Hi Gram!

You don’t really think about how big Texas is unless you’re driving through it. The sun is shining, there’s beautiful southwestern landscape all around, everybody you meet is friendly, and you’re having a great drive. Then the sun sets, the stars come out, and it starts to be further and further between towns. Eventually, after a few hours of podcasts and driving, I started getting tired and decided to pull over and get a little sleep. The uninitiated might think that they’d driven halfway across the state by then. Certainly, after a few hundred miles, most of Texas would be behind me, right? I’d barely made a dent, not even a quarter of the way across. I was still a few hours from San Antonio, and that’s nowhere near the border. I’ve driven this route before, though, so I didn’t let it get my spirits down. I just put up my makeshift curtains, crawled into my sleeping bag, and entered dreamland. I woke up a few hours later, longer than I had planned to sleep, and went inside to grab some breakfast and stock up on something to drink. I started to reach for a can in the cooler just inside the door before realizing that cooler was full of beer.

Most places I’ve been, the beer is in a standup cooler in the back corner of the store. Not in Texas! They had tall cans of beer sitting on ice just inside the door. I’m not much of a beer drinker, especially when I have a few hundred more miles to drive, so I grabbed some iced tea for the road and yogurt for breakfast, then headed back to my car. I headed east for another bajillion miles, passing through San Antonio during off-peak hours. I thought about stopping and going down to the riverwalk, but it’s not as magical when you’re by yourself. I kept driving for another six or seven lifetimes before getting to the north side of Houston, where my buddy James lives. James and I met in college over twenty five years ago, where we hung out with a group of friends that still talk to this day. After college, truck driving, and moving to Utah, I ended up living in the apartment across the hall from him up in Elk Grove Village for a couple years. Once I moved to Ottawa, we hung out anytime I was back up in that area for work. He moved to Houston with a job transfer a few years ago and says he really enjoys living down there. We spent the next few days catching up on life, watching movies, going to dinner, and hanging out. He had a seminar all day on Saturday, and “Festivale”, the build-up to Mardi Gras, was happening that weekend in New Orleans, so I packed up Saturday morning and kept going on my trek to Florida.
I headed for New Orleans while I asked my friend Lisa what I should look for, where should I go, what should I do while in New Orleans. Lisa and her husband Todd go down there a few times a year and love the area. Her advice? “Go any other weekend!” New Orleans is already a crazy town for parties, but Mardi Gras brings in tourists from all over the world, many of them people in their early 20’s looking to drink, party, and throw beads. I was going to get there in the early afternoon, so I decided to check it out and see what all the hype is about. I drove into town a little before I ran into traffic, and I thought “well, of course there’s traffic. It’s a big party.” When I got a little further into town, there were just people in the streets paying no attention to the cars trying to get through, other people lining the streets with tents, barbecues, coolers, and ladders to stand on so they could see over the people on the curb. I finally parked and walked around a little before deciding to come back another year. I might have pushed through and explored twenty years ago, but I wasn’t ready to show up announced, with no plans and nobody with me to share the experience, when I’m not much of a drinker and I had to be in good condition when I got to Florida in a few days. I got back to the car and kept going east.

It’s kind of cool the way Louisiana is setup. There’s a lot of swamps, marshy areas, and places prone to flooding. They were smart enough to build the interstate up above all of that. In the low areas, it feels like you’re driving along a bridge for miles, and in the higher areas, it’s just a road through countryside. I didn’t see much wildlife from the highway, but I imagine there’s all kind of birds, fish, crocodiles, and who knows what other wildlife living in those swamps. Alabama and Mississippi were similar, just driving along a highway laid a few miles from the coast, passing a small town every now and again. I got into Florida, and thought “wow, I’m almost there!” Boy, was I wrong. The Florida panhandle is a long, long drive, then you turn south and get to drive a long way to get where I was going. But I’ll tell you more about that in the next letter.