Monday, December 26, 2011

Louisiana Road Trip 2011, Part 1: Driving Day in Driving Rain

A quintessential road trip view below. Crossing from Missouri to Arkansas. Rain. Good road trip music.  The annoying squitch of a faulty wiper.





This morning, I packed a big thermos of coffee. For breakfast and lunch on the road, I had sandwiches and an appetizer leftover from yesterday’s Christmas gathering at my mother’s house. Cold soda in the cooler behind the passenger seat.

The rain got very tiresome toward the end of my driving day, when it got dark. But all was forgotten when I unloaded and got settled into my little cabin at Leroy Percy State Park outside Hollandale, MS. (I had found the place online yesterday, but I couldn’t make the reservation online, so I called en route once I was sure I’d make it as far as Hollandale.) 

I plugged in the bookshelf stereo player I brought with me, put on some good music, poured a glass of juicy Georgian wine, and made a dinner sandwich from fixings I’d picked up at a grocery store in Cleveland, Mississippi, an hour earlier.

I went to bed early, but woke suddenly when I heard odd skitterings. Along the walls? The floor by my bed? The roof? Where? Assigned the noise to mice, squirrels, or very large insects, and returned to sleep. Only to awaken again to the sound of my screen porch door shutting noisily. …. When I investigated, I discovered the wind periodically blew the screen door open, and then it would close loudly. There was no latch to keep it shut.

So ended the first day of my Louisiana road trip.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a book I read recently with a bad ending....