Driving through the Mississippi Delta

Driving along the Mississippi River should be easy, it certainly isn't discrete, but it is elusive from the road.  You know it's there but it is always just behind that berm or just a little too far away to actually see. When you finally get a glimpse, it's worth the miles you have spent searching for it: it is pretty massive.
I covered a lot of territory yesterday and saw the river a few times and ended up in Vicksburg, which is on the river. Along the way were crazy billboards for everything from Survival and Gun Conventions to Finding the Voice of God to dozens of billboards from lawyers promising to get you money or land or custody of your kids.  I saw a dead warthog (or maybe it was a wild boar) and a flock of white cranes. Houses standing in water up to their front porch railings, not to be on dry land for months to come. In a large flock of blackbirds there was one brilliantly red bird, maybe a cardinal, that made me exclaim out loud.

I drove mainly small back roads so there were hundreds of broken down cars, broken homes, sad looking old men on rickety chairs sitting on corners. For a while I was on Hwy. 61, Mississippi's Blues Highway, and I stopped at a visitor center for the Blues. A charming woman pointed me to a small cafe for breakfast where I was treated like a local and had good coffee ("what? No cream or sugar?") and good food. The road was bordered on both sides with miles and miles of cotton fields, the historic product of the Delta and the years of slave labor.

Being in the South does remind you how white California really is. I don't mean that to sound negative but it is easy to forget what the rest of America is like.

The coffee in hotels is always bad and there isn't the coffee culture in the South like there is on the coast. I haven't seen a Starbucks since I left the airport in Memphis so this morning I am on a quest for a good cup of strong coffee.  While on that search I will see a bit more of Vicksburg and then visit Jackson and after that we'll see where the road takes me.