THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020
I departed St Louis around 7am on Thursday, January 30, 2020 with 8.000 miles on my Honda Ridgeline. I headed south on I-55 toward Natchez, Mississippi. I completed the trip with 9,500 miles on my odometer around 7pm on Sunday February 2nd . The point of this short excursion was to test several things, including my personal stamina, my ability to basically live out of my little pickup truck, the validity of my planning, and the adequacy of my gear. I also wanted to discover what kinds of unanticipated events and circumstances for which I should prepare myself.
I selected the Natchez area for three reasons: 1) It was on my list, 2) It was a relatively short excursion; I was able to drive there in one (very long) day and return in one (very long) day, and 3) It was comparatively warm. The day I left St Louis we still had a light dusting of snow, and I strongly dislike cold weather. I’d had enough of winter, and just needed to thoroughly defrost myself. I planned my route using a combination of the maps & descriptions in the Most Scenic Drives in America book listed above, Google Earth, and a 2019 Rand McNally Road Atlas (the large print edition). In the end, though, I found that virtually all my navigation was done through a combination of Google Maps and the navigation system in my Honda. I did refer about a dozen times to the information from the Most Scenic Drives book, which I had photocopied using my iPhone before departure; a very smart thing to do, as it turned out.
On January 30, I drove relatively straight through to Natchez. I stopped about a half-dozen times, as the trip was about 500 miles. I came off my planned route inadvertently in Jackson, Mississippi on the way down by following the Natchez Trace Parkway along the Pearl River.
By the time I realized with enough clarity what I had done, it made more sense to follow that on to Natchez than to backtrack and take the main highway again, so I forged ahead. It added more than an hour to my trip. But looking back, I’m glad I did it because it afforded me a preview of the beautiful shoreline along the river between Jackson and Natchez that I’d almost certainly have missed otherwise. I was so struck by it that I deliberately returned along this same route when I headed back to St. Louis, and invested most of a morning in photographing that stretch. It’s quite beautiful and – on that day, at least – it was virtually deserted.
My entire day on Thursday was devoted to travel, and briefly arranging for my lodging in Natchez. I spent 80% of the trip listening to old time Radio Classics on Sirius XM. Love the old radio shows; especially the mysteries, crime dramas, and westerns from the 1950s and early 1960s.
There were some stretches where I just turned the radio off, too, and listened to the quiet whoosh of the truck knifing its way through the wind along the highway. I love that sound, and the opportunity for quiet contemplation it offers. The combination of freedom from the noise of televisions, conversational chatter, and the other extraneous hubbub of normal daily life and the lure of the unfettered open road is a heady brew. It made me feel younger somehow, as though life was a blank canvas stretched out before me, at least for a few days. No schedule, no meetings, no one expecting me at a certain place or a certain time.
Yet I was as connected as I needed to be. My iPhone is wirelessly connected through my Honda and so anyone I know is just one button away by phone, and only a tiny bit further by Facetime, if I needed to see them, and if they needed to see me. From time to time throughout my excursion I would share photos and videos via text message too, and so I was still as “connected” as if I were in my office at work or my living room at home. In so many ways, staying connected while distant is so much easier than it has ever been before; it’s both wonderful and unsettling, I guess. It worked out very well for me on this trip. Weather improved as I skated southward, traffic was light, and my spirits improved with every mile.