Update

Sorry for the delay everyone, we have been without internet service for a while now.  In fact, we just stopped at a coffee shop in Elvis' birthplace of Tupelo, MS to get some signal and send an update.  Hope you all enjoy the flood of posts below.  We are off to a nice state park for a few days, then up to Nashville to visit some friends.  Check back in a few days!

Resiliency

Traveling with your kid is a very different experience.  For those of you who have done it, you know what I am saying.  With a child in tow, the experiences are magnified, both good and bad.  Over the last couple of days, we have had a couple of bad ones.

 

Maggie has been playing with her imaginary friends quite a bit lately.  Only in this case, her friends aren’t so imaginary.  They just aren’t here.  While she gets to see a bunch of new things, play in a bunch of new places, and run around outside all the time, the reality is, she doesn’t have her friends.  Thus, we have our not so imaginary friends, Henry and Anna.  Two great friends of hers from Telluride who we left behind.

 Yesterday, Maggie was thrilled to discover a small green bug that was hanging out in her bunk.  She even called me over to see it.  “What’s he doing?” she asked.  “I think he is just hanging out and visiting you,” I said.  This was a moment like any of the thousands of small and curious moments you enjoy with your kids when you spend every waking hour with them.  Only it wasn’t ordinary for her.

 Later in the day, Maggie went back to her bunk to look for her little green friend.  Only he wasn’t there.  When she went asked where he went, I said innocuously “he probably just went away.”  This was not the right thing to say.  The next thing you know, she is staring at us, hyperventilating, with crocodile tears pouring down her face.  When she finally gasps enough air to speak, she wails: “BUT IT’S NOT OKAY TO LEAVE!  IT’S NOT OKAY WHEN PEOPLE LEAVE AND DON’T COME BACK!  IT’S NOT OKAY TO LEAVE ANNA AND HENRY!  I MISS THEM!  I WANT TO GO HOME!”

 Next thing I know, it feels like I am standing there, looking at someone holding my heart in front of me after they just removed it from my body with a spoon.  You feel like the worst parent in the world.  Like you let your child down to pursue this dream of yours.

 Then, we calm her down, she calls her best friend on the phone, talks to her in that semi-coherent stream of consciousness talk that 31/2 year olds use.  She has a cup of milk, some bedtime stories, and she is fast asleep.  Today, she looks at us as we are sitting around the dinner picnic table and says with a 1000 watt smile:  “Mom, Dad, as long as we are together, we can go anywhere and live in Francine.” 

 I read a book once that contained interviews with the Dali Lama.  The author described how when the Dali Lama was told some very sad news, he could visually see the pain and sadness wash over the Dali Lama, who then felt it, remembered it, and let it go.  This is what I thought of with Maggie.  She experienced the emotions of sadness, of loneliness, completely, and then when the time was right, she let them go and moved on.  That is resiliency.  If you watch closely enough, your child can teach you something about how to live your life every day.

MPR - Volume 2.0

Next, we turn to our one, and so far only, special feature of the Slow Lane: MPR aka Margaret’s Playground Review.  Since we last left you, Maggie has enjoyed two playgrounds of note.  The first was at the Mill Creek RV Campground and Resort in Canton, TX.  Let me tell you folks, what this playground lacked in size, it made up for in quality.  As with every blade of grass at this place, the playground was immaculate.  And while it was small, it contained the essence of playground; the Holy Trinity of Fun, swings, rocking animals, and curly slides.  If you were to ask Maggie what more she needed in a park, somewhere in the midst of her 100 word answer, you would hear the word “nothing.”  We enjoyed several sessions at this park rocking, swinging and sliding.  It is as simple as that.  Pure playground joy.  Unsurprisingly, when asked to rate this park on a scale of 1-5 stars, Maggie gave it a hearty 10 stars!

The second park Maggie reviewed was located at Lake Bistineau State Park.  This here park was more of a retro, throwback kind of park.  The kind of parks we played at as kids, back in the day when your parents could let you ride your bike without a helmet and not get reported to social services.  This park contained wooden equipment with metal stairs, slides, and money bars.  Oh the humanity!  Hot in the summer, stick your tongue to it cold in the winter, actual metal, not that ployvinalethalenewhatever stuff they make play equipment out of these days.

Despite its old-school style, this park delivered, with one exception.  One of the ladders leading up to the big slide was missing a rung.  This unfortunate situation didn’t allow Maggie to summit the slide area solo, so the park’s rating suffered a bit.  On the plus side, it had a good ole fashioned tire swing, which was a very cutoff shorts and stick fishing pole kind of stylish.  All in all, Maggie gave this park a solid 7 out of 5 stars.

Check back real soon for more MPR, until then, play safe and wear your sunscreen.

Swamp Thang

Our next stop after leaving the Lone Star Sate was a great little state park in northwestern Louisiana called Lake Bistineau State park.  Don’t even try to pronounce it right.  What you learn in Louisiana is that unless you are from there, you can’t pronounce it.  Now I like to think that I can get in the spirit of a place and kind of slide into the local vernacular a bit, but Louisiana-speak is a near native of Latin for a Midwestern boy.  In fact, we were visiting a bamboo rodmaking Baptist minister friend of mine (yes, you read that right) a few days ago and he was giving us some directions to our next stop.  He said: “just head down here to the stop sign and hang a right.  Take that road to the town of crowVUL, which you northerners would call CROW-ville.  Then follow that road up to the Town of DEL-hi, which if you are from India, you would call Delhi.”  There is no rhyme or reason to it and you can’t fake it.  You are either from there, or your not. 

All that aside, Lake Bistineau was lovely.   It was a quintessential, postcard type Louisiana spot.  Huge pine and deciduous trees reaching right up to the water of the lake, which is full of giant Bald Cypress trees with Spanish Moss hanging down from the branches.  We just hung out, hiked around a bit, and enjoyed the view.  We were planning on renting a canoe to explore the lake a bit, but canoe rentals don’t start until “summer” (after Memorial Day), ignoring the fact that it was about 90 degrees in the shade while we were there.  The other highlight comes when there is no light and you can hear the sounds of the night.  Hollow tree frogs calling out their sweet song to the ladies so loud it sounds like your high school tuba player warming up in your ear.  Crickets, bullfrogs, owls, and other unknown sounds combine intro a cacophony of indigenous audio.  It sounded EXACTLY what the bayou should sound like.  While I loved the experience, I slept with earplugs.  There is no way I was getting to sleep otherwise. 

After our visit to Lake Bistineau and our stop to visit my rodmaking friend, we headed to Vicksburg, Mississippi for a tour of the Civil War Battlefield, but we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves.  We were going to go to New Orleans, but when you are traveling around the country in your own little world, you don’t notice things.  Things like, the weekend we had planned to head down to N’owlins, was the same weekend as a little thing called Jazz Festival and 350,000 other people had beat us down there.  Didn’t think it was quite the right time to drag Francine through the French Quarter.  Oh well, next time.

Some photos of the Lake, just a taste of the Bayou.  I have been experimenting with an old photo technique I used to use a bit, pinhole photography.  Pretty cool when combined with digital cameras.  High tech and low tech collide and create some pretty interesting results. Enjoy.

 

Don't Mess With Texas

Don’t Mess With Texas

You’ve heard this slogan for the longest time and so have we.  We took it seriously.  We didn’t mess with Texas.  Drove across in a couple of days, Louisiana bound.  We crossed the boarder at Hobbs, New Mexico, where Texas is flat, hot, and dusty cotton country.  Miles and miles of cotton fields with ochre colored soil and a cotton gin or two in each small town.  

We stayed our first night at Abilene State Park, just south of the town of Abilene (calling it such is being a bit generous).  The park was lovely, nestled in a quite piece of the Texas hill country.  We camped in a great little spot with beautiful oak trees for shade and a quite little creek rolling by out back.  

By the time we hit Dallas, the geography looked like the Midwest, only 114 degrees hotter.  On a day when it was almost 90, with 50% humidity, we actually had one guy say with his quite, slurred together Texas drawl: “nice spring day tuday, you should see when it gets hot in the summir.”  Curious, I asked: “how hot does it get?”  He replied “hunnert, hunnert en ten.  Humidity up around sixty fiiiiveee PERcent.  Hot.”

The second night we stayed in beautifully landscaped private campground outside of Dallas, in a little town called Canton.  Only this one has no Hall of Fame.  The park was immaculate; you half expected to see a foursome of golfers playing through.  Not only could you camp there on their manicured grounds, but you could also buy yourself a little slice of Texas, a small cabin on one of the “lakes” in the park.  These are not lakes as you native Minnesotans might consider them.  Just large ponds, really.  But they will take a singlewide, fancy it up with a porch, some stone accents, and some nice landscaping and sell it to you for a song.  If anyone is looking to go in on a vacation ownership deal down there, just let us know.  We had a nice mellow campfire and shoved off the next day for the Bayou.

A note about Dairy Queens.  The have a gaggle of them in Texas.  Nearly every town has one, but it is not like your little walk up, only open in the summer, ice cream and hot dog kind of DQ, we are talking a full service Texas institution here.  Along with giant containers containing 100 gallons of sweet tea, these DQs have unique, Big Hat, entrees like the Belt Buster, the Double Belt Buster, and for you big ole wranglers, they will sling you out a Triple Belt Buster.  A triple cheeseburger soooo big, you could feed a small family on it.  Just make sure to loosen your belt buckle a bit.  Lastly, y’all should know you can get everything chicken fried.  Chicken fried chicken sandwiches, chicken fried steak strips, chicken fried ice cream (well maybe that’s a tall tale).  And EVERYTHING comes with a side of gravy.  Just try to save room for the ice cream.

Outside of that, we can’t tell you too much else about Texas, we didn’t mess with it.  Now we know that one can see the Alamo, Austin, San Antonio, and a bunch of cool stuff in between.  We just decided not to.  Oh, and sorry, no pictures.  If you want more, stop and down and see Texas yourself.  The people are very friendly.

We are currently in Vicksburg, MS at the Ameristar Casino RV resort- really it is the best place in town - no really. The connectivity is not great, but we are doing well and excited to post more of our last few days on the road. Check back in the next few days for the latest update. Jay has some great photos, there is a new edition or 2 of MPR and we have 2 great State Parks to share with you. 

Wind

We drove uphill today.  All day, or so it seemed.  We drove into the wind today.  90+ degrees and winds at 30+.  From Santa Fe to Carlsbad, NM.  It wasn't that far on the map, but believe me, it was long.

One stop.  Roswell, New Mexico.  Intergalactic Ellis Island for our little green space friends.  While we didn't feel moved enough to capture some images for posterity, here are four brief points to ponder.

1.  There are at least 2 shops that claim to be "alien headquarters."  This is confusing.  Imagine traveling light years to Roswell, only to find out you don't know where to stop first.  The Chamber of Commerce needs to clear this up before we experience a celestial diplomatic incident.

2.  There are a few too many gun stores in Roswell.  Perhaps this is driven by the constant threat of space invasion?  The strangest one?  A store called "Discount Guns," which was conveniently located next to the "Little Lambs Christian Day Care."  Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.  At least if it was a Wal-Mart next door they would be catching it all on film.

3.  It is hot in Roswell.  Maybe it isn't all the time, but it was 93 degrees on April 15.  When you have spent the winter in 400 inches of snow at 9,000 feet, this qualifies as really hot.

4. Aliens apparently have bad taste.  I mean really, why Roswell?  No offense if you are from there, but a cosmopolitan city it is not.  Now certainly these guys can't just set their giant saucers down in the middle of Central Park (or could they?) but why not a nice small to mid sized cities with some cultural opportunities and good schools?  They are advanced beings, are they not?

We made it safely through Roswell without any close encounters, which is nice.  Now we only have one more alien land to conquer . . . Texas.