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and last updated August 25th,1999.
WELCOME TO MY DAY..
IT IS NICE TO HAVE YOU SHARE IT WITH ME...
BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI,
US OF A !!,
Well folks, as I told you last time, I'm mobile again, and enjoying it, and loving my temporary car.......
And to think I had waited 40 years for a car that exact colour
And my sweet red car and I traversed
three states on Wednesday, taking John back to Pensacola to get his truck, which seemd like a good way to get to see some of the country, as long, I made clear, as I didn't have to drive in the rain, because I have trouble enough with the blue-tinged misty-polluted air as it is, and, having been caught once in a seasonal thunderstorm in Atlanta, I did NOT want to repeat the experience...NO WAY!!
And John assured me there was no rain in sight...and for the first few miles there certainly wasn't!!
Of course, it was a long trip.... long enough for us to drive through the same massive tropical downpour three times..once on the way there, with John driving and twice on
the way back with me driving but trying to follow him..and barely able to
see his lights, (one red, one white..VERY unusual truck he owns!!), in the whiteout except when the lightning struck close enough to ulluminate ALL...scary!
It is hard to get away from the Military in America..I mean, every town in Australia has its war memorial and honour board and a statue or two, but in the USA one is reminded, constantly, that the country has a long, proud and rather sad tradition of fighting for whatever is right at the time...that America is, and has always been in a state of military preparedness...with, now, enough obsolete hardware to decorate the beaches and the parks and even the roadsides...
...and to fill many, many museums!
Were some enterprising salvage company to do a deal with the US Government regarding all those little jet fighters dotted here and there on highways and byways, seems to me a fortune could be made passing them on the Australian Government..might be one way to get ourselves enough planes to adequately monitor our Northern coastline for Illegal Boat People and lost Round-The-World-Yachtsmen....and Yachtswomen, of course!!!
The Alabama lies beside the highway at Mobile, Alabama, but is NOT that city's only claim to fame. As well, Mobile is one of only two known places in the world
where the Jubilee occurs, and John was telling me how, every year or so, for no known reason, all the sea creatures in the area swim or float to the surface of the sea and lie there waiting to be scooped up in whatever containers are to hand and taken home to dinner!
And of course, this Australian Lady Of LittleFaith scoffed and said that would be a great story....for the Bible, which already had, she thought, another tale rather like it...words she was going to have to metaphorically eat, later!!
Driving in this part of America in the summer is incredibly deceptive, for an Australian..
To begin with, the vegetation is that which WE associate with cold regions and high mountain areas..lots of pine and oak, and everything so very GREEN!!
And then there is that blue haze, also very wintry-looking to Aussie eyes....
And there is the car's air-conditioning, further adding to the illusion of winter chill.....
Until one gets out of the car and the heat beats at the neck and weakens the knees, and is so very hard to believe that one has no choice but to acknowledge that this is a different, different country!!!
Florida certainly knows how to welcome tourists...
The first tourist-centre, outside Pensacola, has lounge suites and soft chairs, and wide, marbled floors and magnificent washrooms, and great maps, and friendly staff..and a free glass of citrus juice for every single person!!
And Pensacola has a very large Naval Air Presence, with a huge base and fields, and training units with their little planes, the whole complex so widespread that even John got himself lost a couple of times . But we finally found his beloved truck, (for want of a better word) and I was surprised to find this venerable wheeled warrior had only been on the road a few months longer than my own pristine, only 70,000k Laser Ghia!
But John climbed into it with a happy sigh and took off in the rain, leaving me to follow him into the downpour...to lunch, he said...and went looking for a enlisted-mens' club where we might get something to eat at military rates. There was one place he thought he's like to try but he came away from there a bit puzzled. It was full already , he said, " with Chiefs singing "Mary Had A Little Lamb", and as I raised my eyebrows, all these uniformed and beribboned leaders of men began to emerge. What Mary thought, I have no idea, but MY eyebrows took a long time to come down!
But they had told John, back at the Base Petrol station, about another great place to eat, and we sloshed along in the rain looking for it. I don't think we eventually ate where we were supposed to, but the rain had stopped by the time we pulled into a Waffle House at Mobile, and there seemed some chance Noah might be sent back into retirement after all...
And because he always likes to make his point, John asked one of the staffers to tell me about the Jubilee....and the young black man said, yes, indeed, Suh, just the night before it had been, well, around 2.15 am., to be precise, and one of the
best yet, with plenty fuh ivvybardy!
In fact, he said, he had just cooked up a mess of crabs that very hour, and he brought one out to show us..
And John, who had told me for more than a year that he just wanted to spend
one evening with me, and had managed to achieve that the previous night , despite
Kosovo, the Farnborough Air Show and his mother's illness, grimaced
and groaned and wailed:
It didn't seem the time to remind him that at 2am we had been sitting
outside in a courtyard at the base, admiring what appeared to be a sudden
eclipse of the moon, and he had been assuring me there was nowhere else he
would rather be....
But as I thought about that strange moon, it seemed to me logical and natural that the fish would have been reacting to that eclipse and I said so...and everyone stared at me, and seemed to think I had probably just solved something around as important a puzzle as the Riddle of The Sphinx!
And John seemed very proud of me, even if he had just missed the fishy opportunity of a lifetime.
We ate that night where John had been urging me to go..next door, to Boomtown Casino, and I have to admit the atmosphere was great. Apart from having a fantastic kids' playcentre, with minimachines and rides and prizes, it is all decked out as a Western Town, with a Wooden Indian, a giant stuffed steer, giftshops and souvenir stands, a bakery and good snackbars....the usual all-you-can-eat smorgasboard..and lots of.......seafood!!
It is incredibly hard to get away from seafood here..great groaning tables of it,with
folk spending hours discussing the finer points of cracking the various types of
shell..
Well, some folks.do..I personally have trouble eating anything that
LOOKS at me as I open my mouth!
And having now tasted the way they cook eye-fillet steak in Mississippi, I can see why seafood is so popular here!!
Now, as I said, you can't get far away from the military in this neck of the woods, so I wasn't surprised when John chatted up the cash-register girl and found her father had served with him somewhere, and then the drink waitress turned out to be in the Air National Guard, with some fulltime service....
But what took the cake, I thought, was when one of the
waitresses making a fuss of John and feeding him the best Crabs' legs
turned out to be a serving E7 Master Sergeant, Air National Guard,
with ten more years than John has up..thirty to his twenty!
Like I said, folks, the influence of the Military is NEVER far away, in this part of the world, and should never, never, be underestimated!!
So he had someone to REALLY talk to about the Med Plan, and entitlements,
and pension age, etc!
And she brought him a plate of some special, Not-For-The-Public crab legs from Alaska, called , I think, Stone Crabs...(this, in a
self-service buffet restaurant!!)..
NEXT BULLETIN ABOUT HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI !!!
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