Driving Around The Southeast, Looking For Food

[title type="h2"]A Week On The Road[/title] [title type="h5"]Friday, July 22-Thursday, July 28, 2016. Battling Storms Along US 90.[/title] I have taken some strange vacations over the years, probably because I have some strange ideas about what vacations are for. Mary Ann tells me that I ought to keep the details of these to myself. She's probably right. Some of my trips are hard to explain to anyone other than a fellow existential thinker. The first of the series is a good example. In it I planned to go to Des Moines, Iowa and beyond, with my goal being a study in boredom. Friends kept telling me that I must have some other motivation. Des Moines was at that time (summer 1975) the headquarters of the large magazine publishing company that produces Better Homes and Gardens. I was editor of New Orleans Magazine at the time, which was co-founded by a few editors from Better Homes. Conclusion: I was being called up to work there. But no. The high point of the trip was actually being in Des Moines. No greatest contrast could be found than New Orleans versus Des Moines. Where I found to my great amusement that ads for restaurants typically claimed only that they served chicken, steak, fish, or some combination of the three. None of the ads claimed that any of this food was good, let alone great. That indeed was truth in advertising. (I should say here that one of New Orleans's greatest best restaurateurs--Brad Hollingsworth, the owner of Clancy's--is a native of Des Moines. See? That was an interesting factoid that came from my Des Moines sojourn.) I took this excursion alone (who would want to join me?) in my three-year-old VW Minibus. It developed a bad spark plug wire en route, the repair of which kept me in the capital of Iowa an extra night. I arrived in DesMoines after stays in Greenville in the Mississippi Delta (wasn't looking for a job there, either), and Springfield, Missouri (home of French's Mustard). I spent my nights in Ramada Inns for about $25. After the two days in Des Moines, I played it safe by following the Mississippi River home, stopping in big cities--St. Louis and Memphis. I took about a dozen trips along these lines. The series ending when Mary Ann and I were married. She puts her foot down when it comes to cheap motels. And she didn't get the boredom thing. The best of the series was in 1983. I was freelancing entirely, and could take off for almost any length of time. I left my house with no idea of where I was heading. I lived in Gentilly at the time, which is bisected by US 90. I headed west on it. When I came to the junction with US 11--which begins there--I made the turn toward the old Maestri Bridge. I stayed on US 11 until I reached the other end--at the New Hampshire border with Canada. That turned out to be anything but boring. The ride was actually beautiful and fascinating, with the fall colors of the trees in fine display. On my way home, I spent a week spent in Truro on Cape Cod. Lot of good restaurants around there. And I drove the entire Blue Ridge Parkway, which weaves around the peaks of the Appalachians. A terrific trip by any standard. Another boredom run--to West Texas and the Big Bend Country--was so fascinating that I would travel it many times. Leaving Big Bend after my first visit, I drove the westernmost 200 or so miles of US 90--also known as the Old Spanish Trail--to that highway's end in Van Horn, Texas. When I was a geeky kid I studied maps, and noticed that US 90--which runs through New Orleans from the Huey P. Long Bridge to the Rigolets and beyond--is the only US highway whose number ends in a zero that doesn't travel all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. It has always ended in Van Horn. I had a sort of pity for US 90's attentuation. I felt our highway had been cheated. In many succeeding journeys to Big Bend, an underrated national park with a magnifcent desert setting, I drove every inch of US 90. But that left a disregarded stretch to the east--one that has been on my mind ever since. When would I travel the part of US 90 from New Orleans to Jacksonville Beach, where the highway ends within sight eyeshot of the Atlantic Ocean? I knew I would cover those miles someday. And this summer, I finally did.

Friday, July 22, 2016. Exploring The Eastern Half Of US 90.

Oddly, Mary Ann has been behind my project to drive to the Atlantic terminus of US 90 for quite some time. She won't be with me, of course. My silly desires allow her to please me without participating. I have no problem with this. My purchase of a new VW Beetle a few months ago made this the perfect time for a long road trip. It's been a long time since my last one. My vacations in recent years have been cruises with the Eat Club. My plan was to add to the US 90 aspect a visit to my daughter Mary Leigh and her fiancé Dave in the Washington, D.C. area. I would break the tour up with a stop in Charleston, and finish it with wanderings in parts of the Appalachians before heading for home. Or so I planned. All that on the itinerary, I departed the Cool Water Ranch at around nine this morning. Before heading out, I breakfasted with Mary Ann at Mattina Bella, a block away from US 190--a "child" highway of the "parent" US 90. US 190 begins at US 90 about five miles south of Slidell. When I get to the junction, it is covered by a black sky, shooting formidable lightning bolts every twenty seconds or so--and very close by. I drive into it (there was no other place to go), to feel the wind increasing. I see what looks like a large tornado to the northeast, roughly in my direction of travel. Finally, the rain begins to pour, reducing the visibility to almost nothing. It was the most frightening weather I have ever attempted to drive through. After some ten minutes of this, the rain comes to an almost immediate halt. I breathe a sigh of relief, and continue on to Bay St. Louis and the sandy Mississippi beaches, where it doesn't appear to have rained at all. By the time I pass the end of the sandy beach in Ocean Springs, most of the traffic on US 90 has moved to the I-10. I-10 shadows US 90 for most of its route. Signs directing me to I-10 appear again and again. I ignore them, and keep following the US 90 sign. When I get to Mobile, US 90 becomes difficult to follow. It swings far north of town, running through heavy industry. Besides that, the traffic through the city is very heavy. Rush hour. When I finally escape all this, I'm across Mobile Bay, heading east on a well-kept two-lane road lined by tall pines on both sides and a constantly rolling terrain. It is a striking vista. Ironically, this is precisely what I was hoping to find in Des Moines those long years ago, but didn't. I encounter about a mile of backed-up traffic on US 90 near Pensacola. That city is a major cog in the operations of the U.S. Navy--insurance for sailors and the like. It's Friday afternoon, and it seems as though everyone working for the Navy is on his or her way home. I run into a lot more traffic as I battle east. Then, suddenly, it ends, and US 90 runs through a thoroughly rural area. The sun heads toward the horizon. Two additions to the two-lane highway appear. One of them looks like a new railroad line, created from the ground up by CSX, the large hauler whose rail lines dominate the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans. When the tracks veer off, in their place is something I've read about, but didn't expect to see. The Old Spanish Trail, whose origins predate automobile roadways, is also known as The Red Brick Road (no connection with the Wizard of Oz). Parts of the original roadway--dating back to the early1900s--are visible. A long bike trail not only has been built along this part of US 90, but is made of red bricks! Flat land makes both railroads and bike trails possible. But now US 90 starts rolling dramatically and beautifully. While admiring this, after fifty miles or so we get another enormous, lightning-blasting series of very hard rain. Then, as soon as it begins, it ends, and the beautiful scenery resumes. A certain regularity sets in after that. Towns that ask for 40-mph speed limits appear about every ten miles. The sun is declining. Worry about finding my hotel begins. The town names are unfamiliar--and I don't have a Florida map to check. Every time I see the black-and-white shield of US 90, I am relieved. But every now and then I don't see it, making me wonder whether I missed a turn. Then I see the reassuring shield. The fates are with me. Right about where I expected to find it, I see the tall Howard Johnson. I didn't know HoJo was still out there. I miss the turn but pull a successful U-ie. Then I can't find the entrance. The access roads are in total darkness. But I visually sight the hotel, and make my way over after three or four tries. It is twelve hours since I kissed MA good-bye. This is a much longer day than I had in mind. I am very tired. And hungry: I haven't had a thing to eat since breakfast with MA. The hotel, however, is the perfect kind for this reminiscence of my earliest road trips. It's a real motel, with the front doors of the rooms opening onto outdoor balconies, as opposed to interior hallways. Hah! MA would hate this place. The room rate is $69. Gotta love it. [title type="h2"]Saturday, July 23, 2016. Contrasting Roads. [/title] I don't expect much from the breakfast buffet in the Howard Johnson's. Toast is the only hot food I see. But I'm not really hungry, even after fasting most of yesterday. At least I know where I am headed without needing a map. I just keep my eyes tuned to the EAST US 90 signs. The Howard Johnson's is on the outskirts of Tallahassee. For a capital city, Tallahassee is neither large nor puzzling in its highways. I'm on the other side of it without much effort. And then I find myself tooling down pleasant, sunny roads with many trees and lush, green meadows. It's almost 150 miles from the HoJo to Jacksonville. But the sun is shining and the nice scenery continues. It's almost as if I must come up with a way to add tension. Which is the only explanation why I pass up what in retrospect was obviously the last gas station for many miles. The terrain now begins to look much less inhabited, and all the gas stations I see are abandoned. I barely make it to a filling station before either the gas tank or my bladder create emergencies. As US 90 enters Jacksonville (the biggest city in the country, in terms of its square mileage) the next point of difference from standard suburbia is a series of enormous facilities that make up the Florida State Prison. This goes on for miles, and is about as charming as it sounds. When the penal facilities end, the highway enters an industrial area, dotted with some old nightclubs and restaurants. Maybe they're excellent, but I don't think I am their target customer. US 90 winds its way into Jacksonville's central city, where the road signs are difficult to understand. I double back twice before making it onto the bridge that leads to Jacksonville Beach. The highway widens to eight lanes, with traffic signals every two or three blocks and enormous shopping malls on both sides. This makes for irritating, slow progress. But the beach is inevitable. US 90--its signs still come just in time--ends in a traffic circle it shares with A1A. That's the highway that lines the eastern coast of most of Florida. Mission accomplished! But I saw it through, and my claim to have traveled every inch of US 90 is validated, from this beach to the ironically similar desert around Van Horn in West Texas. I wonder which one is hotter. It's 99 here and now. I take a picture, then quickly escape this traffic jam. It took almost 200 miles and about five hours to get here today. I am happy to forget about it and get a move on up the coast. I cross the southernmost wedge of Georgia and decide there is no time to go to Savannah. I will head onward to Charleston, where a hotel reservation awaits. I lack a map of South Carolina. (Of all the maps I picked up a month ago at AAA, I seem to have left all the important ones at home.) But here is a Visitor Center, just over the South Carolina state lines. Two very helpful ladies in the Visitor Center, who print out a route from here to my hotel in Charleston for me. I am very pleased to see that the distance ahead is much less than I supposed. That is the good news. The bad news is that the first Holiday Inn Express I find is not the one where I have my reservation. The clerks in this one tell me where to go. I do find another one, but that's not it, either. At the second location, the clerk prints out a detailed route. I once again learn how hard it is to read instructions while driving alone. I take a wrong turn that brings me to an extraordinarily beautiful bridge that towers over the Charleston harbor and the Copper River. All I can do is cross the Copper River on the bridge. When I get to the other side, I head back. In the meantime, however, there is an incident on the bridge that backs traffic for some three miles. It takes me an hour to land. Once I'm out of traffic, I read over my last set of instructions. Then I call the front desk of the hotel, hoping they can talk me in. I see something on the road that I missed the first time around. I follow this clue and soon find myself looking at the marquee of the hotel. It would take me only six more attempts to figure out how exactly to get into the hotel's parking lot. It looks to be within slingshot distance from where I am. But if they were trying to hide the place, they could hardly have done a better job. When Mary Ann hears this story, she tells me that nobody uses maps anymore, but GPS smart phones. Mine will indeed show where one is, which direction one is headed, and a few other details. But my phone doesn't talk. It occurs to me that the ability of the hotel industry to put up hotels in inconvenient, off-main street locations must be helping its expansion, now that it's not necessary fora hotel to have a good location. Once again I skip supper. My total eating for the day was that miserable little breakfast, followed later by a single Krystal hamburger. This is the Land of Krystal, whose hamburgers I grew a taste for in high school. A few years ago the family-owned chain of little square hamburgers was bought out by a corporate restaurant group. They went in and made enough upgrades in the product that its distinctive flavor--it never varied in all the years I'd been sneaking them--is unrecognizable to me. The real reason I was there to look over my wayward maps to the hotel. In any case, I will make up for all these missed meals when I get to Charleston, which is a real food town, I hear.

Sunday, July 24, 2016. A Better Way To Be On Vacation.

Shagged out after all those hours of driving, I decide that my original itinerary is too ambitious. The swing through D.C. would add many more miles and keep me on the road even longer than the grueling plan I've followed so far. It leaves me exhausted and enervated at the end of the day. Not fun. Besides, Mary Ann was on the phone saying that my choice of hotels in a city like Charleston is ridiculous. She already has another place in mind for me, at a reasonable rate. The Vendue was a place she never stayed in, but she knew all about it anyway. It's right in the center of the East Way, which is to Charleston what Decatur Street is to the French Quarter. Some of the several buildings the hotel occupies date back to the 1700s. The renovations are recent and classy, with a collection of art so impressive that they hold art exhibitions and seminars regularly. More important to me, there is a well-thought-of restaurant at Vendue called The Drawing Room. Get it? Art? Drawing? The Vendue is incomparably easier to find than the backstreet location of the Holiday Inn. It's in the middle of the "French Quarter"--the core of Charleston's old town. I am greeted by a man of indeterminate European lineage. He parks the car, gives me a tour of the hotel, then gives me dozens of ideas as to what to do with myself during the next two days. I begin with a walk along the waterfront and its unique sculptures. I think this is the first fountain I've seen in the shape of a pineapple. I dine in the Drawing Room. This is not a standard hotel dining room, but one that makes a statement about localism. So I begin with an assortment of heirloom vegetables, with emphasis on beets of many colors. It's all atop a plate of sharply-flavored salsas and garnishes. Next is a thick, creamy squash soup with housemade prosciutto, and herbal oils. The entree is a fish I've seen and heard of before but never tasted. Tilefish is from the Atlantic (that big water feature outside), and has a great texture and flavor. It has arrived after being pan-seared to a nice brown, while the white flesh is exposed by its being cut into big chunks. Underneath this fish is something best described as cream of grits, and beneath that is what looks like creamed spinach but is actually kale (I think). Dessert is an assortment of ice creams mixed up with balls of pastry. Delicious, and enough for two or more people. The propensity for overfeeding is one that will surface in every meal I have in Charleston, no matter where it's from. The drink report shows a Negroni at the beginning and a glass of Tocai Friulano with the fish. That's a wine I haven't has since I was last in Friuli, the most underrated of all Italian wine distructs. But this is not from Friuli, but from the Napa winery Clendennan--another name I have not seen attached to a bottle in front of me. It all adds upto a terrific dinner, unmistakably stamped with the local flavors. The service staff is sharp and gives good commentary on the ingredients, the wines, and everything else. Suggestions as to where might dine tomorrow night. Diner completed, I adjourn to my windowless room. That lack is how the low rate was accomplished. The room is large, handsome and very comfortable. Mary Ann is right that I should stay in Charleston another couple of days. Monday, July 25, 2016. More Vendue. Mary Ann is right in thinking that a couple of days in this marvelous little hotel is just what I need. I'm up early and have a very generous breakfast. I foolishly wait until the temperature begins shooting upward before heading out on a two-hour stroll. By the time I get to the apogee of this walk, I am close to being drenched in my own juices. I duck into the Walgreens to bring my body temperature down to below heatstroke range. The staff there invites me to stay as long as I like in their unmanned cove of an ice cream parlor. And I do. I reach this spot on King Street, which appears to be the ancestral main promenade through the shopping district of Charleston's old town. Lots of interesting retail shops, former department stores, a few movie theaters with big marquees with names in lights, and quite a few restaurants, most of them not quite open. The entire strip is well kept, with few run-down buildings and almost no general dirtiness. En route back I begin a quest for shade. Parallel to King Street one block over is Meeting Street. It's much more residential in character than King Street. Many more trees, for one thing. The few businesses along Meeting Street area offices and non-retail operations. What restaurants I see are mostly ethnic. The houses scattered among all this have a grandeur about them, even those that have become apartments. All this qualifies as a historic neighborhood. Several streets are paved with cobblestones--bit round ones. Charleston gets its stones the same way New Orleans acquired its own: all of them started out as ballast on ships. Like New Orleans, Charleston is a port city. Some ladies dressed in Revolution Era costumes and stationed on a balcony make sure I noticed them. I was glad to see them, actually, because I didn't know exactly where I was. They were happy to direct me to the hotel, a half-dozen blocks away. Making my way through the now unshaded "French Quarter," I encounter a restaurant called SNOBS. It stands for Slightly North Of Broad Street. Last night, one of the staff at the hotel told me that SNOBS was one of the better places to dine. Its menu certainly looked that way. They'd just opened for lunch. Two young women at the door persuade me to make a reservation for the Chef's Table tonight. This is a one-sided ten-top. The kitchen was on the other side. No special prix-fixe menu or anything--I will order from the whole menu. I look over the menu for a few seconds, then arrange my reservation for tonight. I spent the most of the rest of the afternoon writing these words at a table in the hotel's coffee shop. Then a nice nap, in which I feel the radiation I received from earlier sun exposure radiate back out again. The people at SNOBS bring me to what they say is one of the two best seats at the long Chef's Table--at the ends. They say either one has a lot of traffic nearby, but if I want to really get into the action thay are better than the ones in the middle. That sounds reasonable. I am the only one at this table for most of the two hours I spend there. Later, two other single guys are seated, with large gaps between them, me, and one another. Ah! The Lonely Guy Table! I know it well. Another aspect of SNOBS's Chefs Table is an idea other restaurants with such tables should copy. Instead of the high bar chairs seen in setups like this (Emeril's, for example), these are standard height, as is the table. Much more comfortable, especially if you're going to be there awhile. I find high chairs uncomfortable. The waiter and I hit it off immediately. He is unusually conversant in the tiny details of SNOBS's food and on wine in general. I am here so early that he has time to shoot the breeze. The menu that results from all this palaver has only one problem: it consists of far too much food. The first course, for example, is carpaccio, which the server he says has been on the menu since SNOBS opened. It is already one dish too many when I ask about it, but I go ahead anyway. What comes out is a dinner plate completely covered with two layers of pounded, raw beef and its variety of zippy sauces and herbs. It is delicious. I leave more than half of it, because where will I put it all? I have the soup du jour. Comes out in a modest cup, just enough. What the menu describes as peas are not green, but brown, as in crowder peas or black eye peas. There's also some ham in there. Not what I expected, but I didn't have to add Tabasco, and I do away with the cup quickly. Here comes a beet salad, something that is held in high regards in these precincts. Stylistically, it follows the guidelines we have in New Orleans: locally grown greens and vegetable for the most part, with cheese made not far away, and dressings with a little bite-back and some mustard. I am finding that almost all the food I have in Charleston is on the salty side, and that is the case here. Of all the conversartions I have with this waiter, we spend the most time mulling over whether I should get the swordfish. The gourmet restaurants in the Southeast have excellent fish, different species from the ones we get at home. (Last night's tilefish, for example.) The waiter and I consider the matter of how well cooked the fish should be. Sword, despite its resemblance to tuna, needs medium-well cooking--160 degrees or so. Waiter and chef both say that's absolutely right. Bang! Onto the grill it goes, soon to come out in a thicker steak than I expect, with some thick tomato slices cooked down almost to a sauce. And the dinner finishes with one final oversizing. Ice cream, a kind of cobbler, and a bunch of berries, enough for a table of four. I get to talking with the manager, who is a member of the family that created SNOBS. The dining room is nearly full. And the three bachelors at the Chef Table are all still there. I will reduce their number to two. Back at the Vendue, I turn on the television. The only time I ever watch the tube is when I'm traveling. I watch for about three hours, and conclude that this a bad night for TV, or the worst night in a long while. Tuesday, July 26, 2016. Redirection. I leave Vendue with so many valedictories from the staff that I feel like a departing, seldom-seen cousin. One of them gives me deliciously simple exit instructions. Just drive a block to East Bay Street, take a left, then stay on it. It becomes I-26, and takes me all the way to my next stop, Knoxville, some 360 miles down the road. Sounds easy enough. It isn't. About 75 miles up the highway we begin a very noticeable climb as we prepare to cross the Appalachian Mountains. We top out at the Eastern Continental Divide, which is at 2820 feet at the point where I road crosses it. My Beetle handles the ups, downs and curves well. This is where a manual transmission shows its stuff. On the other hand, many large trucks claim the road, often lining up in convoys about eight of ten trucks long. They're hard to ride in front or in back of. The constant curving of the road makes it more challenging still. I just grind away at it until I get to where I'm headed. I've been to Knoxville twice before. The first was during the city's World's Fair in the 1970s. I don't remember much about it, driving as I was from Nashville to northern Indiana. The second was on my final return home from our Katrina refuge in Washington, D. C., when I decided that I had driven too far the first day out. Mary Ann continues to chide me about my incompetence in using the GPS aspect of my smart phone, which isn't as smart as hers. It doesn't talk, for example. While using it does indeed show the way to where I'm going, it's hard to read the electronic map and drive at the same time. Finding the hotel MA reserved for me here in Knoxville is further complicated by impassible streets separating me from the hotel. And the only signage on the Four Points hotel could not be seen until one is about twenty feet away from it. At last, I had the room clerk talk me in, but only with great difficulty. She and I would laugh about it when I arrived. I flop down for a nap, with my mind on the allure of a cocktail afterwards. The hotel is clearly designed for Millennial tastes, and so is the restaurant's menu. I get a Manhattan and feel the nervousness from all the day's driving drift away. The food was nothing much. It started well with a soup of beef and cabbage, which tasted a lot better than it sounds. Then a salad, then a very ill-designed Thai-style chicken dish, which wasn't that at all. The place seems to be brand-new, and a little stiff at that. But I didn't care. Just wanted to watch some television (which isn't getting any better). A pretty dull day, hardly worth writing about. Well, wait. There is the Louisville & Nashville railroad depot around the block from the hotel. The L&N was one of the major passenger lines serving New Orleans in the golden days of train travel. The station certainly looked like an auspicious place from which to catch a train. Wednesday, July 27, 2016. Halfway To Home. I cancel the hotel that MA booked for me in Nashville. My original plan was to go there, then take the Natchez Trace--which begins in Nashville--to Jackson, Mississippi, and from there go home. But once again, when I add up the mileage, it becomes onerous. My prime motivation now is to get home and begin unwinding. Instead, I book a room in Birmingham, which makes for a nice, easy day's roll of 300 miles. It also gives time to jump off the Interstate and move over to US 11, the original main road in the direction I'm headed. The highway is pleasantly rural, with small towns full of buildings and businesses that would be familiar to a time traveler from the 1940s or so. The hotel wasn't much, but the price was right: $80. It's one of a half-dozen hostelries in a large shopping area, with everything from Walmart down to specialty shops. An adjacent area is full of chain restaurants. The room clerk said that his recommendation for dining is Landry's. I didn't tell him we had one of those back home. He's probably right about the relative goodness of Landry's and the other places there. I wind up going to dinner at O'Charley's, a chain that's often written about in restaurant industry magazines. I'd never been there before, but the menu was exactly what I expected to find, with its big hamburgers, Mexican dishes, basic seafood, fried chicken nuggets (with a dipping sauce to make it seem special). The restaurant is full. I take a spot at the bar. The young woman running the bar is overwhelmed with work, and not very good at it. I order a Manhattan, and get what tastes like chilled straight whiskey with a couple of cherries. My dinner begins with a surprisingly good chicken and tortilla soup. Then a salad, then a platter of fried catfish--again, better than I expect. A lot is missing from the service--little things like forks and knives and napkins. And I knew that even if I asked to have the dishes brought out one at a time, I would get the entire order simultaneously. This is something chain restaurants could not do more throughly if they were actually trying to put all four courses onto the counter at once. It all boils down to this: we are very lucky in New Orleans in that the chains don't form a majority of restaurants. I try one last time to find something entertaining on the telly. I find something: "Mrs. Doubtfire," a movie in which Robin Williams plays a character who, in order to saver his career and his marriage, disguises himself as an old British lady who is willing to be the nanny and housekeeper for his own wife and kids. He does this through the agency of extreme cross-dressing technique, as well as his own ability to do many different voices. At the end, the family is reunited, and the British-lady character gets her own television show aimed at kids. Later, I find myself asleep but still watching the tube. I sit up in the bed and wait to see what's coming on next. There is a commercial on now. It is followed by another, and another, and yet another. I wonder how many will be shown. I count nine, at which point I fall asleep again. If this sounds like pure waste of time, it is. But back in the days when I took vacations like this at least anually, I found it all entertaining--enough so that I can still recall in great detail all the motels I stayed in, the TV shows I watched, and the bad restaurants I dined in. I am thankful that Mary Ann turned me away from that habit. Well, it's all about to end. Thursday, July 28, 2016. The Last Road. The last day of my final road trip started agreeably. The free breakfast buffet in the hotel wasn't much, but it was just enough. Juice, coffee, make-em-yourself waffles, breakfast sausage (but no bacon), small pucks of sort-of scrambled eggs. . . but that was about it. The waffles and sausage were good enough to make me feel as if a meal had transpired. I'm gone at around eight. The I-459 is full of cars and trucks zooming along at top speed in a light rain. It gets even worse as the highway becomes the unified I-20 and I-59. I just put up with it. But this route carries a rich load of reminiscence for me. I came this way in 1977 to research what would be my biggest freelance writing gig ever until I started writing books. I was paid handsomely--including expenses, the only time anyone reimbursed me for that--to check out the cutting edge of the restaurants and bars of Atlanta for BMW. The German automaker had its sponsored race driver coming to take part in a race, and they wanted to show him off as a man of fine tastes. I hung around for two weeks eating and drinking. The article was accepted, translated into German, and published. Two decades later, this string of highways carried Jude and me and a number of his Boy Scout friends to summer Scout camp in northeast Alabama. We did it three times, resulting in some of the most cherished memories of my life. Some of the least enjoyable times came a few years later, when this was on our Hurricane Katrina escape route to Washington, D.C. Indeed, the route I'm traveling today is a lot like the one that brought me back home permanently as I left the rest of my family temporarily behind. The rain stops, but a new plague appears: extra-wide house trailers on the highway. Sometimes they come in in groups of five or ten. They seem always to be either right ahead of me or right behind me. I don't know which is the more threatening. I thought I would escape them when I-59 broke away from the I-20. No such luck. Finally, at Hattiesburg. I dump out of the expressway and move to the old highway: the ever-present US 11. It was the first country road worthy of the name in my earliest days of driving a car. Its rolling hills show more relief than seems possible so close to the lowlands of Louisiana and southern Mississippi. It's still a wonderful little-traveled but well-maintained two-lane blacktop. And there was the vacation of 1983, when I drove the entirety of US 11 from New Orleans to Canada in one fell swoop of seven days. And now I understand why on that trip I felt I had to stop in a town called Moira in extreme upstate New York. After only about a hundred miles from Watertown, I felt too exhausted to go on. At thirty-one years old! Yes, long-distance driving can do that to one. So I am aglow at the prospect of turning into the driveway of the Cool Water Ranch at around four in the afternoon. The dogs and the cats are happy to see me. Mary Ann isn't, because she's across the lake hosting my radio show. My romance with the long, long road is over. I don't even want to think about the next thing to end.