"The Mississippi's mighty, it starts in Minnesota......

...at a place that you could walk across with five steps down. I guess that's how you started, like a pinprick to my heart...."  (Thank you, Indigo Girls.)

For years I have wanted to drive the length of the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, south of New Orleans. It's about a 3,000 mile drive if you take the winding road that parallels the Mississippi. At this time of the year starting in Minnesota is not really feasible because it is still frozen there, or at least it is now. That could change this week as temperatures rise and snow melts.

Next Thursday I fly into Memphis.  Two weeks later I fly out of Memphis, back to SFO. For those two weeks I will attempt to see as much as the Mississippi as I can, crossing it, driving the Great River Road as much as I can, rain and flooding being the deterrent, I suppose. I don't know how it will go, but I am doing it just the same. If need be, I will simply drive another route but seeing the Mississippi empty into the Gulf of Mexico is sort of the end game for the drive.  There will be a detour to Nashville for two nights because Lucinda Williams is playing at the Ryman Theater on April 2, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," one of her finest albums in her long productive career. And the Ryman! Iconic! I am quite excited about that.

No other hotel rooms have been booked, it is a seat-of-the-pants sort of trip, just me and my rental car, a bucket of maps and off I will go. I hope to write about it, so please stay tuned and I will post photos on Instagram as well. I am finding small parkways that run for hundreds of miles through state and national forests, in Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi, so there will be no lack of beautiful roads to explore.

If you know me at all you know that the thing I love most (after my kids) is travel. There are no funds for this trip other than my old-age savings account but as I feel my body slowly eroding from the encroaching older age, it's do it now or don't do it at all. The next two or three years will hopefully find me going to as many places as I can. Money be damned!  (Well, not really.....) My job is realistically on hold for another two weeks anyway and no one knows how well Autocamp will bounce back from the floods (or "high water event" as we have been instructed to say) and thus how many hours I will be needed in the next two months is up in the air. So I take to the road.....


Get your motors running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure, whatever comes our way. 

.