2020 Pandemic Wandering, Day One

I wrote this Thursday night, but couldn't publish it then because the Internet at the fancy-schmancy hotel I used was not acceptably secure. Sorry for the delay.
 
First, a rant:

We are in the middle of a serious pandemic, which surely everyone in the country knows. Unfortunately, people seem to not understand the most basic fact about this pandemic disease, which is that is spreads from one person to another through the air we breathe.

Travelling alone in a car, I feel pretty safe from infection. Stopping at a gas station seems safe enough, as I can generally do my business there entirely away from other people. Even when I go into a convenience store (because of course the card reader at the pump wasn’t working) the clerk is behind a plexiglas shield. OK, safe enough there. But when I went to a Subway shop for lunch, I saw 8 people in line, none of them wearing a mask. Even worse, the three “sandwich artists” behind the counter weren’t wearing masks. 

Those are the people who, more than anyone else, should wear masks. The are the primary vectors for the disease. They are potentially exposed to the virus by every single person who steps up to place an order, and they will pass that exposure along to every subsequent person they talk to. 

I went somewhere else for lunch. Subway sandwiches are pretty good, and I like knowing what I’m getting, nutritionally speaking, but they are not literally to die for.

OK, so that’s off my chest now.

DAY 1: Thursday, June 11, San Antonio to Natchez

The drive over was uneventful. Top down all the way, and for those who are homebound in this health emergency, I can report that intercity traffic along I-10 is only slightly less than in normal times. Certainly every over-the-road truck is out there, and traffic between Katy and Houston was heavy enough that I opted to take the Katy Tollway, where mine was one of three cars I saw using it before the tollway ended at Loop 610. And for those who know me, the fact that I was willing to pay the extra dollar to use the tollway along there should be proof enough that traffic in the mainlanes was heavy.

I got to my hotel in Natchez about 6pm. There was no one at the desk, so while I waited for the clerk to return I made some calculations and decided that I could grab a quick dinner and get to Windsor Ruins in time to take some sunset pictures there. I had planned to stop there in the morning — it’s just a few miles off the Natchez Trace Parkway, and about 40 miles from my hotel. 

So I drove up there. A nice drive: once I passed the city’s airport, there was almost no traffic at all and the sun was low enough in the sky to the west that it produced no glare and little heat. I got to the ruins, down a pleasant country lane, and was the only person there.

Windsor Ruins

Windsor Ruins are the remains of a huge plantation mansion built just before the Civil War. It survived that cataslysm largely unscathed, only to burn down in a fire 25 years later. All that remains is the Corinthian collonade that surrounded the house. I was expecting it to be as mystically eerie as the reconstructed collonade from the US Capitol’s porch that stands in the National Arboretum in Wasshington DC (see below), but because these ruins are somewhat unstable, they are surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence, so you cannot walk among the columns; and the fence is high enough that, for most of its circumference, it’s very hard for even a tall person to get a good picture. I could just get my lens over the top rail if I stood on tiptoe, and not always then. (There’s also a place in back where some frustrated tourist or uncaring teenager has cut the fence open.) Still, I think I got some decent pictures (including, I hope, a couple of nice shots with the car in them. Sadly, I won’t know until tomorrow, because this fancy hotel I chose to stay in (because rates are cheap right now, what with the pandemic) has an unsecured wireless internet with an unrecognised certificate, and so Firefox, my browser of choice, will not allow me to connect to it. So I will have to wait until tomorrow to upload my pictures and have a look at them, at which time I will cut and paste this narrative from my notepad to my blog.

The collonade at the Nat'l Arboretum, in DC

 








And here's a link to the pictures from this trip.

The Adventure Resumes

Oh, this "lockdown" has been tedious. Not so much for me: my normal life before coronavirus wasn't so very different from life in lockdown. Still, plans were upset.

Several years ago I acknowledged that I had driven my little convertible into the ground, as expected, and I got rid of it with the expectation that I would find something else to replace it with; another convertible, newer and possessed of a longer

The Old One

lifespan than a 13-year-old car with close to 200,000 miles on it, but one with the legroom and trunkroom that I absolutely require for the kind of travelling I like to do; and one with something like the sexy flowing lines of the old convertible.

Well, surprise, surprise: after a search of 4 or 5 years, I accepted the fact that there simply are no newer convertibles that  have the particular combination of attributes I wanted. There are beautiful cars out there, to be sure; I'm particularly attracted to the large Mercedes convertible. But none of those pretty cars, including especially the large Mercedes, have sufficient trunk room. Once you put the top down, an adequate stowage compartment becomes a slot for a briefcase. And other pretty convertibles start out with a too-small trunk.And others have cockpits so restrictive that I can barely slide under the steering wheel.

So last year I did some reflecting, and decided that, given the limited time I have left to do the kind of travelling I want (even though I'm still only 49 again), and the limited demands I make on my road car -- averaging 40 mph on back roads, even for days at a stretch, just isn't the sort of challenge a decent vehicle, even an old one, will succumb to -- I decided that what I need is another old sexy Jag. So I bought one, in January, in California. Drove it home just in time to beat the virus to South Texas. (Possibly worse.) And so it's been pretty much sitting in my driveway, laughing at me, as I cancel one planned trip after another, waiting for some place to go.

The New One

Enough. I can "social distance" as well in a car by myself as I can in my own neighbourhood. While in past travels I have occasionally met new people, and even developed a handful of good long-distance friendships with people from across the country, and renewed some old relationships, there's I see no reason why I should feel more at risk talking briefly to a masked hotel desk clerk or a waitress in a cafe in some remote hillside community in Kentucky than I already am when fondling groceries at the local supermarket, or having coffee and chilaquiles in the local taquería. So, why sit home?

And so, my county count will resume. Come Thursday, I'm heading out. First I plan to drive the entire length of Natchez Trace Parkway (I've already driven most of it: 40 mph on a nice country road uninterrupted by cross-traffic for 8 hours), then I'm off for a wander through the backroads of Tennessee and Kentucky, visiting counties I've never been to before. (There are plenty in Kentucky, and I won't get to all of them; there are fewer in Tennessee, but I'll only get to about half of what's left.) Then, up into Ohio, where there are six counties I've never seen, all in the northwest part of that state, so I will get to all of them, and that will make Ohio the 32nd state that I finish with. I'll get to some counties in Indiana and Missouri on the way home, but again, won't finish with those. (I could, easily, if I was willing to take the time, but the Merseyside Derby is set to take place on Father's Day, and I want to be home in time to watch it with my wife. It matters, especially this year. Certainly more than a few additional counties in the midwest.)

In past years, I would post prolix accounts of my trips as I went along. (As here, for example.) That got inconvenient when I travelled with friends, as there was usually something more interesting to do than type all evening. So I just started posting links to the pictures I took that day. Then that got inconvenient, as technology issues often got in the way. So I switched to just posting links to the photo albums when I got home. Well, this time I'll be travelling alone again, so I figure to have not much else to do of an evening than post travelogues every evening, or at least most evenings, wifi permitting. That plan was threatened by the fact that both of my computers were out of action, one dead, one dying. But today my little Macbook Air was saved from the rubbish heap by the timely intercession of a not-too-inconveniently-located repair shop (and two hundred dollars), no thanks to Apple and its poorly designed website.* So I will have my little computer along, and my camera batteries are charging as I type, and maybe there will be something of interest to take a picture of, once I get to Natchez.

Stay tuned.

The County-Count Status Map (not totally up-to-date)

* for example: I forgot my Apple ID, so I clicked on the "forget?" link ... and the first thing it tells you to do is enter your Apple ID. Duh.