Travelogue, Part the Third

The first and second parts of the trip were enough to put insomniacs to sleep. This is the final part of the travelogue.

Wednesday, 16 March

New Orleans having driven us out with a combination of wet, miserable weather, and menacing thugs, we decided to take the scenic route to Hattiesburg (yes, I know: there are demonstrably no scenic roads in either Louisiana or Mississipi . . . but we had to do something to fill in the time before we could check in to the next hotel).

After breakfast, Victor boldly offered to be the navigator for the next leg of the journey. This was his first attempt to read US city maps in realtime, so the adventure was perhaps a bit more extreme than he'd hoped. On the plus side, we did get to cross the Mississippi River a few times, along with the causeway across Lake Ponchartrain. The Huey P. Long Bridge is quite an interesting engineering feat — I wish I'd had the leisure to take a couple of photos of the bridge and its combined road-and-railway approaches.

The weather, of course, remained grey and overcast, so the scenic value of both bridges and the causeway was minimized (at least for me, the white-knuckled driver).

Once we got across Lake Ponchartrain, we turned east on US 190 and took our time towards Slidell and Bay St. Louis. Somewhere near White Kitchen, someone was in a huge rush to get past us and sent a load of loose gravel into our windshield. Luckily, there was only one piece of rock big enough to do damage, and it only chipped the glass. I should get a permanent marker and label it "Souvenir of Louisiana" or something . . .

When we got to Bay St. Louis, the idea of getting out of the car and walking along the waterfront became quite appealing. I turned south into the historic district of town, just as a train approached on the bridge over the bay:

Getting access to the beach was quite a hassle: we keep forgetting that American and Canadian laws differ about beaches (Americans can own land right to the waterline, while Canadians only own the land to within a few feet of the waterline, allowing public access to the shore). We couldn't get down to the beach without trespassing — at least that's the way it appeared as we drove along the shoreline.

We eventually had to give up on Bay St. Louis and continue east. Gulfport and Biloxi had much better public access to the waterfront, as it turned out. We also found fascinating dead creatures scattered along the beach:

We certainly don't see things like this along the shores of the Great Lakes!

Gulfport also offered an essential travel stop: a mall with public washrooms. While we were in the mall, Elizabeth discovered some great deals on clothes, so we spent a couple of hours with her grabbing bargains in the clothing line and the boys trading away their shirts for Magic cards at a gaming store, lusting after swords and daggers in a few other stores, and generally attempting to revive the consumer economy of this part of the Gulf Coast.

Of course, no shopping experience is complete without at least one sign in the store which seems to mean something other than they intended it to say.

Prying the consumers away from the mall, we turned north as evening fell. A quick stop at a liquor store had me in some quandary: so many wines I'd never seen before . . . how many can I try? In the end, it was the diminished carrying capacity of our vehicle that decided things: there clearly was not enough room left for a couple of crates of wine. I made do with some California wines I'd never heard of.

Thursday, 17 March

This was our one day of SCA activity: visiting Gulf Wars, near Lumberton. My original plan had been to camp at the event and merely do some day-trips to New Orleans and the surrounding area. Adding a fourth person (Liam) to our party meant that we couldn't take all the necessary camping gear along, so we converted the trip into a stay-in-hotels expedition. Given the weather we encountered, I think it was a good improvisation.

You'd think, given that Gulf Wars is a pretty big event (at least 2500 people, based on our site tokens), that there'd be plenty of opportunities for photography . . . and probably on any other day of the war you'd be right. As it was, we arrived on the coldest day — so cold that the site looked like it'd been physically transported to Ontario, minus the accumulated snow. As rough, tough, rugged Canadians we were not affected by the cold — at least, that's what I'd like you to believe. We were miserably cold! We drove 2000 kilometres south to enjoy warmer weather. We wuz robbed!

On the positive side, we continued our attempt to boost the economy, buying three swords, a dagger, a cloak, some doublets, and other vaguely medieval or renaissance gear. Victor picked up a "Pappenheimer"-style rapier, while Liam and I each bought slightly earlier swept-hilt rapiers (mine had a matching dagger). I guess I now have to teach them how to use them properly.

The Most Surreal Dinner of the Trip

Arriving back in Hattiesburg, we compromised on the Lone Star restaurant for dinner: we have a Lone Star chain in the Toronto area, although this one didn't seem to be affiliated with them (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Canadian restaurants aren't affiliated with the American chain). This particular restaurant seemed a bit down-market from the ones we were familiar with, and the menu was quite different.

It took quite some time for our waitress to come to take our order, and when she arrived, we seemed to be quite an unexpected surprise to her. She was unfamiliar with the wine list, so Elizabeth and I ended up having to sound out the names of the wines for her — not a good start. To be frank, we suspected that she was either slightly drunk or slightly high: her mood was giddy, but her ability to concentrate was minimal, and she seemed determined to spend as much time talking with us as she possibly could.

Victor and Liam were wearing the Mardi Gras beads they'd bought in New Orleans, and the waitress seemed puzzled about them. She claimed to have never visited New Orleans, and to be unfamiliar with the traditions of Mardi Gras. Because Victor's beads had little devil heads on them, she called him "Satan" for the rest of the meal, while Liam became "Superman" for the logo on his beads.

She took quite a liking for Liam, and pretty clearly was smitten with him (even if she had trouble pronouncing his name — she worked through "Lee-oh" and "Lee-ah", before settling on "Lee-ah-mm"). As she went to collect our drinks, Victor kidded Liam that she was practically drooling all over him.

The food was quite acceptable:

In the background of the photo of Victor, you can just make out the waitress, for a brief moment serving another table before she returned to fawn all over "Superman" again. When she returned, we found out that she was a drummer for her church band. Somehow, this didn't surprise us.

The excess eating continued:

By the time we got back to the hotel, sleeping was a major priority for Elizabeth and I, but the guys decided to burn some midnight oil and play a few [dozen] games of Magic. Liam demonstrates how well this works in reducing waistlines:

Friday, 18 March

Repacking the car each morning was becoming quite a logistical challenge, with all the additional baggage we'd been accumulating. I'm pretty good at this, but it was taking a bit longer each time to stow everything away safely and still leave me with some small segment of rear view mirror space.

Friday was another drive-all-day day, with the terrors of rural Alabama to be crossed. Not much of note happened until we crossed into Tennesee and tried to find our way to the Chattanooga-Chickamauga battlefields. We got off the highway one exit too soon, and it took a fair amount of time to realize that we were on the wrong side of Lookout Mountain. Getting back on the road was a bit of a challenge, and when we did manage that, we found that we were just joining the back of a huge tail-back due to an accident ahead. It took nearly an hour to get back to the point we'd left the highway the first time.

With the park due to close at dusk, there was no point in trying to get there by this point in the late afternoon, so we carried on towards Knoxville. In spite of my expectations, I didn't see Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit straddling the town like a Colossus, so we just bypassed Knoxville and turned north. We stopped in Caryville, luckily getting one of the last two available rooms in the hotel, and had dinner in Jacksboro.

Over Victor's protests, I insisted on trying the only Mexican restaurant in the area. Yet more eating occurred. I no longer knew how they were fitting it in:

Saturday, 19 March

We were starting to run out of time for this trip, as work and school were waiting for us on Monday morning. The only side-trip we allowed ourselves today was a small detour into Lexington for snack food, Aleve&tm;, and wine. The aptly named "Liquor Barn" near Man'o'War Boulevard provided me with half a dozen bottles of wine to add to the cellar.

It was interesting to compare relative prices between the government-run LCBO and the private Liquor Barn — American wine was less expensive, but not incredibly so, while French, Italian, and Australian wine was actually more expensive in Kentucky than in Ontario. Chilean and Argentinian wine was about the same price in both places. As a result, all I brought back was American wine.

The rest of the northbound journey was uneventful, although I still want those three days I seemed to spend between Cincinnati and Toledo back!

The border crossing was anti-climactic. Until very recently, I'd always had much more trouble getting back into Canada than I'd ever had trying to get into the United States. As a result, we had all our passports ready and I'd threatened the lads with physical harm if they said anything except in answer to direct questions from the Canadian customs official. Liam was, I suspect, terrified (he'd last crossed a border when he was five . . . I think he expected us to be deported to Guantanamo Bay or something).

Getting into the border crossing line-ups, I'd apparently used my unfailing ability to get into the slowest-moving line. It was perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes wait while the seven or eight cars in front of us were processed. Every other line seemed to be passing us at twice our speed. The vehicle two in front of us seemed to draw particular interest, and the inspection took longer than any of the others had done.

We finally pulled up to the booth, handed over our passports, and waited for the throw of the cosmic dice.

Customs: Where have you been?
Me: New Orleans
Customs: How long were you gone?
Me: Seven days
Customs: How was the weather?
Me: It sucked.
Customs: [Snickering] Welcome home. [More snickering]

He passed back the passports and waved us on. The sound of Liam breathing again was almost deafening.