23 April 2014
Kentwood, LA to Poplarville, MS
76 miles (Total Miles = 2,266)

Snake Count Update: Total = 5. Three added today alone, but none of them were wriggling or slithering across the road (bigger tires than ours had made sure of that) so for that, we are thankful.

Hello Mississippi! A state neither one of us has been to but we’ve both known how to spell since before we lost all of our baby teeth. I know even less about Mississippi than I did about Louisiana, which translates to knowing less than nothing, so I am prepared to be surprised and hopefully in a good way. And thus far, with the green, lush, and quiet back-country roads we connected together to get to Poplarville, I must say this Mississippi is looking good. If there’s any downside, it would be the lack of a Dairy Queen here in Poplarville. While the snake count has been going up, the Blizzard count has been going down. This is a trend that must be reversed.

So, as usual, now that we’ve left her, a few thoughts on Louisiana:

Logging is big, and so are the trucks. I never would have thought we’d encounter so many logging trucks in Louisiana, but given that I knew nothing about the state before arriving, it’s no wonder that I didn’t realize the state has lots of trees and therefore some of them must be cut down. To their credit, most of the logging truck drivers gave us as much room as possible when passing by, and to our credit, if it was easy to pull over to give them that much more room, we did. The shoulders may have been littered with hunks of wood and strips of bark, but that’s better than bits of my bicycle.

Ebony and Ivory. I don’t know if they’re living in perfect harmony down here. I know I met a bunch of lovely people of all creeds and colors, none of which made any difference to me, but to hear a few local folks talk, there’s still a negative undercurrent about things 50 years past. At least for them there is. Maybe it’s time to forget and move on, maybe that’s easier said than done. Not being in their shoes or having lived their lives, it’s really not for me to judge. But I didn’t expect to hear some of what I did and I would hope that those old wounds will eventually heal.

It’s not just one big swamp. At least not the bit we crossed. Not one (real) alligator in sight. I think I’m actually okay with that.