Nathan posted on July 05, 2008 18:20
Saturday, July 5, 2008
We drove Mississippi today. It kind of felt like we came in through the back door. We drove through hills and woods, on tiny dirt roads which, if they have not already served as the setting for a Pulitzer-prize winning novel about darkly hidden family secrets, stubborn caste prejudices, and the strange friendships that transcend them, well, I'm sure they soon will. After a few miles of peering into the small but enormous lives of back-woods Mississippians, we passed into flat farm-lands. After that, the rest of Mississippi was more of the same, between tiny woods communities and the considerably nicer farmlands in between.
Today has afforded the most off-road-ish driving so far. We had a higher dirt-to-pavement ratio, and we got to drive on a couple of mud-splashing roads, a two-track, and a couple of levees. At one point we missed a turn, and Nathan turned the Jeep around in more of a slide than a turn. Awesome!
We met with two couples who were traveling the TAT in Russian military motorcycles (make: Ural) with sidecars. Those things are pretty sweet: they look like they were made in the 1950's, but they are 2006 models. I guess the Russian military just found a design that works and stuck with it.
Bathed in another creek, this time a shallow one underneath an old timber bridge. Had to stop for pigs. I got pictures of that. Nathan was non-plussed by my compulsion to make friends with the lovely pig who was blocking our way. I'm not sure why...
We passed into Arkansas this evening, where most of the crops are rice in--well, you don't call them paddies in the U.S., do you? Whatever; they are still growing in water. There are lots of rivers and swamps, too, to the point that we were concerned about finding a dry place park the Jeep for the night. We started looking for campgrounds in the nearby towns, but the nearby towns had populations around 700. No camping.
One town (Hazen) has a couple of motels, and all of a sudden a hot shower and AC sounded so tempting (last night was extremely damp and sticky, even though it wasn't too hot). The GPS showed a tiny road running parallel to the interstate that ended up right by the motels. We thought that would be more fun, and it was certainly the most direct route from where we were, so we took off down a tiny dirt road through the woods. It involved driving around a gate, but we were soon traversing more of a leaf-covered path-ish thing through even thicker woods. The brush soon became high enough that we couldn't quite see the road, but we could see a set of tracks where someone else had recently driven, so despite an increasingly softer and wetter ground, we pushed on. Until we came to a river with no bridge and a steep bank. We got stuck on a bank of earth that required a bit of winching, but no harm done.
Except for one thing: there was an uncommon number of mosquitoes in the w oods there, and during the winching, they moved into the Jeep and set up shop. I took a picture of mosquitoes on the Jeep's roof. They hung like bats from the roof, dropping down for tasty little snacks.
Good supper, shower, and AC tonight.
Posted by EHenson at 7:50 PM