The New Orleans St. Charles Streetcar, all decked out for the holidays.
David Burrow, on Long Beach in Mississippi on Christmas Eve, 2000.
The New Orleans St. Charles Streetcar, all decked out for the holidays.
David Burrow, on Long Beach in Mississippi on Christmas Eve, 2000.
It's strange to think that as I write this we're having record heat in May, but Iowans certainly don't need to be reminded how cold and snowy the winter of 2000-2001 was. Fortunately, in the middle of it, Margaret and I were able to take a bit of a break and spend the holidays in the sunny South.
This will probably be shorter than most of the travelogues I have written over the years. That's partly because the trip itself was not a long one, and also because I had already been to all these destinations. It was fascinating, though, to see how different the places were in winter, compared to what I had seen in summer-not to mention how different the southern winter was to what we had up north. I hope these differences might also provide a just a bit of interest for you who are reading this.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2000 (149 miles)
Algona, Iowa to Decorah, Iowa
School got out early today. I left the second the bell rang and headed east down highway 18. It was a frigid day, and I was thankful to have my Metro (whose heater works very well) rather than my old Colt, which always seemed cold in winter. Although winter had barely started-officially-on much of the road it already seemed as if I was driving through a tunnel, with massive cuts and vast banks of snow on either side.
I was pleased to take the new Avenue of the Saints for about a third of the way over to Margaret's. The route is still not quite complete, but it is now four lane from Interstate 35 at Clear Lake to past Charles City. This was the first time I had driven the part over by Charles City, and it was very nice. I especially appreciated it since it was rather windy, and snow was starting to drift back over the road. On a four lane they were managing to keep at least one lane in each direction clear.
The four-lane gave out at Charles City, and I drove through drifts along highway 18 to New Hampton. It wasn't anything too terrible-certainly less worrisome than what we would face later in the winter. Mostly it just made for a very bumpy ride.
Even though I didn't really need gas, I bought gas in New Hampton. At $1.22 a gallon, this was the cheapest gas I had seen for a while (… and much cheaper than we'd be seeing come spring). I warmed myself a bit with a cup of coffee and then continued on to Decorah.
Margaret and I had arranged to meet at the McDonalds in Decorah. She was late arriving, so I filled some time sipping on coffee and having one of their tasty yogurt parfaits. Eventually Margaret showed up, and we went out to dinner at a place called the Victorian Rose, a nice restaurant located in an old restored hotel in downtown Decorah. It's a pleasant place, although the menu was really quite limited and tended toward the pretentious side.
After dinner we drove northward to Lanesboro, Minnesota. Lanesboro is full of gentrified old Victorian buildings, and the whole place is really more of a tourist trap than a town. Among the other local attractions is a small professional theatre company. Margaret is a high-level patron of the theatre, which entitles her to unlimited tickets to their many shows. She treated me to their Christmas production. The show was apparently put together at the last minute, when the theatre had difficulty getting royalty clearance for the show they had intended to do. Instead they produced an original show called (I think) The Giving Star, which merged a variety of fairy tales with the Christmas story. It was surprisingly well done and made quite a pleasant start to the holidays.
It was very cold once the play got out-well below zero-and I was hoping I wouldn't have any problems starting my car. Fortunately, I didn't. Indeed, while the Colt had perennial problems in sub-zero weather, the Metro has always seemed to start right up (it's more of a problem in very hot weather). I think it may help that the car is made in Canada; they must design it for bitter winters.
We made our way back to Decorah and then slowly and carefully wound eastward to Margaret's place in the country. The county roads were snowpacked and slippery, and at night they seemed downright dangerous to me. In fact, this morning Margaret had gone into the ditch on her way to work. We crept up the hills and around the curves this evening, but eventually we made it safely to her home.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2000 (602 miles)
Decorah, Iowa to Hayti, MO
I didn't sleep especially well last night. Part of that was the excitement of going on a trip, and part was that I stayed up quite late reading a book I found on the shelf in Margaret's guest room. The book was about "friendly architecture"-all the things cities should do to make buildings friendly to people. It was a bit on the preachy side, concluding that virtually every building constructed in the 20th Century was horrible. It did make for interesting reading, though.
It had snowed overnight (probably 3 inches or so), but the weather was warmer. The plows had not been out yet, so we plowed our own path along the county roads back to Decorah. In some ways this was better than last night, because the fresh snow provided a bit of traction so it wasn't quite so slick.
We stopped for gas in Calmar, and while we were there it started to snow harder. Predictions had been for just a couple of inches, but that total had already been exceeded and this was obviously going to be a fairly heavy storm. Visibility was bad, and Margaret drove very carefully as we headed southward toward Oelwein and Independence. With the temperature warming rapidly, what we were most worried about was ice. There's traction on snow, but it's almost impossible to move without sliding on ice. Our fears seemed to be confirmed when we turned onto Interstate 380 near Urbana. All the way south to Cedar Rapids the ditches were littered with cars that had gone off the road. I was all but ready to suggest that we cancel the trip-or at least postpone things a day. Margaret is a more adventuresome driver than me, though, and we keep on heading south.
We exited in Cedar Rapids and followed streets across the city. That seemed wise. The streets had melted down to slush, while the elevated interstate still seemed very slippery. Margaret stopped at a Jiffy Lube in Cedar Rapids to have her oil changed, and while there we had lunch at a nearby sandwich shop. This was a Blimpie. I'd never eaten at one before, and I don't know that I'll be rushing back. The place was dirty, and the food didn't seem especially fresh. It was filling, though-and it also killed time, which today was a definite plus.
Killing time was good, because it allowed the temperature to continue to rise and for traffic to wear down the ice coating on the interstate. By the time we re-entered I-380, conditions were much improved. There were still cars in the ditch everywhere, but we were able to cruise at roughly the speed limit without feeling like our lives were in danger. We continued south to Iowa City, where the road becomes highway 218 and continues as the southern leg of Avenue of the Saints to Mount Pleasant.
By the time we got to Mt. Pleasant it was a beautiful day-clear and bright, with the sun reflecting brightly off the snow. The roads were completely clear, although there were still massive drifts and cuts everywhere. We continued southward to Donnelson and then crossed into Missouri on highway #394. This will one day be the Avenue of the Saints, and the nothing little road already has big blue signs advertising that fact about every two miles.
I had brought along a copy of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol that I acquired years ago. (It's probably literally decades ago; I can remember buying it at B. Dalton's in Burlington-which would mean at the oldest I was in college at the time, and it was very likely high school.) Once the weather improved, as we drove along I read aloud the story of Scrooge's visitation and transformation. I love A Christmas Carol; it's just about my favorite piece of literature. I've enjoyed the many plays and movies based on it, but none of them really does justice to the book. Dickens was a master of the language, and I delighted in reading aloud all his carefully chosen words. The book kept us occupied for the bulk of our drive down to the Gulf Coast.
We stopped for gas in Hannibal and continued following highway 61 (the Missouri section of Avenue of the Saints) down to the southern Saint-St. Louis. We went around the city on the beltway-which was busy, but manageable, and then continued south on Interstate 55. I was amazed that everything was still completely snow-covered, even in southern Missouri. There were no longer the massive drifts we had in Iowa, but they had several inches of snow with a crust on top that wasn't going to be melting any time soon. The snow cover was general all the way south to about Cape Girardeau (which would be about the same latitude as Wichita or Norfolk or San Francisco).
We stopped at a rest area somewhere on I-55 in southern Missouri. When we pulled in the place was entirely deserted. I don't think I've ever before been to an interstate rest area where I was the only patron. It was really kind of an eerie feeling. We took care of our business, and by the time we finished, a single trucker had joined us in the parking lot. When we left, he was there all by himself.
By now it was too dark to read, so we listened to tapes of Christmas tapes for the rest of our drive across Missouri. By the time we passed Sikeston we finally started seeing some patches in the snow cover, and it was more brown than white when we reached our final destination, Hayti (pronounced HAY-tie), the self-proclaimed "capital of the bootheel" in extreme southeast Missouri. We checked into Hayti's Comfort Inn, which was old and cramped, but adequate for our needs and then had a pasta supper at the Pizza Hut next door.
It was amusing to hear the TV weathercasters complaining about the unseasonable cold they were having in the area. They were expecting a low in the lower 20s tonight, with highs in the upper 30s tomorrow. Iowa, by contrast, would have 20 below for Christmas and it would be well into the New Year before the temperature made it above freezing. We felt like it was positively toasty here, yet the locals were all miserable with cold. I supposed it's all what you're used to.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2000 (444 miles)
Hayti, MO to Long Beach, Mississippi
We switched to light jackets instead of heavy coats for out drive today. We continued south into Arkansas, and the patches of snow continued to thin out there. By the time we reached Memphis we had hit the absolute end of the snow.
There was road construction in Memphis. (I think there has been road construction every time I've ever been to Memphis), but on Sunday morning we were able to get through it without any problem.
We stopped for gas at a ratty little convenience store in the middle of the forest somewhere between Memphis and Grenada, Mississippi. It was fascinating to see how much the weather had changed. It wasn't hot and steamy, like the Mississippi summer. Rather, it was like a fresh day in spring. The temperature was somewhere in the 50s, and with a jacket it was downright comfortable.
I was also intrigued to see how different the forest looked in winter, compared to the summers I had been in grad school. The vast majority of Mississippi is covered in very dense forest. Every interstate in the state is almost literally a tunnel through the forest. In summer the trees seem to loom over the road, and their lush canopy makes it seem dark even at midday. In "winter" (or the Dixie equivalent of it), the forest was much less dense. Most of the deciduous trees were either bare or just budding (again, just like springtime), so there were just the tall flash pines shading the road. The countryside looked much more open, and really much more inviting than it did in summer.
We went around Jackson on the beltway and then stopped at the southern suburb of Richland for a bite to eat. We hadn't really had breakfast, and it wasn't really time for lunch yet, so we just snacked at a Krystal restaurant. Krystal is a Southern institution that features tiny square burgers, similar to the White Castle burgers I enjoy in Chicago (but with more mustard). Here they were also featuring so-called "chili pups", miniature chili dogs sized to match the mini-burgers. We snacked on a bit of that junk food and then continued southward.
Before long we made it to Hattiesburg, the town I know the best in all of Dixie, because it's where I went to graduate school. I noticed an amazing amount of changes as we headed into town on highway 49. They've built a new convention complex and several new motels and restaurants. The closer we got to the town center, though, the more familiar everything seemed. USM looked exactly the same as it had ten years ago, and I'm sure old Wilbur Hall where I lived hasn't improved any with age.
We did a bit of shopping in Hattiesburg. In particular we went to Rose's, a local discount store west of the USM campus, where I had shopped many times while a student here. They had improved Rose's slightly, but it was the cheapest place in town-not to mention one of the dirtiest.
It was warm in Hattiesburg. All the weather predictions I had checked ahead of time had implied it might be in the 50s on the Gulf Coast, and I had packed accordingly, mostly clothes appropriate for fall weather. It was a sunny 65 in Hattiesburg, and they had flowers sitting out in front of the store for sale. I was wearing a sweatshirt, and the sweatshirt was an appropriate name for it. My chief purchase at Rose's was a lightweight, short-sleeved USM football jersey, which was much more appropriate for the actual conditions than anything I had packed.
You get an idea of how relative feelings about the climate are, though, by the fact that while I was buying lightweight clothes, almost everyone in the store had on parkas. Many people we saw here and later on the trip complained about how cold the weather was. Hotel clerks apologized that our vacation was being ruined by the unseasonable weather. I guess it's just what you're used to. To me, I might as well have been in Hawaii, it was so warm.
We also stopped at the Sav-a-Center grocery store next door to Roses, where I picked up a large supply of Community® New Orleans blend coffee. It's a mixture of espresso-strength coffee and chicory, which is an acquired taste-but one I have acquired myself. It's the coffee of the Gulf Coast region. They sell the stuff to tourists in New Orleans at "souvenir" prices (like $10 a pound), but 80 miles away it's just the regular coffee you see on the supermarket shelf-no more expensive than Folgers.
After shopping we had a late lunch at Cuco's, the Mexican restaurant that my friends and I had frequented many times in college. Actually my friends and I had mostly frequented the bar; I think today was just the second time I had been in the restaurant proper. We had purposely planned a late lunch, on the theory that there would likely be little open on Christmas Eve night. We had run into problems finding places to eat in Chicago on Christmas Eve and Christmas, so we figured it was smartest to plan things assuming no evening meal. Cuco's was sort of a combination lunch and dinner, and it was a very nice meal.
After lunch we continued south from Hattiesburg, now through denser forest. It almost never freezes in southern Mississippi (although they did have hard freeze warnings the week before we were here). The forest was not so dense as it is in the height of summer, but it still managed to darken the road. We finished up Dickens and listened to a few more tapes as we made our way southward to Gulfport.
I was shocked at all the development as we headed into Gulfport. When I was a student, I headed down to the Coast almost every weekend. Gulfport then was not really a shopping destination. It had the bare necessities for the locals, and lots of tacky tourist shops along the beach. The city is not far from either New Orleans of Mobile, and I assumed the locals went to one of them for their major purchases. Today that would definitely not be necessary. At the intersection of I-10 and US 49 there's a whole new area of development, with at least two major malls, plus peripheral stores and restaurants. Today I'd venture people from New Orleans may head to Gulfport on shopping excursions, and the retail trade has to be a major part of the local economy today.
A lot of the new development comes from the addition of casinos along the Gulf Coast. More than anywhere else I've seen, casinos have really taken off in Mississippi. There are more than twenty lining the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Each is officially water-based, but the boats are permanently docked, and in many cases they've built permanent structures around them-so you wouldn't even know there was a boat there when passing by. It seems strange to me that hordes of people come down here and never even bother to notice the beautiful beaches-but their goal for vacation is just to gamble. The casinos cater primarily to busloads of tourists (mostly senior citizens) from around the country, and on the way to the casinos the buses stop at the malls on the outskirts of the city.
As with Hattiesburg, as we got into the city proper, most of Gulfport seemed unchanged. In Gulfport's case, that's rather unfortunate, because the old city is one of the dumpiest places in the South. The place is still ugly, but there was much more of a feeling of general prosperity than when I was first here. If you recall my Dixie travelogue from 1990, you'll remember my describing that the most exciting thing in downtown Gulfport was unemployed people lined up to donate blood. No one is unemployed in Gulfport today, unless it's by their own choice. The casinos and their related commerce may not be good jobs, but they are jobs-and in an area that has been poverty-stricken through most of its history, that's basically a good thing.
Downtown Gulfport may be a dump, but that was not why we were here. When we finally reached US 90 I knew again why I loved the coast. We passed the old banana docks, and right there was the beautiful open beach I remembered so well. I still find it hard to believe that so many other states spoil their beaches by allowing development right along the water. Unfortunately that's the way it is in Florida (where the whole state seems like one big condo development), in the Carolinas, and-I understand-in Texas and California. That's also how it is along much of the Great Lakes, not to mention the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado. People build right next to natural beauty, thereby spoiling the view for everybody else. It's hard to think of Mississippi as a progressive state, but here they've got almost everyone else beat. With the exception of the dockside casinos (which are fairly well spaced out), there is no development at all on the beach side of US 90. Both businesses and residences are restricted to the north side of the road, which leaves a clear, unobstructed view of the sand and water. It is unquestionably the most beautiful beach I have ever seen anywhere, and the lack of development is a big part of the reason why.
We drove along the beach through Gulfport and on to the town of Long Beach, whose name literally describes its location. Our hotel was the Sleep Inn-Long Beach, which was, like everything else, on the north side of US 90. The hotel was perpendicular to the beach, and most of the rooms at this budget hotel didn't really have much of a view. Our first-floor room was in the corner, though, and we did manage to catch a glimpse of the Gulf out our window.
It was 70 degrees this afternoon in Long Beach-can you imagine it? That's 90 degrees warmer than what we had left in Decorah. I was in a T-shirt and shorts walking along the beach … on Christmas Eve. The water itself was chilly, but the beach was very pleasant. We spent a while walking along the water's edge and then settled in to the hotel.
We needn't have worried about dinner. Every casino in the area was having a special Christmas buffet, and the whole Coast was littered with all-night restaurants, which-unlike many of their counterparts up north-actually were open 24-hours, even on holidays. Since we had had a big, late lunch, though, we made our dinner in the hotel room by snacking on crackers and cheese.
After supper we headed out along highway 90 to see what the Coast looked like lit up for the holidays. West of Long Beach is the town of Pass Christian (chris-CHAN), where the north side of the road is lined by splendid old mansions that were "summer cottages" for the rich and famous a century ago. We thought these might be elaborately decorated. A few were, but the majority had small, mostly indoor decorations, that were hard to see from the highway. We'd see a warm glow through the formal doorways or catch a glimpse of a tree through a grand window, but that was about it.
By far the most interesting thing we saw was a "Christmas tree" in a small park near the mansions in Pass Christian. I put "Christmas tree" in quotation marks, because in fact it was a live oak tree, the kind that drips with Spanish moss all over Dixie. They had constructed huge wire decorations and lined the ornaments with strings of lights. They then hung the decorations from the boughs of the oak tree (which probably required a cherry-picker to do). There were no other lights on the tree, and at night it looked as if the decorations were hanging in mid-air.
We drove back to the hotel and then spent a bit of time walking along the beach at night. That's something I'd never done before, anywhere. One thing I couldn't get over was just how dark it was. When we looked north, there were streetlights and building lights in the city, just as you would expect to see. To the south, though, it was just a wall of black. It would be fascinating (though probably a bit scary) to be on a boat at night, and I think I got a bit of that sensation here.
We had originally planned to go to church on Christmas Eve. We had considered both a Methodist church in Biloxi (about 15 miles east of our hotel) and a Catholic church on the edge of Long Beach (about 3 miles from the hotel). The Catholic church looked frankly strange. The building was very modern-a chrome pyramid that seemed to be taking off into space-and their signs made it seem as if it were just a bit too friendly for our taste. By the time we were done exploring the beach, neither of us felt like driving to Biloxi to the Methodist church, so we got our Christmas Eve religion by watching midnight mass on television. They were featuring the group of monks in Alabama that a former student of mine (Eddie Flaig) is a member of. I kept trying hard, but I never did see him among the group.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2000
Mississippi Gulf Coast, Mississippi
Like all Sleep Inns, this one featured a complimentary continental breakfast. We got up relatively late (at least by the standards of the school year) and made our way to the breakfast room to partake of it. The breakfast was extremely minimal-basically a Danish and weak juice. It broke our fast, though, which I guess was the point.
Back at the room we exchanged Christmas presents while playing holiday music in the background. It's strange celebrating Christmas in a hotel room, but the spirit of the season was there nonetheless, and we had a happy morning.
One interesting part of our Christmas was traditional British Christmas crackers. We've often celebrated with these in our family-especially since our parents died. Having read Dickens (who makes reference to them) on the way down, crackers seemed a fitting part of our holiday this year. The crackers are just big tubes decorated in wrapping paper, with tabs to pull at the ends. You and a friend (or sister) pull on the ends, a cap of gunpowder at the end of the tabs explodes and makes a loud bang, and then silly little gifts fall all over the place. An essential part of every cracker is a silly paper hat, and Margaret and I wore ours around the hotel room. Instead of the traditional plastic toys, our crackers featured tiny ornaments that were really quite nice.
Among the gifts Margaret had given me was a copy of the UCC's New Century Hymnal, which I had requested mostly for entertainment value. I am extremely thankful that my own local church has not chosen to use that hymnal. The hymnal was edited for "politically correct" purposes, and not even the Lord Almighty escaped the censors. Actually "Lord Almighty" would be doubly offensive to the hymnal editors. First, "Lord" would imply that the Deity might be male, which they would construe as sexism. Beyond that they would probably feel that "almighty" was demeaning to "differently-abled persons". Even "disability" is offensive to the new UCC, and it never seems to occur to them that it might be good to think of God as all-powerful. It was amusing to read through all the changes in the new hymnal, but honestly the whole concept of it makes me angry. I can appreciate that all people should feel included in the Church, and I would hope that all new hymns would be written with inclusive (but hopefully not forced) language. What I don't like is messing with literature. The poets who wrote those hymns chose their words for a reason, and if I were one of those poets I would be offended to have someone else represent their words as mine. I think we would be better to either abandon the old hymns or to understand them in the context of the society for which they were written.
Well, enough of the rant (though anyone who has read my travelogues before knows there's got to be at least one of those). We eventually got bored just sitting around the motel room, so we set out for our daily adventure. We drove east through Gulfport and past "Casino Row" in Biloxi. On the way we passed location after location of that Southern institution, the Waffle House. They averaged one about every six miles, and every one of these was open and doing a booming business on Christmas morning. If only there were Waffle Houses in Chicago when we were there two years ago.
Our destination for the morning was Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs. The ferry to the barrier islands was closed for winter, but on shore the park also includes Davis Bayou, a swamp along the mainland shore. We drove there and spent an hour or so hiking on their boardwalk trails.
Once again I simply could not believe the weather we were having. With my northern blood, to me a warm Christmas would be in the 20s-maybe even above freezing if it were exceptionally warm. So what was it like this morning? Well, it was chillier than it was yesterday, probably in the 50s. I was wearing the sweatshirt I got for playing the Ghost of Christmas Present years ago in a community theatre production of A Christmas Carol. I had no jacket or hat or scarf, but with the sweatshirt I was quite comfortable. (In fact, by afternoon I was getting rather warm.) Margaret and I posed for pictures by the magnolia trees-which weren't in bloom, but were lush with greenery-and the fan-like palmetto bushes. I really can't imagine living without the seasonal extremes we have up north, but it was nice to experience it just this once.
We drove on east to Pascagoula. For decades Pascagoula has been one of America's major shipbuilding ports, and we happened to catch a glimpse of the USS Cole as we passed through the city. The Cole was attacked by terrorists last October, and just yesterday it arrived in Pascagoula for repairs. We had seen it arriving on the TV news, and given the size of the thing, there was no question as to which ship it was when we saw it.
We continued following US 90 into Alabama. Margaret had never been to the "Heart of Dixie" before, so it made an appropriate destination (being about 50 miles from Long Beach). I didn't care for Alabama when I was first here in 1990, and the place hasn't improved with time. These are still the "Redneck Woods" that my college friend Bobby called home, and they'll probably stay that way forever. Most of the homes are glorified shacks or rundown mobile homes, but here and there is an ostentatious suburban mansion thrown in for good measure. The top-of-the-line business is Family Dollar, and the churches are all Pentacostal. Half the people drive beat-up pick-ups, and the other half drive LTDs or Impalas from the '70s. Overall the place comes across as White Trash Central, and I guess what makes me like dislike it most is that they seem to be proud of that.
Before too long we made it to Mobile. We got onto Interstate 10, which seemed surprisingly busy for Christmas Day. We followed I-10 east around the city and on across Mobile Bay. The interstate bridge offers spectacular views of the bay, and it made for a lovely drive.
We turned back west and headed through Mobile on a variety of city streets that constitute US 90. Again it surprised us that several businesses were open, and while I'm sure the locals thought things were dead, to me it seemed like the place was quite busy for a holiday.
It was well after noon by now and definitely time for lunch. We settled at the place everyone in Dixie seemed to be eating-the Waffle House. I had the traditional ham dinner I've had almost every Christmas of my life … with just a few changes, like having "chunked and covered" hash browns instead of baked potatoes and Texas toast instead of garlic bread. Waffle House is definitely not a luxury restaurant, but it made a surprisingly pleasant Christmas dinner.
We got gas in Mobile at a Mobil station (which seemed appropriate, given the city). Out front they had a display of 2-liter Pepsi products in some of the strangest bottles I've ever seen. Instead of being rounded at the top like most 2-liter bottles, these came almost straight up to a point, like a cone. It looked more like some wine bottles than a pop bottle-though still in #1 plastic, rather than glass. Having started a collection of Pepsi memorabilia on my first major trip (to Russia) 17 years ago, I had to drop 99 cents to add another strange item to the collection.
We re-traced our path on highway 90 back to the Mississippi border. Right at the border we picked up I-10, which follows a more inland route. In southeast Mississippi the whole interstate is one long bridge across the swamp, and the views are really quite lovely. Right in the middle of the swamp we stopped briefly at a rest area, which was totally packed on Christmas Day. What surprised me as much as anything was that there were probably half a dozen people working at the rest area-doing janitorial work and construction projects. I really think that's unnecessary. While it was nice that Waffle House was open for our lunch, in as much as possible I think Christmas is one day everyone should have off.
There was a nice little trail at the rest area where we hiked right down to the edge of the Pascagoula River. Along the way they had trash barrels with signs that said "MISSISSIPPI: LITTER FREE BY 2003". That's a nice goal, but I'm certainly not expecting them to make it. Litter is a horrible problem all over the South; you see pop and beer cans everywhere. About the only thing that stops it is a deposit law that encourages people not to throw it away (and encourages other people to pick up the litter that has been discarded). In Mississippi you can in theory recycle cans, but all you get is the going price per pound for aluminum (about a quarter, for nearly a hundred cans). I am thankful that Iowa has its deposit law, and I wish our legislature would expand it to include things like bottled water and juice. When we do "Adopt-a-Highway" at school, that's the stuff we always pick up. I'm sure down here they'd feel that was government intrusion, though; so they'll probably be living with litter forever.
The rest area also had signs advertising 24-hour security. I'm not exactly sure what that entails (whether they have someone on duty overnight or whether there are security cameras or an emergency phone, or what), but if anything the sign made me feel less secure. I can't imagine they'd spend money on extra security unless there had been some kind of problem.
We made our way back to Gulfport where we stopped at an International House of Pancakes (which was also open 24-hours, even on Christmas). I had regretted no ordering the pecan pie at Waffle House and intended to have dessert at the IHOP. Unfortunately the Southern specialty was not on the menu here. Instead I had apple crisp with ice cream-which, I might add, was very good.
We returned to the hotel and mostly had a long, lazy afternoon. I hiked around town a bit-with nothing of great interest to recount. Probably the most interesting thing I saw while walking was a vast number of people who were discarding their Christmas trees-on the afternoon of Christmas Day. While I rather strongly disagree with the priests and deacons here at school who think we shouldn't even mention Christmas until Advent is over and I always think it's strange and rather stupid to have our school Christmas mass after Epiphany, I think it's even stranger to put an end Christmas before the special day is even over. I pretty much celebrate the throughout the month of December myself, beginning at the start of Advent and continuing through New Year's. I would never even think of taking down the tree until New Year's Eve, and it really caught me off guard to see so many trees out with the trash this afternoon. I suppose it's harder to sustain the holiday feeling when there isn't any snow, though, so maybe that explains the relative unimportance of the holiday down here.
After the hike I did some reading, walked a bit more along the beach, and just hung out and relaxed. We thought about going to one of the casino buffets for dinner, but we'd had plenty to eat, so we just snacked again. It may not have been the most exciting Christmas I've ever spent, but it was pleasant and really quite satisfying.
CONTINUED IN PART 2
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