we weren't tempted to brave the drizzle for that.
Wednesday, November 15th
Today we were only crossing less than the full width of Alabama, so I didn't bother leaving last night's campground until 8:00 and planned a little sightseeing. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't so great, but it cleared up pretty well as the day went on.
But we started with a road not actually existing that Google promised existed. Later I looked the directions up again and realized Google hadn't bothered to mention I'd have to make an extra turn, so I ended up heading along a road I knew nothing about, wondering where the right road was. But I knew I-85 was just over there, and kept going until I hit an obviously main street that I thought would access the highway, and sure enough it did.
I've been seeing signs and bumper stickers again, like I saw for the 2020 election, that say things like "Jesus 2024 - Our Only Hope." And all over again I think it extremely unlikely Jesus would get much support if he actually did show up and started campaigning with his message from the Sermon on the Mount. I've been hearing stories recently from distressed evangelical preachers whose congregations have been yelling at them for preaching "woke" themes, when all they were doing was preaching what Jesus said. Very disheartening for many of us.
Even though we'd been driving for less than a half hour, I stopped at a dog park in Montgomery - very nice, very large park. I spoke for a bit with a young woman from France who came with some kind of pointer (she told me but I forgot) that had very long rear legs. I asked her about quarantine and she said she hadn't had to quarantine her dog because France doesn't have rabies. She said she'd had to produce reams of paperwork beforehand, but then she'd had no trouble. I wish I'd had more time to ask her what kind of trip she was making - I mean, bringing your dog along on a transatlantic trip is quite a commitment. Apparently Canada Geese were new to her because I saw her stalking a nearby flock to take photos.
I saw a sign in Montgomery for the "Gobble Wobble 5K Walk/Run" the day after Thanksgiving. And I passed a building labeled "Bricklayers Hall" that had a historical marker in front. https://www.hmdb.org/Black-Bricklayers-Hall Unlike Georgia, Alabama apparently isn't shy about including a lot of information on their historical markers, and this one explains a great deal about the role this building played in civil rights battles of the 1960s.
I heard on the radio about a program called "Chicago CRED" that is a community approach to reducing gun-related violence. Sounds like a worthwhile effort. And I heard about an article by Anna Devere Smith, who I've seen as an actress but who is also apparently a playwright. The article is called "This Ghost of Slavery" and is in a recent edition of The Atlantic, which says I have to subscribe if I want to read the article, so I guess I'll hold off for now.
We drove by the state capitol building - very attractive, classical - but I decided against some of the other landmark places that I visited when I was doing my month in Alabama and instead drove on to Selma. A road sign said I was on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, commemorating the 1965 march over the 54 miles between the 2 cities as part of a voting rights protest. This was the march that had several false starts - one of which resulted in the incredibly violent Bloody Sunday, that Americans saw on their TVs and helped turn the tide of public opinion. That was the time police used fire hoses, dogs and mounted police to run down the people who were peacefully - and legally - walking across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma.
I drove across that bridge today, hoping maybe that could demystify it somehow, but I guess it'd take a lot more than a drive to stop believing that day was anything but horrifically dehumanizing.
The radio also told me that US News had voted on this year's Best Places to Live and ranked Green Bay, WI, as #1 and Huntsville, AL, as #2.
We stopped to take a lunch break at Demopolis, "City of the People," founded 1817. Gasoline was $2.89/gallon. I am absolutely delighted to see that the price of gas is coming down so nicely.
All day Dext was having soft stools, and he threw up both his breakfast and his lunch. I guess he ate something wrong again and I just can't figure out how to show him the cause-and-effect connection.
We crossed the Mississippi state line - "Birthplace of America's Music" - and within a few miles were in our campsite.
This campground was heavily wooded and built on a hill. The dog park wasn't so great - Dext didn't want to linger there for long - but we were able to walk around the campground a bit.
Thursday, November 16th
Because even Google said today's drive would take 5½ hours (meaning about 9 hours for me), we left the Meridian campground just before 7:00. We stopped for gas at a Love's - $2.69/gallon - and it wasn't long before I realized that cheap gas = lousy roads. Alabama's had been bad enough, but Mississippi's roads were pretty terrible. Rough road surfaces aren't just uncomfortable, they can be dangerous, making it hard for tires to get a good purchase.
Speaking of dangerous: just as I was starting to pass a semi-with-trailer, an idiot cut in front of me into the non-space between me and the semi. If I hadn't moved over onto the left shoulder, we would have crashed - at highway speed.
I heard on the radio that during the Thanksgiving period Mississippi is the #1 deadliest state in the country. We're still a week away, but after the driving display I've already seen today, I was glad I wasn't planning to stick around.
Vicksburg was about halfway along today's route and online I'd found a dog park there, so that's where we stopped. It was on unused airport land and was pretty good sized, though there were few trees of course (airports not liking tall trees). We met a guy with his brown & white Husky, and the guy explained his dog had gotten Lyme disease twice, because it was so hard for him to find ticks in the seriously thick coat Huskies have. He said they were from upstate New York and were moving to Boulder, via a visit to Austin. He told me Google alerted him to dog parks along the route it charted for him, which is how he ended up at the Vicksburg dog park. Nice guy, nice dog. But it was chilly and windy and after the initial meeting, Dext pretty much ignored the Husky and said he wanted to get out of the cold, so we left.
I started seeing signs for the Great River Road - along the mighty Mississippi - and it took me back several years ago when I was following those signs in quite a few states.
And then we crossed the Mississippi River and crossed the Louisiana state line.
Louisiana's roads were just as terrible as Mississippi's - why do the folks around here put up with it?
We stopped at a Kroger and were in our campsite by 3:00 (so the drive took us 8 hours, not 9). By the time I'd done all my chores, I was really tired. But the day wasn't over: Bucky figured out how to work the latch for the screen door and got out.
We had a really nice campsite with a level paved pad and lots of grass and patio furniture. But we were also right by the entrance drive and the way Bucky was moving around the campsite - from under the RV out to the grass and back - I was afraid he'd get excited and run out onto the road. It was really scary for me and because of that, this time I couldn't just sit in the cabin and wait for him to come back in. But he kept running away when I tried to approach him, so all I could do was just stand outside and say nice things to him in a reassuring voice, and he finally came up to me and let me pick him up. Thank goodness. But this was his 4th time getting out - and it was clear I could never again leave the screen door as the only barrier to the outside.
Friday, November 17th
Shreveport to Mount Pleasant is a drive of only about an hour and a half, but remembering the lack of services in Mt. Pleasant, I decided on a detour to Tyler first.
We stopped by the highway for gas - $2.57/gallon - and while I was filling up I saw 2 large dogs (white Lab and black Great Dane types) leaving the gas station and running across a very busy 4-lane road that was access to I-20. Cars and big trucks all had to stop for the dogs, who milled around at the businesses across the road and then I didn't see where they went. And I never saw anyone looking for them. Worrying.
We crossed the Texas state line, where a sign said it was "Unlawful to Enter Texas with Citrus Plants." I didn't remember that, not that I was carting around a grapefruit tree.
Driving into Tyler I saw a billboard for some kind of Jeep-type vehicle that said, "Tougher Than A Two Dollar Steak." Which is pretty descriptive.
We got to a Petco and, inside the store, Dext vomited twice. He'd already produced liquid stools again. I decided to stop at a grocery store to pick up the chicken-and-rice ingredients. At the store I ran across a woman about my age who was looking for egg noodles. She said she'd never used them before but had found a delicious-sounding recipe that called for them, but she didn't know what they looked like. Having made way too many tuna noodle casseroles in my life not to know what those noodles look like, I found them for her and realized later I should have asked for the recipe.
We went to the Tyler dog park we've visited before. Today there were 5 dogs in the big dog park, one of them a Great Dane and another something else really large. All nice dogs with nice people.
After stopping at Tyler's recycling center, we headed north. In Pittsburg, a pickup pulled out right in front of me and went really slowly, so I went around him and ended up behind a Jeep that stopped at a green light and kept sitting there while the light turned yellow, then red, and finally moved on the next green. That driver must have been on his phone because who else would do that.
Back at our familiar Mt. Pleasant KOA, I dumped the tanks, walked Dexter, cooked the chicken and the rice for him, filled the water tank, stored all the groceries I'd bought - I was pretty pooped by the time it was all done. We'll be here for a couple of weeks.
