Three Years a Traveler - Leslie White (Pocket Review)

(The last six weeks have conspired to throw me so far off my normal reading and blogging schedule that I now find myself way late  reviewing the last half-dozen books I've read despite how long it took me to read that lot. I've been trying to review them in the order I read them, but the longer this strange new schedule continues, the more hazy the plot details are becoming. Consequently, I'm going to go with some shorter, "pocket-sized" reviews for the immediate future - while trying to get back into the old rhythm, hopefully sooner than later.)

 

You would be hard-pressed to come up with a more concise summary of Leslie White's Three Years a Traveler than the words the author chose for her memoir's subtitle: "One woman, one dog, seven RVs, and the path less traveled to heal the heart." That's just about perfect.

White's decision to hit the road as a contract employee, someone willing to work for just about any hospital in the U.S. that needs someone on a temporary basis having her specific diagnostic skills, resulted from three horrific years she and her family endured together. As she puts it, "Of my immediate family of five (my parents and two brothers), four of them have had cancer and three of them died from it in as many years."

"I thought I could simply drive away from the heartache of my parent's passing, the boredom of my depressing life, and perhaps somehow repair my crumbling relationship with BF. Well, yes...and no."

White is in for a rather rude awakening because it's about to get a whole lot worse before it starts to get better.

Along the way, as she uses the trial-and-error method to finally pinpoint the RV that will best suit her limited driving skills, White will make a lot of rookie road-traveler mistakes - not the least of which is bringing her freeloading boyfriend (the infamous BF referenced in the above quote) along on the first leg of her journey. But she adapts, she learns a few new tricks, she makes friends, meets some nice people, meets a few jerks, and finally settles into a lifestyle that seems to do for her exactly what she was hoping for when she first decided to chuck it all and hit the road.

The best part of all of this is that White saved a seat in the RV for the rest of us. And we get to go on one hell of a ride with her.

Three Years a Traveler is fun for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to live out of an RV for a few months - or years. If you're curious about the lifestyle, this is a great place to start.

2024 Booker Prize Longlist Announcement

 

When I got home this morning I found the official 2024 Booker Prize longlist email waiting in my inbox. I was pleased to see that James by Percivel Everett, one so many of us have read, is on the list along with another I've just started reading, Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History. I'm also a little disappointed to find that one of the nominees, Richard Powers's Playground won't even be published until after the shortlist is announced in a few weeks. Deja vu from last year, that.

So, in the order they are listed in the official email, here are the thirteen novels on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist:

From what I gather, these novels are kind of all over the map, some of them requiring a lot more commitment than others, with even some sci-fi in the mix. If I do manage to get through the twelve I haven't yet read, I suspect that the experience will be much like last year's with some really great books mixed in with a few that I just don't get at all.

What I'm Reading This Week (July 28, 2024)

 

I am eagerly awaiting announcement of the twelve or thirteen books that will comprise the 2024 Booker Prize longlist this Tuesday so that I can get an earlier start on the list than I managed last year. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying several books before I start trying to locate the first two or three of the prize-nominated "Booker Dozen." 

I'm about halfway through Graham Moore's The Sherlockian and I'm having quite a bit of fun with it. The novel, which centers around the 2010 murder of one of the Baker Street Irregulars, is told from two points of view: a club member who takes it upon himself to do what Sherlock would do and try to solve the murder himself and, in alternating chapters, that of Arthur Conan Doyle as he tries to cope with his decision to kill off Sherlock Holmes and move on with his life in the 1890s. It all makes me want to know more about the real Doyle...and those rabid fans of the stories.

I was clearing a box of books the other day and found Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West among a few others I decided to keep for re-reading. I'm only 60 or so pages into the book now, but it blows my mind that it was written in 2002 because everything that Buchanan predicted in The Death of the West is almost exactly what is happening in the world today. I don't remember taking the book all that seriously in 2002 because it seemed too fantastic to me to ever really happen - but it has. I wish more of us had paid attention to books like this one when they were published two decades ago.

I first heard about Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History on a YouTube video claiming that it was one of the better books written so far this year. As it turns out, the novel is set in Algeria, a country I lived and worked in for almost a decade, so I was really curious. It covers seven decades of Algerian history (1940-2010) largely from the point of view of the pied-noirs, those Frenchmen whose families had/have lived in Algeria for their entire lives as they struggle to survive and maintain their identity through all the turmoil and war that has plagued Algeria for so long.

I have high hopes for Mrs. Plansky's Revenge even though I haven't started it yet (as the library clock is ticking away). I learned of this one over on the Staircase Wit blog (if you don't read that blog, you need to check it out), and it just punched all the right buttons for me. It's about a 98-year-old widow who falls for an AI scam that ends up emptying her bank accounts. Suddenly, she is near penniless - and she's not having it. After authorities don't offer her much hope of recovering her lost money, she decides she can do a better job finding the scammers herself. So she does. Can't wait to get started.

I did finish Lynda La Plante's The Dirty Dozen this week and was enough satisfied by La Plante's style to want to read more of her Jane Tennison series. Also, I'm still reading a few pages every few days from the Helen Keller autobiography The Story of My Life, but I'm finding it to be so dryly written that it's a bit of a slow read. I do plan to complete it, but I don't feel much of an urgency to get on with it. Next, I need to tackle four or five reviews that have stacked up since my road trip and the hurricane experience. I'm relying on some pretty detailed notes to do those, but I've seldom waited this long to write up my thoughts on what I've read so it's going to be a bit of a reach for me to do them justice.

I have no idea what comes next after this bunch - even though I have been on a bit of a book-buying binge this last few weeks - because of the anticipated Booker Prize announcements. I hope you all are doing well and reading away, too. I'll look forward to checking in to see what books you guys will add to my TBR list because that thing can never be too long, can it?

Off the Books - Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

 Soma Mei Sheng Frazier's Off the Books is one of those novels I never found myself getting fully comfortable with despite Frazier managing to keep me interested enough in its plot to want to see how it would all turn out in the end. 

The novel's main character, Mei, is a Chinese American woman who has recently dropped out of Dartmouth to return to her Oakland home. She has no real idea about the rest of her life but is soon working as a limo driver who can be depended upon to keep her mouth shut about her passengers and where she takes them. As a result, Mei becomes the go-to driver for a many of the area's sex workers. It is Mei's uncle who eventually comes up with a plan to have Mei go indie by driving the clients he chooses for her in her own vehicle, effectively cutting out the middleman and even more effectively protecting the privacy of her clients. 

That's how Mei meets Henry, a handsome Chinese American burdened with a huge suitcase who wants to be driven across the country to New York. Henry is a strange one. He has enough money to stay in the most luxurious hotels along the route but he and Mei often stay in some of the rattiest hotel rooms imaginable. And Henry appears to be in no big hurry to get to New York. Instead, he peppers the trip with frequent rest stops during which he disappears to lug his big black suitcase out of the car in private over and over again.

Before long, Mei is wondering just what can be in the suitcase - especially after she begins to suspect that whatever is inside might be alive. And when she finally does learn the "truth," she stays more confused than ever about why Henry really wants to go to New York.

The plot of Off the Books is clever enough, and each of its main characters has more good moments than bad ones, but I found myself in a struggle to really care much what happened to any of them despite the danger that they often appear to be in. Mei and Henry never seemed real enough for me to feel empathy for them despite their plight. 

I blame that partially on Frazier's prose style, one in which she jumps from present to past and back again in almost every chapter, all the while inserting whole sentences in Chinese without ever making very clear what was being said between various characters. There are a lot of things to like about the book: the quirky characters met on the long road trip, the hook about what could possibly be in the humongous suitcase Henry continuously wrestles with, the good natured humorous jabs that Mei's uncle often takes at her, etc. But I could never get past that point in a novel where the reading stops feeling like a chore and becomes a treat to look forward to. I always notice when that "click" happens for me; this time it never did.

A Quick Hello with More to Follow

 I just realized that it's been a week since I've posted anything on Book Chase. That's kind of the way it's been going around here lately, it seems. It was only after we got power back on a few days ago that we both realized how exhausted we both were by the combination of constant heat, humidity, and limited sleep we had experienced for over a week. Strangely enough, that only became obvious to both of us after the AC came back on and we realized how little energy we had available to direct toward the clean-up still required. Thankfully we are both feeling much better the last couple of days, and things around here - despite the massive debris pickup still to be done in the county - are almost back to normal now. 

I hope to post again later today or in the morning about BOOKS. Can't wait to get back to some book-talk because the two books I've been concentrating on this week both proved to be mental lifesavers. I finished Tuned Out, the British time travel novel I mentioned (loved it), and I'm really enjoying the Jane Tennison novel I'm reading, The Dirty Dozen.

More later...hope you are all doing well.

What I'm Reading This Week (July 15, 2024)

 

Well, not much really.

Just staying as cool as possible these last few days while trying to find decent hot food at least once a day, gasoline for the small generator that has made life bearable, and making sure that various small lights, phones, and other devices are charged up by the time it gets pitch dark has taken a lot more time than I imagined it would. And even when I do sit down to read, I'm either too sleepy to concentrate, too hot to concentrate, or it's too dark to read because all the window covers are closed to minimize the inside temperature. (I hope I don't come across as a whiner, but I'm so frustrated by the totally incompetent response of CenterPoint to this storm that it feels good to vent a little.)

So I've been lucky if I read 30 pages a day, and that's not a lot of progress on the two 400-plus-page books I'm reading right now. That's the bad news; the good news is that both books are good.

This 2019 book is the fifth in Lynda La Plante's Tennison series, but it's the first one I've read even though I've enjoyed the Tennison television shows for a number of years now. Turns out, it's not a bad place to jump into the written series because it's set in 1980 just as Jane Tennison becomes the first female detective ever assigned to the Met's elite Flying Squad, otherwise known as the "Sweeney." I don't know about the rest of the series, but The Dirty Dozen is very much a detailed police procedural, and I'm really enjoying it.

Keith Pearson's tuned out makes for a real change of pace from the Tennison novel. I'm only about 60 pages in, and I'm still waiting on the "time travel" aspect that's promised in the book's subtitle, but I do find the prose style very readable. So far, it's the story of a 30-year-old university graduate who is sobered by his (and his whole generation's) chances of ever achieving the kind of financial success and security that all previous generations have achieved. He's tired of all the advice his parents  give him - and somehow (I think) manages to time travel back to the time they were his age. It's all very light, with a tone somewhere between sarcasm and irony, and I hope it remains so when the time travel bit finally starts.

I still have some reviews to help keep me awake and busy enough to forget that it's now 87 degrees at my desk as I write this up at 10:45 a.m. So here it is, Day 8 of no power, with a target date of "end-of-day July 19" for reconnection to the grid and serious doubt on my part that that will really happen. Of the 2.3 million people who lost power during Huricane Beryl, some 250,000 of us remain to be powered up. Lucky me being in the last 11%. 

Later, guys.

The Big Door Prize - M.O. Walsh

 

I have to admit right up front that the main reason I bought The Big Door Prize in the first place was because the first thought that popped into my head when I read its title was that hilarious country song "In Spite of Ourselves" sung by John Prine and Iris Dement. (I should add that the book was on sale in a Dollar Store I go into about twice a year for $1, too, so I didn't have a lot to lose by taking a chance on it.)

Well as it turns out, The Big Door Prize is a lot of fun.

The book opens with a short prologue that leads with this question:

How can you know that your whole life will change on a day the sun rises at the agreed-upon time by science or God or what-have-you and the morning birds go about their usual bouncing for worms?"

 For the little town of Deerfield, Louisiana it all begins on the day a mysterious new machine appears in the local grocery store, a machine that promises to use your DNA sample to tell you exactly what you are best suited for in life. For the paltry sum of two dollars you can find out what you are destined to be if you only have the courage to go for it. Soon enough, a surprisingly large segment of Deerfield's citizens have decided to go for it, and the town is unlikely ever to be the same again.

The townspeople are abruptly quitting their longtime jobs to become cowboys, musicians, magicians, survivalists living off the grid, and athletes. One woman even believes it is her destiny to marry into one of the world's royal families. Within just a few days marriages are threatened, lives are put in danger, and everyone seems happier with themselves than ever. But now the real question is where did the DNAMIX machine come from and who is behind it?

The Big Door Prize may not be the deepest novel in the world, but it manages to combine fun and humor with an exploration of the conflicts involved with remaining forever true to oneself if that comes into conflict with family and community responsibilities. There is also a much darker side plot interwoven throughout the novel that adds another reason to keep turning the pages of The Big Door Prize. If you're in the mood for something a little different, you might enjoy this one a lot. 

Listen carefully to the lyrics of "In Spite of Ourselves" and you'll see why the book title led me directly to thinking about one of my old favorites. 

So Now I Get It - Hurricane Beryl Teachable Moments

Things I've figured out over the last four days (I'm kind of slow sometimes) being without power following Hurricane Beryl:

• Even if you prefer cooking on an electric stovetop, there's a huge advantage after a hurricane in having a gas stovetop,

• Unless you love cold showers and baths, a tankless water heater is not your friend because it requires electricity in order to rapidly superheat water whenever you need hot, or even warm, water,

• A  built-in home generator is worth its weight in gold if you don't have one when you need it for an extended period, and if you try to order one now, it will literally cost more than the value of a full half-pound of gold (somewhere between $16 and $22 thousand),

• one kind-hearted neighbor who is willing to share what he has in order to ease your situation is a life-changer. 

From what I understand, the number of people without power in the greater Houston area now totals about 978,000, down from the original number of 2.3 million people without four days ago. Of course, those numbers come from CenterPoint Energy, one of the most inept public utility companies in the nation - whose executives know that when this is all over, an accounting will be demanded by the governor, the mayor, and the Public Utility Commission. 

This has all the makings of a summer that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Look for Me There - Luke Russert

Luke Russert's Look for Me There is, I think, a pretty frank and honest travel book and memoir, and I want to give Russert full credit for that. But in a nutshell, for me it's: not a bad book by an author I am left with mixed feelings about.

Luke Russert is the son of the beloved and universally respected news journalist Tim Russert. Tim Russert, while at work for NBC, died suddenly from a heart attack on June 13, 2008 while Luke (then 22 years old) was traveling in Italy with his mother. By October 2016, Luke himself had been eight years on the NBC career path he began after his father's death. But he was unhappy, unsatisfied, unfulfilled (you can choose the word or right combination of words), and decided to walk away from his job in order to explore the world for himself. 

"What pains me isn't just a latent wanderlust. The last eight years have been such a whirlwind that I've never fully processed my grief for Dad. It's apparent that I've spent so much time honoring his legacy that I've never truly accepted his death. Worse, by honoring that legacy, I have failed to forge my own life. I'm thirty years old and have no idea who I am..."

 So Luke, largely on his mother's dime, begins to travel from country to country as he slowly morphs into an Instagram addict who is only satisfied after he "drops a bomb" on his favorite social media platform. He stops traveling for pleasure and what he can learn about himself and the countries he explores, and begins to imagine that his Instagram followers actually need the content he posts:

"Whereas in the past I may have taken a moment to prep for the day so I could get more out of it, now I'm more focused on just getting it done and taking the needed pictures. Pictures are my muse. They provide content and, on Instagram, give people an idea of what I do. They somehow make me feel that I matter."

 I'm still not sure if Russert is telling me that he understands the shallowness of this admission, or if he's justifying the kind of traveler he soon enough became. Part of the reason that I wonder this is how terribly he resented his mother's attempts to tell him it was time to come home and get on with the rest of his life, to find some purpose in life other than keeping his Instagram followers happy enough to attach little hearts and comments to every picture he posted. 

But here's where it gets tricky. Luke grew up an over-protected son. According to Luke, his father never wanted to take a risk; he never traveled outside the country; he always had a plan for anything that could happen to himself or his family. And Tim expected Luke to live the same way. So did Luke begin his world travels as a way to run from that part of his father's legacy? Does traveling around the world solo make Luke feels as if he's beaten his father at something?

Long after everyone around him sees it, Luke finally does come around to the idea that he is wasting his life:

"What causes me the anxiety that leads to self-medicating? What am I searching for? Why did I feel so empty after living such a full, blessed, and privileged life?...Being part of a legacy also meant I was living in loss. I come to realize that I'm also beset with not only inadequacy but also its sibling - fear of failure - along with a real fear of mortality."

 Wrong as I likely am to be, this is where I end up with what Luke Russert has to say in Look for Me There:

Luke was a young man trying to live up to the expectations of a father he completely admired but to whom he felt that he could never measure up. His answer was to give up and wander the world and life for three years, finally deciding to be more like his mother: "spontaneous, creative, and experimental." 

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I hope he has his life together now.

Hurricane Beryl Was another Doozie

Looks like I completely misjudged the impact of Hurricane Beryl on the greater Houston area. Beryl was officially a Category One hurricane when it came through Houston, so I downplayed its impact in my mind only to find that we are going to be feeling the impact of the storm for several more weeks. This one was not so much a rain event as it was a wind event, so there's that.

However, at its peak some 2.3 million people were without power, and around half of those folks are still without power - including my entire part of town. We have had no electricity since 9:15 a.m. Monday, and have been warned that it could be another week before we get it back. I'll leave it up to you guys to imagine what life is like in the high humidity aftermath of about 8 inches of rain and temperatures approaching the mid-nineties. Let's just say it's not pleasant.

So I spent the afternoon grilling meat before it could go bad from thawing out all at once, and inviting the three grandchildren over to share a big meal toward the end of the day. Until a couple of hours ago, we were completely cut off from the internet, television, email, text, etc. so it felt a little like living in the 1950s. Luckily, a kind neighbor loaned me some kind of battery inverter that should give us about eight hours of just enough power to plug in the fridge, a fan, and the net. When it gets dark, we'll opt for a lamp or two until the thing fizzles, and then we'll try to find a way to recharge the battery in the morning.

So just checking in. Unsure how much I'll be around, but wanted to let everyone know that things are going relatively well considering all the wind damage we had. The eye of the storm went almost exactly over the top of my house, and I'm impressed by what 75-85 mph winds can do. 

I'll check in later...

What I'm Reading This Week (July 8, 2024)

 

As I begin to prepare this update, Hurricane Beryl seems to have finally aimed itself almost directly at the Houston area and should be arriving in another twelve hours or so. That said, this is supposed to be a Category One hurricane, so it probably won't do the kind of damage we've become so accustomed to here in the last few years. My biggest fear at this point is losing power for an extended period of time.

My reading schedule has been a little different than it usually is because of all the driving I've done in the past two weeks. I did manage to finish up one book and read another while on the road: The Big Door Prize by M.O. Walsh and Off the Books by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier. Both books were enjoyable enough, I suppose, but I have mixed feelings about Off the Books. I found Frazier's style a little difficult to get comfortable with, and still haven't figured out how to describe the book accurately. I suspect that a formal review of that one is going to come together rather slowly.

I found this edition of Helen Keller's autobiography in the gift shop of her birthplace and home in Tuscumbia, Alabama last week. I'm one of those more familiar with Keller's girlhood as it was represented in the movies about her life than anything else about her, so it was fascinating to walk the same hallways and see all the rooms that were so important to her during her life - especially I think, the water well pump behind the house where it finally "clicked" that the signs she was feeling in her hand signified the word for "water." I'm curious to see how Keller tells her own story.

The premise of Off the Books is kind of interesting: a recent Dartmouth drop-out comes home to Oakland with not much of a plan for what's next. She finds herself driving a limo for a company that keeps her busy enough until her grandfather buys her a vehicle large enough to cut out the middle man and keep all the cash for herself. After a while, Mei seems to specialize in driving regularly for a cast of shady characters - and then Henry and his huge suitcase come into her world and it all gets even weirder. The writing style is not nearly as interesting as the plot, though, so I'm still digesting my feelings about this one.

Leslie White's Three Years a Traveler is one of those books that seems to have come out of nowhere for me. A few days ago, I had never heard of the book; today, I'm almost done with it and have thoroughly enjoyed accompanying White on her journey of self-discovery as she grieves the loss of both parents to cancer within a few months of each other. White needed a fresh start, and she found one with her decision to purchase an RV and hit the road as a traveling histologist willing to contract her services for a few months at a time in various hospitals all over the U.S.

 I haven't been reading as many books at the same time as I usually do because of my limited reading hours, so I'm wide open to new reading choices for the upcoming days. Here are a few of the ones I'll be choosing from after I finish Three Years a Traveler and Helen Keller's book:

Homegoing is historical fiction covering 300 years of Ghanaian history, and the descendants of Ghanaians who came to America as slaves.

The Dark Wives, scheduled for August 27 publication, is book number 11 in the Vera Stanhope series by Ann Cleeves. I've been holding off on this one, but I feel myself giving in now.

I'm a big fan of the Jane Tennison television shows but I've never read one of Lynda La Plante's Tennison novels. This one kind of fell into my hands recently, and made me wonder what I've been missing.

I'm at least three books behind on reviews I want to write (and hoping that my notes jog my memory in all the right places), so my reading time will still be a little limited this week. Too, it remains to be seen how much disruption the approaching storm will cause. Hurricane Beryl seems very determined to tour the Houston area before she's done, so we'll see how it all turns out. I'm still hoping for a big fizzle from Beryl. Have a great reading week!

Deliverance - James Dickey

 

James Dickey's Deliverance is a remarkable novel. The first time I read it, in mid-1971, I appreciated the novel for its sensationalism and thrilling plot about four city slickers who are forced into a kill-or-be-killed battle of wits and weapons in the Georgia backwoods that will redefine their lives. This second reading of Deliverance, however, has left me thinking about aspects of the novel I barely considered in 1971. Maybe that's because I'm (hopefully) a better reader than I was 53 years ago, but more likely it's simply because I realize now what people (even some of the "good" ones) are capable of doing to each other when they think they can get away with it.

The city boys are:

• Ed - an ad agency art director who also serves as Dickey's narrator,
• Lewis - the muscle-bound self-appointed leader of the group who has supreme confidence in his leadership abilities and physical prowess,
• Drew - a financial advisor specializing in mutual funds, and
• Bobby - a sales manager for a soft drink company.

The four men are happy enough with their work, but each of them craves a break in their daily routine, some kind of weekend adventure that will rejuvenate them by for another few months of what their daily lives have become. So when Lewis, who is also a champion archer, hits them with the idea of a canoe trip down a river valley that is about to be dammed up and flooded forever, it doesn't take much prodding to get the other three men to agree to the idea. And despite their complete lack of experience, and not not having a clue about what to expect ahead of them, all goes relatively well the first day.

Nothing, though, could have prepared the group for the violence and death they would face on the morning of the second day when two of them are viciously set upon by two of the scariest predators on the face of the planet: human beings prepared to take everything they own from them, including their sense of dignity and self-worth. Even though what happens in a sudden burst of explosive violence leaves Ed, Lewis, Drew, and Bobby shaken to their core, they know they can't allow the truth of what they did ever to be told - and then they realize that their attackers feel the same. There's only one solution...kill or be killed.

And this is when the novel changes from a thriller into something deeper in which Dickey explores the mind of a good man pushed to the brink, a man who comes to the realization that in order to protect himself, his family, and the only life they have ever known, he is going to have to become a completely different man than the one he believes himself to be. Can he do it? Should he do it? These questions are what make Deliverance so different a novel than the one I first read in 1971.

James Dickey, who died in 1997, was primarily a poet. He was an avid outdoorsman and archer who made his reputation as a National Book Award in Poetry winner and eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. Ironically enough, he is best known today for his first novel, Deliverance, which was followed by Alnilam in 1987 and To the White Sea in 1993.

I'm Back - Just in Time for the Storm Watch

Even though it's been only fourteen days, it seems like I've been gone forever. Turns out that reading while wandering the backroads of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana (along with a little bit of Tennessee) is not nearly as easy as I hoped it would be - mainly because I was pretty much exhausted by the heat by the end of each day for the entire trip. I am way behind on book reviewing - and the books are growing hazier in my mind by the minute - but I decided to begin with a quick "Hello Post" and a few pictures as I ease myself back into Book Chasing. 

So here are a few pictures that give a taste of what I've been up to for the last two weeks:

One of the 20-or-so murals on buildings in Clarksdale, MS

A view from the side of B.B. King's Gravesite 

The only surviving structure in the Vicksburg Battleground Park

 

Another of the Clarksdale, MS, murals

Friendship Cemetery, Columbus, Ms, site of America's first Memorial Day celebration

"Contraband Camp," Corinth, MS, home of freed slaves during the Civil War

Birthplace of Elvis Presley, Tupelo, MS

Muscle Shoals Studios, AL; toilet Mick Jagger composed "Wild Horses" on 

Hellen Keller home near Muscle Shoals, AL

Louisiana State capitol building, Baton Rouge, LA

View from one side of 27th floor, LA State Capitol

Cathedral in Lafayette, LA

 

500+ year old tree on cathedral grounds

All of these photos should be "clickable" for a larger, more detailed look.

The pictures are kind of all over the map - and so was my wandering. I never had more than a general destination in mind, and usually lost a lot of potential road time in favor of long conversations with the locals. It was a great trip, and it was exactly what I needed at that moment. More later if anyone is interested, but I do promise to get back to book-talk very soon. I've missed all of you, and can't wait to catch up on what everyone has been up to.

...as for Hurricane Beryl, it's looking better for the upper Texas Gulf Coast today. We are likely to get some decent rain, but not the flooding rains we often get - and not a lot of wind.