Month: May 2023

Then Came the Last Day of May

It’s said the West is nice this time of year, that’s what they say

My favorite heavy metal band from the 70s was Blue Oyster Cult and the title of one of my favorite songs from them almost matches the title of this post – Days instead of Day.

This is a Public Service Announcement: If you ever need to stay overnight in Leesville, Louisiana do not stay in the Holiday Inn Express there. Stay at the rundown motel next door with the swimming pool that is 3/4 full of green algae water, it’ll probably be nicer. Here is a partial list of things that were wrong:

  1. The rug between the beds was not vacuumed, there was lint and what was possibly clothes soap powder on the floor.
  2. There was also a small round red squishy thing near one of the beds, possibly a cat toy.
  3. Inside the closet were the totally dry swimsuits of two small children on the hotels hangers.
  4. When you turned on the TV there was nothing but snow. It defaults to the cable input which is not connected. You have to hit the I/O button on the side of the TV to select the Component Input.
  5. The TV has Direct TV and no guide. Even if it did it wouldn’t help, there is no other way to select the channel except using the up/down toggle on the remote.
  6. Every other channel you scroll through is either an all infomercial our is not part of the package the hotel has bought.
  7. The screen on the window, which I didn’t even consider opening, was torn and the bottom third was gone.
  8. The shower head in the bath was not the typical HIE unit but a random brand thing that had a spray selector that wouldn’t change, so you ended up with a spray that resembled the pattern of Death Star ray.
  9. Surprise, the bathroom floor was dirty.
  10. The usually mediocre breakfast was shitty, fewer than usual selections, food not really hot and the sometime saving grace cinnamon bun was so dry as to be inedible.

Maybe just bypass Leesville entirely. A couple miles up the road from the hotel I found a coffee shop, so I thought maybe I can get a good caramel latte there. The last two I have tried on this trip, Green River, UT and Hammond, LA have been respectfully, awful and then sub-par. Well, the one from “Back To Nature” was worse than the other two, it was served in a Styrofoam cup and I can’t be sure, but the caramel shot I think was a squirt of Hershey’s caramel ice cream sundae syrup.

To top off the day just after crossing into Texas either the box truck or SUV following on its tail tossed a rock up and plunked the lower part of the windshield creating a nice star crack. It didn’t seem to spread any on the rest of the 300 mile drive, but I cicrcled it tonight with a Sharpie so I can see if it does expand further.

At least we don’t end up like the three kids in Blue Oyster Cult’s song.

It wasn’t until the car suddenly stopped
In the middle of a cold and barren place
And the other guy turned and spilled
Three boys blood, did they know a trap had been laid?

Fort Johnson?

We probably didn’t start out today’s drive from Hammond on the planned route from last night, but eventually we did meet up with it towards the end somewhere as there aren’t that many ways to get there from southeast Louisiana. As it turned out, a bit of today’s route was a repeat of some of our Moss Motoring Challenge trip roads of 2014. We even ate lunch at the same spot we did a little over 9 years ago, Lea’s Lunchroom in LeCompte.

We did manage to get to one point of interest from Roadside America though. The small cemetery next to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Moreauville had, among the usual above ground crypts and mausoleums, a tall black crucifix with an unusual plague at its base that reads “…disappeared Nov. 23, 1953, Intercepting a UFO over Canadian Border…”

Tonight’s stop is in Leesville, Louisiana just outside the gates of a large Army installation called Fort Polk which is named named after a Confederate general from the Civil War, Leonidas Polk. At least for the next week or two when it will be renamed Fort Johnson in honor of Sgt. William Henry Johnson, a North Carolina native who served in the Army during World War I and earned an African American Medal of Honor.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Bright Colors Edition of SORT
As of Monday, May 29, 2023 at 7:00 PM central time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2006 Porsche Cayman 2002 Jeep Wrangler 2013 BMW 135is
A couple of perennial favorites in the sports and off-road categories with a smaller version, from the usual car company, for the touring category.

Here is what two week’s ago cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 1967 Austin Mini Cooper Sold for $24,067 on 5/18/23
Off-Road: Meyers Manx Dune Buggy Sold for $15,550 on 5/19/23
Touring: 1999 Acura NSX-T Sold for $116,000 on 5/21/23

Route Change


One last Laurel photo…

We were supposed to stay here another day, but a opportunity to visit with a couple of folks who live on the “North Shore”, which is what the people here in these parts call anything on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, so we bailed on our stay to head south.

First up was another trip to Mandeville for café au lait and beignets with a friend. Halfway down I-59 south we got a text that she couldn’t make it because of a prior arrangement she forgot about. Not a problem we were still going to the Café Du Monde for treats, but we changed the location to Covington instead of Mandeville because it was more on our way to the second rendezvous in Hammond. This is where we visited with the mother of Sally, who we on our way to see in Santa Fe, and a second Mom to Donna when she was living in New Orleans back in the 60s & 70s.

So now, tomorrow instead of going from Laurel, MS to Leesville, LA we are driving from Hammond, LA to Leesville. Before we were going to be heading due west on US84 for most of it, but now we have to go west northwest and there are a lot of rivers (including the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya), bayous and swampy areas that preclude an easy direct route. This afternoon we created a convoluted route and we are hopeful of being able stay on it tomorrow.

Side Road Trip

This morning we took a little side trip to a place we spent three years at, about 40 years ago, Meridian, Mississippi. After returning from Guam and a 6-month bit of schooling in Tennessee, I was assigned to NAS Meridian. Donna worked on her college degree while I worked at the Navy base. We found an apartment in a complex on the north side of town that allowed her to go the college without having to deal with downtown and I could head due north to the Navy base. Believe it or not, but that apartment complex is still there and going strong. We drove through the loop and while it did look familiar neither one of us could pick out the building we lived in.

We visited the campus where Donna went to school, but it wasn’t totally recognizable. We also drove a part of the route from the apartment complex to the Navy base that I drove and would sometimes bicycle ride to (Donna would often ride halfway and return back home.) We drove some through downtown and it was almost completely unfamiliar. We stumbled onto the US Government complex building and took the above photo because it included the Post Office. It is amazing how much detail is lost after 40 years, including neither of us remembering just how hilly the terrain was there.

On the way from Laurel to Meridian we drove up on US11. Which in a fit of madness and youth we once rode our bikes on (loaded with a pup tent, 2 sleeping bags and a white gas stove) as part of a 4 day trip to her Mom’s house in New Orleans. We didn’t expect to be able pick out anything we’d remember, because we would have been traveling at 1/5 the speed we were driving and because pretty much any two-lane backroad through southern Mississippi looks the same.

About three quarters of the way to Meridian, Donna noticed a sign for a Confederate Cemetery as we whizzed by. So we u-turned and went back to check it out. We drove into a cemetery, but it seemed a bit too recent when I noticed, just across some railroad tracks the familiar sight of small white marble headstone in neat rows. So we went over to the right place. Even if their cause was misguided, on this Memorial Day weekend it is still important to remember those that gave their all.

Even if this little side trip didn’t bring distinct memories back it was nice way to spend a morning. We got back to Laurel and had lunch at an actual local restaurant. We have mostly eaten at the VRBO or at southern chain type places we remember fondly from our South Carolina days, but we can highly recommend the Texas Pitmaster BBQ if you are ever here.

Their Hometown

Today and tomorrow are scheduled down days at a VRBO here in Laurel. The population of Laurel is roughly half of what Klamath Falls has, but somehow it seemed twice as crowded as our home town. Especially around Mississippi route 15 which runs north/south and is that street in every town that is lined with practically every chain restaurant & stores.

Today we drove into downtown Laurel to walk around a few blocks and this place has Ben and Erin Napier’s fingerprints all over it. Because it is a weekend there are lots of tourists (like us) wandering around both on foot and in cars. We walked into a couple of the stores related to this HGTV juggernaut, Scotsman General Store & Woodshop and Laurel Mercantile Co., and looked but couldn’t find anything we really wanted to spend money on.

We also did not take the 7 Passenger Golf Cart Tour through Laurel’s Historic District and ride by featured homes from HGTV’s Home Town, but it did seem like wherever we went there was a tour golf cart there too. Somehow all this has turned the downtown into an under construction Disneyesque place. There are a lot of HGTV/Hometown/Napier shiny new things interspersed with still unoccupied, rundown buildings.

34,000 Rivets


There may or may not be 34,000 rivets in the bridges across the Mississippi at Natchez, but the Mini did in fact turn over the 34,000 mile mark just outside Ben and Erin Napier’s Hometown.

No Roadside America stuff today.
Didn’t do any geocaching either.
Just drove from Natchitoches to Laurel.
Took one whole picture. See above.