Gloom, Despair and Agony on me...

Biloxi, Mississippi, Sunday the 31st.

What a crappy day.  High of 8C and rainy with a stiff breeze making it feel much colder.  A month ago I’d have been happy in shorts and a t-shirt — or at least able to pretend to be comfortable.  Today, I had to dig my leather jacket and my wool hat out of the closet.  This is our 28th day on the road and we’re probably a little homesick and without much to distract us from that given the weather.  At home, Alex and Sarah and the boys faced up to 25cm of new snow and the road in to the camp was closed by fallen trees and more than 30cm — and the old snow is still deep on the ground; that would almost be better at least for our mood. Clearly, we’ve been spoiled by nearly 3 weeks of perfect, really perfect, weather;  It’s been 70s, sunny, low humidity for 24 of our 28 days on the road; it’s like we’ve been travelling back and forth between LA and San Diego...

Lacking energy and enthusiasm, we drove out to an antique mall that was more of a flea market and bordering on a garage sale; but our hearts weren’t in it.  Our challenge with antiquing these days is that the house is already full of junk — overflowing in fact.  When we get home we’ll be selling a bunch of it on eBay, some in local auctions and then have a huge garage sale. We’ll probably need the money as well... So everything we see that we might want to buy in an antique store is just another piece that we have to pull out and sell at the other end; full is full. Lorraine was tempted by a pair of  Shawnee Pig Salt and Pepper Shakers that would fit our Shawnee American art pottery collection well.  But when she found out that it was $10 each and not $10 for the pair she walked away.

And frankly, on a rainy, windy, cold Sunday in Bilox there isn’t a lot else we wanted to do.  Walking on the beach — we’d be arrested for odd behaviour; Casinos — we might as well have a little bonfire made of money. We’ll hit Beauvoir, Jeff Davis’s final home and museum, tomorrow. If I’d know the the weather would be this bad for a few days then I would have shot past Biloxi and New Orleans and on into southern Texas to find the sun again and maybe someplace more our speed.

So, instead we drove a little and stopped for lunch looking out over an abandoned empty beach, our mood as gray as the sky.  The restaurant, Whitecaps matches our mood as well. It’s a seafood place from the 70’s trying to look like a restaurant from the 30’s with a menu suspended somewhere in time between the two. We have a mimosa with supermarket o.j. and redolent of the cheapest of wal-mart sparkling wine — perfect for our mood.  We have the Sunday special,  good old-fashioned shrimp and grits; the grits coarse and buttery, the shrimp sautéed with bacon and green onions and mushrooms in a completely traditional way that Duncan Hines would have been proud to recommend in 1935. The decor was heavy with taxidermied sharks, crabs, swordfish and rays — all from the early 70’s. I’m guessing this place, stuck on a mini hill may have been one of the few to escape Katrina.  Biloxi itself has that kind of air — most of the old buildings are actually replicas, Casinos never bring an air of permanence and once you get back off the strip everything has a run-down depressed kind of air — maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s our mood.

After lunch, it was nap time — serially. I fell asleep on the couch watching The Office ( running in a marathon on the Comedy Channel).  When I woke up  I took the dogs for a walk while Lorraine crawled under a blanket on the bed and fell asleep.

And then it was time to work on the blog — nothing like a journal on a day that you feel blah and haven’t actually done much. We’re even just having leftovers for dinner.

So I’ll take the last bit of this to recap the trip to date.  We left March 4th — this is our 28th day on the road. We’re roughly half-way through the trip with no specific plans for the back-half yet — we’ll wing it from here and are open to suggestions.

This is our 9th park ( not counting the Cabela’s Parking lot — way back on March 4th).  I think my favourite was the Fort Picken’s National Park although I really like Ho-Hum on the gulf and Lake Oklawaha KOA was interesting.  Lorraine shares those favourites ( although my overflowing the black tank at Fort Pickens does apparently detract).  Our highlights would be making dinner for JC and Nancy in Naples; the Corkscrew Swamp; the walks on the beach at Ho-Hum, and dinners with Mike and Peggy in Richmond and Leah and Stephen in Virginia Beach; a great drive and lunch with Norton and Phyll in Homosassa was a really special surprise.   Lorraine was especially impressed with Pensacola and would move there tomorrow, I think.

We’ve pulled the trailer a little over 4400km ( not counting side trips like looking for Ogilvies); that’s 2700 miles for my American friends in ten legs.  The longest leg was 920km on the first day from Round Lake to Newark, Delaware; yesterday’s trip from Fort Pickens to Biloxi was only 225km.

Tomorrow the weather will be better, our mood mostly reset.  We’ll head to Beauvoir — our outlook will be  beautiful.   Check out this link. We’re not really quite, that depressed....