Travelogue, Part the First

I'd had hopes that I'd be either able to get regular internet access all last week, or be organized enough to keep moderately useful notes. Hopes that turned out to be rather weakly associated with the real world, unfortunately. So, in the extended entry, is a disjointed ramble from Brooklin to Metairie, by way of Stratford, Windsor, Detroit, Toledo, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Shiloh, Tupelo, Meridian, and St. Francisville.

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Saturday, 12 March

We got up at ugly o'clock in the morning, with the best of intentions of getting the car packed, the coffee brewed, the bodies showered, and the driver awake and responsive by 7:00 a.m. Everything worked great up until the last item — I needed another 45 minutes to be remotely safe on the road.

We arrived in Stratford, our first planned stop, to pick up Liam:

After re-organizing the luggage, we got underway again. Next stop, Windsor's bridge to Detroit. Long wait at the border, with only a light rain to break the monotony. The border guard didn't seem too interested in us, despite our clearly faked documents, badly disguised accents, and the half-ton of weaponry poorly concealed in the trunk. Perhaps it was a good thing I warned the boys not to ululate as we drove up to the inspection station.

The drive south along the I-75 went relatively smoothly, at least once we got out of the rutted road section between the bridge and the Ohio state line. I don't know if Michigan deliberately leaves that stretch of road in poor condition to discourage locals from escaping or if it's a full employment scheme for alignment shops at the exits. Either way, it's almost the worst stretch of road we encountered during the entire trip.

As mentioned before, the I-75 between Toledo and Cincinnati seems to exist in a universe where time has no meaning. Entire geological epochs seemed to pass as we endlessly drove towards the intermediate towns. I'm certain that the continents re-arranged themselves twice in the time it seemed to take between Lima and Dayton.

Driving through Cincinnati at 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday is rather like a combination of riding the Wild Mouse, taking a speed-reading test, and riding through a buffalo stampede. The very worst drivers, of course, had Ontario license plates.

The rain got worse, and the temperature dropped as we entered the stretch of road just north of Cincinnati, and the climb up the hill through Covington on the south side of the Ohio River was just a little hair-raising. The road was icing up just enough to allow speeders to really demonstrate their road-handling skills, or lack of same. We split off the I-75 to take the I-71 to Louisville and fortunately left most of the traffic behind. There were several white-knuckle moments before we got to the Louisville ring road, but nothing too exciting.

Sunday, 13 March

We stayed overnight at the same hotel as a bunch of lacrosse players. They weren't quite as rowdy as a similar-sized group of hockey players would have been, but they were hard to ignore. The next morning, we had to wait until their bus was loaded, as it was parked directly behind my car:

When we managed to get out, we were off down the I-65 towards Bowling Green and Nashville. We've found Nashville to be one of the worst cities to drive through, near, or around; there's always major construction and/or major accidents snarling traffic. This time was no exception: we were stopped for nearly half an hour before we were able to get to an off-ramp and work our way south-east to the Tennessee 155, which took us past whatever was causing the back-up on the I-65. We worked south-west from there, to join the Natchez Trace. We stopped a few times along the Trace, including the Phosphate Mine and the Meriwether Lewis site:

The 50mph speed limit along the Trace meant that we had to get off soon after visiting the Meriwether Lewis site and get back on the main road to visit Shiloh before it got too dark. As US Civil War battlefields go, Shiloh is only moderately littered with monuments and markers (the worst we've found is Gettysburg, where it's difficult to see the ground for all the markers in some spots). The battle took place in early spring, so we were seeing it at about the same stage of the season:

These three photos were taken in the area of the battlefield known as the Hornets' Nest. This was the site of the turning point of the battle, as the Confederates threw in attack after attack on this Union position, wasting both lives and time, and allowing the disorganized Union forces to re-organize. Eventually, after the Confederates brought in 62 cannon and outflanked both ends of the Union position, it fell and the survivors were captured.

It was getting dark as we left the battlefield to make our way down through Corinth to Tupelo. I decided to push on to Meridian, rather than stay in Tupelo again (our last visit hadn't been great). The weather was quite impressive as we passed south of West Point on US 82. A big lightning storm was flashing away directly in front of us, and as we drove further south, the lightning spread wider to both sides, until the entire forward horizon was a constant pyrotechnic show.

The rain held off until we were nearly in Meridian, when Liam suddenly commented that it was amazing that we were still dry. A dramatic pause of about a minute or two, and then the heavens opened and we could barely see the road ahead of us. We didn't have a hotel booked, so finding a place to sleep was a high priority, especially with the rain coming down so heavily. Luckily, there was a Holiday Inn just off the highway, so we booked in there. Unluckily, it was an old pattern Holiday Inn, with exterior access to all the rooms . . . which meant we had to unload the car in the rain and make a dash for the covered walkway in front of the rooms.

Monday, 15 March

We had a room booked in Metairie, just outside New Orleans, but there was no point in dashing down there too soon: we couldn't check in until mid-afternoon at the earliest, so we decided to do some sight-seeing before hitting the Big Easy. St. Francisville sounded interesting, so we turned west and spent the next four and a half hours trying to find some interesting scenery in southern Mississippi and south-eastern Louisiana. There may be some, but we didn't manage to see much of it. Just lots and lots of scrubby evergreen trees and lots and lots of trailers.

St. Francisville has several preserved plantation homes, including the one we visited, which had been built by David Bradford, the erstwhile leader of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

The house is now a bed-and-breakfast, with tours offered during the day. The tour is a bit over-priced for our tastes: it only includes the lower floor, and photos are restricted to the front hallway.

Part the Second will follow, as time allows.