Music:
One morning as I was turning onto Hwy. 80 in Louisiana, my Spotify channel began Lucinda Williams' song "The Ghosts of Highway 80." The song after that was the Beatles "Julia" and two songs later John Stewart was singing about the open highway. Songs would start to play when the location was right, songs about Mississippi and Louisiana would begin when I crossed the state border, songs about rivers rising when I was passing flooded pastures, cotton fields out my windows as a song about the Old South and the Civil War played. Coincidence? Possibly, but I think not. Something else going on there. Spirits defining my playlist, perhaps.
Hotels:
Hotels should have night lights in the bathrooms. Getting up in the middle of the night and having to turn on the overhead light in the bathroom is blinding and wrong.
Too many plastic glasses go into the landfill from hotels. Yes, if you pay enough for a room you might get real glass, but it's rare.
Why do hotels keep comforters on beds when it's 80 degrees outside? Why can't there be a lighter weight blanket?
Why is temperature control in a hotel room such a complicated process? Some rooms are easy, set the temp and it works. Many are flawed: set the temp and the machine over rides your choice and does what it wants. I want it cold at night, let it be cold at night, but too often the cooling machine decides that 68 is cold enough. It's not.
Driving:
I finally made friends with the woman living in my car who tells you where to go when using the Google Maps app. At the beginning of my journey she would be totally confused, telling me to make U-turns, telling me to turn left onto a street I was already driving on, basically making me hate her. But once I realized that she knew North, South, East and West better than I did (as in "Go East on Feller Street" when I had no idea which was was East and thus started out driving West, necessitating those U-turns) and once I agreed to listen to her and take her advice, she was charming, smart and so helpful!
If you have chosen to rent a small, compact car in the South but are given a large SUV, don't whine. Take the SUV. The small roads in the South are often full of very large potholes that can do serious damage to a small, delicate car. The SUV will not have great gas mileage (mine got 27 mpg, not bad) but they are safer on the roads. Plus everyone in the South either drives big vehicles or small, old, duct taped Chevy Novas. Join the crowd, take the big car. Plus they are so much easier to navigate in torrential downpours and lightning storms.
(I did not take the above photo but it is representative of much of what I saw driving.)
Tangentially, since most vehicles are large, parking that large SUV is never a problem. Parking spaces are wide and numerous.
Drinking:
The South has some delicious cocktails and one of the best is the Sazerac. If your bartender can't make a decent one, move on. Another favorite is Vieux Carre, so delicious, less well-known than the Sazerac and therefore not as widely offered. More upscale bars can make you one and when you get one that is well made, it's the perfect cocktail, at least to me.
The South does not have a lot of wine options, at least not in their off sale liquor stores. Beer, yes. Stick to cocktails. However, I was able to get good Sauvignon Blancs from Australia that were fine and very inexpensive. But Gabe gave me a great piece of advice: find a liquor store and buy a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon. For a two week journey, having that bottle of bourbon in my hotel room meant I drank a lot less at the bar and, honestly, a lot less in general. That bottle lasted me the entire two weeks, just a couple of fingers in the early evening after a long day of driving was the perfect antidote to road dust.
Coffee: as I mentioned, they do not have the coffee culture we have on this coast. Finding a good cup of coffee is not easy. Finding an excellent cup of coffee was impossible. Mediocre was OK in the end, better than crappy.
So many more topics to touch on.
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