You Cross the Mississippi, You Get To Mississippi. It's Inevitable!

Hi!  Okay, so I exaggerated last night - we did NOT visit 3 states today; only two,  We decided not to push so much today, and beside which, there's another, maybe sillier reason we're stopping tonight in Mississippi.  See, we've been carefully using our Garmin for this entire trip and we've come across a few RV parks that the Garmin could not recognize.  We were able to locate them anyhow but I think I've noticed that those parks Garmin couldn't see were also the parks in which we had the worst internet connection.  As it turns out, my original idea was to drive straight through Mississippi and stop in Mobile, Alabama.  Aha.  When I went to program the address of the RV park in Mobile, Garmin couldn't find it!  Besides, it was over 170 miles, and Al is getting TIRED from 2 weeks of driving every day so I backed up and found a nice-sounding park in Gautier, MS which Garmin located in a snap.  Therefore - here we are.

I also mentioned that last night's RV park had a lovely little fishing lake.  This morning when I got up it was covered in mist so I couldn't resist going out and taking a few photos of it.  What do you think?

Well, check-out time in these parks tends to be between 11 and noon so as soon as Al was done working we wrapped up and went along our way.  Once again the road was surrounded by tall trees with glimpses between of marshlands and bayous (most of them brown, for some reason) and woods.  I took more photos than usual today, because it developed into a very lovely afternoon, so though I'll post some here, I will make a new album on Facebook so you can see more of the pretty sights we drove by.

Meanwhile, we did not go south on I-10 to New Orleans, figuring it would take extra time and probably several pig-out meals besides.  We stayed on Route 12, which cuts straight across the state, skirting the north end of Lake Pontchartrain.  Before we knew it, we saw the following signs:  Since it was time for a break anyway, we drove in, to discover that the Mississippi welcome center was ALSO the John C Stennis Space Center, which is a rocket test site run  by NASA.

  

Prettiest rest stop we've seen!

They offer tours of the space center but we didn't want to leave the birds alone in the RV for any length of time so we declined.  Anyway, the park is very pretty - all set up for picnics and dog-walking and welcoming and stuff like that.  Probably the prettiest "rest stop" we've come across on our journey.  So we stopped and we rested and felt very welcomed.  

Naturally, this part of Mississippi looks a great deal like the part of Louisiana we left behind, but during today's drive we noticed that the Texan sport of Competitive Tailgating is also played in Mississippi.  We even saw some 18 wheelers trying to outrace one another.  That, or what we thought was one trucker honking his horn at the other was actually the rarely-heard mating call of the Giant Kenworth.  Not sure.  Anyway, it was a bit scary to watch so we backed down and kept to our usual 10mph below the speed limit. MUCH safer that way.

Soon we came to the Biloxi River, and the entirely unpronounceable Tchoutacabouffa River (sounds like the person who named that river had a really bad cold on naming day!).  Shortly after that we came to Biloxi itself.  Well, we sort of came to Biloxi.  Everyone knows that highways are usually set in the back row of towns, so you rarely ever get to really see what a town looks like when traveling this way.  Let's just say we passed by Biloxi and waved hello in a southward direction as we did so.

A little while later we reached Gautier and entered this lovely park that I mentioned at the beginning.  It's much larger and spread out more than the other RV parks we've visited, and the Sioux Bayou runs right nearby.  One thing I especially noticed was that the rules and regulations here have a stipulation I haven't seen before... Rule #11 says, "BEWARE OF ALLIGATORS".  Yeah, really.  It does.  

See?  It really does say that!

Think I'll resist the urge to take a walk by the bayou...

Tomorrow we pass through the rest of Mississippi, take a quick look at Mobile and other brief parts of southern Alabama, and finally - FINALLY - F*I*N*A*L*L*Y - reach Florida!!!  Well, okay, it's just the panhandle, and it will still take us until Saturday to reach our final destination but still...FLORIDA AT LAST!!