December 5

Dec. 4 -> 5

Yesterday we got to Sweetwater, TN around dinnertime and parked along the side of WalMart. This morning we drove around the building as soon as the Coca Cola truck moved and were off. Rte 75 through Chattanooga, then 59 to 20, which will take us west for daaaaays.

Alabama: this is a lovely state, even in her rain gear. Alabama has beautiful rest stops and it’s much warmer there. The best moment of this part of the day was when a tree snowed yellow and brown leaves on us. Much better than real snow ;) They just don’t do detours well, we spent almost an hour on the secondary road between two exits. It involved a left turn at a traffic light with a very short left-turn-green. Apparently the line of cars and trucks puffing diesel fumes through the little town didn’t make enough of an impression on the employees at the police station on that very corner, since there was no officer directing traffic to get more vehicles through…

Mississippi: rte 20 is in terrible shape, the RV rattled so hard that one of the little doors burst open. On the other hand, we passed through a large national forest with beautiful pine trees (a variety we didn’t recognize). It was so far between rest stops that my back and one of my legs cramped up in the male-truck-driver-sized driver’s seat. I think I’ll tuck a little pillow in my back tomorrow.

Louisiana: the road surface is much better and brought us speedily to Monroe, where there is a SuperWalMart next to Catfish Charlie’s restaurant. Obviously, since we were in Louisiana, we weren’t going to eat at McDonalds. We each had a thin and crispy catfish fillet in a basket with deep fried pickles and deep fried red onions, Henk’s “snappy”, mine regular. We bought butter cake for dessert and ate it all. The cash register lady, when she realized we had never been there before, told us to come back to tell her what we thought of the food, and was surprised we ate all of the butter cake in one go. I guess we don’t know the butter cake conventions.