The pause that refreshes – part 2

Still ranting.

I have a GPS rant, too. I cannot begin to list the frequency – particularly in Mississippi – but also in other areas in the south where I’ve had to listen to a warning about “unverified” or “undigitized” areas. Or the insistence that I enter a specific street address when I want simply to reach a certain road or town. Or, trying to locate an address when the GPS has a different city than the one on a place’s website. Or the perpetual demand – particularly when I’ve been sent on a detour – to “make a U-turn if possible.” There’s also the matter (at least in regard to my GPS) of its inability to maintain two identifications for the same road and seemingly making the illogical choice when it needs to make a decision. Case in point: I was travelling south on US 61 in Mississippi when it merged with US 84. This portion of the road is both 61 and 84. When the roads merged, my GPS suddenly had me traversing US 84 and lost any identification for Highway 61. For someone who’s a stranger in these (or any) parts, that can become quite confusing. There were times I was pleased to have an old-fashioned paper map in the car with me. I could go on but you’ve probably had enough and I have one more rant remaining. 

Here’s another thing I’ve learned. Either I’m turning into my father or lots of cooks don’t know how to cook chicken. Dad always preferred dark meat – legs and thighs – to the breast and wing. I’d always preferred the latter. I’m still more a wing man than a leg man but the thigh has overtaken the breast especially on this trip where I’ve encountered more dry chicken than I care to remember. I don’t know if it’s the preparation or the meat itself (certainly it’s never been a problem with my beloved Kiki-Riki pollo a la brasa). If it’s the former then I’m consistently Todd. If it’s the latter, I’m becoming Irv.

Because I’ve started with a pair of rants, I think you’ve earned a photo of the G R R. This is from the stretch between Elsah and Alton.

As you can imagine, I didn’t read much on this trip. The only non-travel related book I brought is Paul Dickson’s Authorisms – a book about words or phrases coined by writers most, but not all of which have found their way into common usage. It’s fairly light reading and barely two hundred pages. I’ve enjoyed it thus far. I note this because I recently reached the section of words beginning with ‘I’ and found four words – illth, incompossible, infracaninophile, and isolato – about which I thought, “I need to work these into my vocabulary perhaps even this blog.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my general good fortune concerning the weather. (This continued through the end of the trip. Outside of the rain the morning I left Saint Paul that continued until mid-afternoon, about half a day’s rain in Memphis, and some rain one morning in NOLA, I had no weather issues – a boon that certainly filled the positive side of the ledger over three weeks.) I had similar good fortune with the temperature. While I don’t mind hot weather, it’s been downright cool most of the trip. Saint Louis had record (or near record) overnight low temperatures the nights I visited and, in the delta, highs were in the low 80’s without oppressive humidity.

Two more thoughts about the trip itself. In the planning stages, I expected some “themes” linking various places would run through the course of the journey. That has, indeed, been the case. But not always in the way I expected. I knew there would be baseball – Roger Maris and the Field of Dreams. I knew there would be movies – Judy Garland and FoD again. I knew there would be music – Memphis, the Mississippi delta and the Blues Trail, and New Orleans. And I knew there would be writers – Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

Two new and unexpected “themes” have arisen. One came from visiting the mounds of ancient Native American peoples in different states. I’ve found myself pausing, reflecting, and feeling an unexpected connection while regularly lingering in these places longer than I ever anticipated I would.

The other has been a focus on the Civil Rights movement and particularly the Civil Rights summer of 1964. Perhaps it began with my observation of the rarity of seeing people of color in the trip’s early stages. You’ll see in a later entry that this interest begins a crescendo when I reach Memphis a few days hence.

The other observation has to do with the specifics and practicalities of the trip. I’m close enough to sixty to call myself sixty and as I’ve come closer to the end of my travels, I’ve realized that I’m no longer capable of doing the same things I could do at forty. A trip like this in the future will either need to be considerably more well planned or taken to the opposite extreme with little planning at all. I’ve had difficulty serving as the planner, driver, photographer, and chronicler (especially given the details I include).

My nightly forays into uploading and captioning photos, trying to aggregate the day’s notes into something that will result in a coherent blog entry, and searching the internet for specific addresses and routes for the next day have exacted a price. I fear my dull, early evenings in Memphis and New Orleans will disappoint some readers and bore others. I hope I’ll make the rest of the trip interesting enough to compensate.