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and last updated August 7th,1999.
WELCOME TO MY DAY..
IT IS NICE TO HAVE YOU SHARE IT WITH ME...
BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI,
US OF A !!,
Well folks, I'm mobile again, America's vast distances between domicile, supplies and public utilities having beaten me yet again......
And of course, as soon as I climbed into the car, I wondered why I had waited so long and missed out on so much I could have done..had I had wheels!!
Within hours I had seen more of the Gulfport Biloxi area than through the whole of the preceeding week...
And oh, how much there is to SEE!!
Though I DO miss Rich, my travelling/driving/photographing companion of last trip, who made sure I always had photo opportunities... other motorists seeming a tad uneasy at the sight of a woman driving and taking adjusted-focus digital pictures at the same time...
Course, were I in Belgium noone would think this the slightest bit odd!
Oh, and the remaining bits of old architecture that haven't been made into casino-development sites yet!
To Australian eyes, the long , wide stretches of deep white sand seem strangely untrodden and strangely underoccupied....
Could it be that midsummer, here, is just too hot for folk to venture too far from their air-conditioners?
Or is it just too darn hard to cross four lanes of highway from the motels and apartments to get there?
I had a feeling John would not have been fed, on the planes, so I shopped for food supplies during one of my "lost" tours of the area, (and left my new sunglasses in a supermarket I found, and have never been able to relocate!) and made sure I found out what kind of beer he likes.There is never any problem buying beer in the USA..even the service stations can keep it , so it was easy to pick up a six-pack in the hotel general store. Strangely, to an Australian, one cannot easily get beer or wine with one's meals here!
And I was right, they hadn't fed him, and he was more interested in talking than eating, any way, so two Bud Lights slipped down rather smoothly..
Now I've SEEN military quarters in Australia, stayed at a base once, when the husband was taken ill there....but
I have never seen anything like the way the U.S. government looks after its serving, (and reserve, and retired) personnel...
John got into conversation there at once, of course, with another Master-Sergeant, (retired), who was very interested in John's advice on hitching free flights to wherever, and they talked in the special language these American veterans seem to speak..I think it works like a Masonic handshake...
We took the last of our coffee outside, where there were picnic tables on a courtyard lawn, and watched as the red moon eclipsed, which seemed odd, since we had heard nothing about an expected eclipse, not realising, then, how significant this phenomenon was to prove...
Of course John had been keen for me to get a car..after I baulked at driving his open-tray, no air-conditioning, manual truck about. He called me from that Oregon hospital, when his Mom was out of danger, heartily sick of waiting for a return free flight courtesy of the Air Force, but homesick enough to actually spend all day making his way back via commercial flights...and he wanted me to get a car and meet him at New Orleans Airport..
which I thought about, but decided I had better regretfully decline, it being one thing to be lost within sight of one's highrise hotel on the first day's driving on the wrong side of the road in a strange car..but to meet a particular plane at a particular airport in a city one has not yet visited is quite another!
So poor John had to catch a bus to Biloxi..but it dropped him right at the door and right on time, something I would not, I suspect, have achieved!
But he looked like a tramp, having neither shaved nor washined his clothes for a week, and while I had a razor, laundry facilities for THAT amount of washing were beyond even MY skill at improvisation!
So my first "date" here was a night out at the laundrette at Keesler Air Base, with John decked out fetchingly in a grey-mauve designer T I had bought at Macy's in Atlanta, his only clean garment being a Mickey-Mouse sweatshirt with fraying hood...or another that said S>O>B>.....
I can inderstand, now, why some of Australia's Kosovo refugees elected to return to Kosovo rather than move into allocated (military) quarters, which had been recently vacated by our soldiers, and then made more luxurious for the visitors!)
Then while John's washing cleaned and then tumbled in the rows of gleaming machines, in a spotless laundry-room made relaxed by pictures and potplants, we sipped coffee in the base's 24 hour Convenience Store, complete with a great variety of supplies, snacks and munchies, and with one whole wall of liquor varieties (no dry bases, here), a wall of videos and computer supplies and another , smaller, wall filled with adult magazines....
And despite the hour, (it was now after midnight), there was a steady stream of customers!
And then I refolded John's clean clothes, (well, I didn't want to have to IRON them, did I?), while he got into his usual animated conversation with a young airman from the Azores, homeward bound on the morrow, and they talked of bullfighting and bullrunning..and rates, and freebies and benefits...and free flights!
And I had promised John's twin sister, Jean, a nurse, in an ealier phone conversation, that I would tuck him up early, since his blood sugar level, (he is a recent diabetic) had soared during the week with the stress of the family crisis, and he had been travelling all day, since 5 am in fact, and would be travelling again, next day, when we drove MY car to collect his truck from the Naval Air Base at Pensacola, in Florida, from where his free flight had left...
And it COULD have been the fact that he hadn't slept in a proper bed for a week, but I like to think it was the camomile tea, and that Australians can teach Yanks a thing or two about RELAXING...
But whatever it was, it worked.....
And that is another story, of course, of course!!..
And when we went out to the car, John's washing nestly stowed in my big Macy's bag, that moon was still almost half in shadow, and such a strange colour.....
Well, it was too late to do anything about the early part of the promise, but while he showered, I made camomile tea for him, which he didn't really want, never having had it before, but drank to be polite, and liked it, much to his surprise...
And next day, the day we traversed three states and a deluge in one trip, his blood sugar was just fine..
NEXT BULLETIN STILL ABOUT BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI !!!
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©Robin Knight, 1999.
