The Next Day Gone

Life's like a road that you travel on
When there's one day here, and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind
There's a world outside every darkened door
Where blues won't haunt you anymore
Where the brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shore
--Rascal Flatts

We leave in two days.  We are now at the point at which we would love to just jump in and take off.  This could be the next day gone.  The Christmas parties are done.  The big meals are done.  The gifts are given and unwrapped.  And a couple of them are installed in the RV.  Now the only thing left is final preparations.  Loading nearly six weeks worth of food into an impossibly small refrigerator and any other nooks and crannies that can be found in a 24-foot RV.  Checking off the big list of items that we don’t want to forget.

The RV has been moved into its “loading position” in the driveway.  The fuel tanks are full, the batteries are charged, most of the systems have been tested.  Today we’ll turn the fridge on and maybe even de-winterize the water system and fill the fresh water tank.  We’ll strap the kayaks and the bikes on the back.

We’ve been blessed so far with a green Christmas and a forecast for a green New Year.  While snow at Christmas is more normal, snow when preparing and then driving an RV gets to be quite a challenge and we are grateful that it has held off until at least after we leave.

We won’t be doing much sightseeing on the way to Texas.  Not like our usual travel where it takes nearly three weeks to get to North Carolina.  We are due in Palacios, Texas on Friday, or Saturday at the very latest, so it’s a bit more pedal to the metal this time.  We’ll do most of the slow travel on the way back.

One thing we will be doing is driving the Natchez Trace, which is a 444-mile scenic drive that goes through three states: Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.  This National Parkway follows a route that has been used for thousands of years, starting with hunter/gatherers following the bison and deer, to several tribes of native Americans who called the region home and traveled on the trail for hunting and trading expeditions, to pioneers and explorers who used this wilderness road.  This route was used extensively during the Civil War to transport troops.  Though the road was the best choice at the time, the troops still had to contend with knee-deep mud, oxen dying from the heat, an occasional rattlesnake, and a “heavy a shower of hail and rain that ever fell upon poor soldiers in the world,” according to soldier A. J. Edmundson.

The Natchez Trace was officially reestablished as a unit of the National Park Service in 1938, and in 2005, the Natchez Trace Parkway was completed, extending from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee. 

Looking at the maps, this route only adds about 2.5 hours of drive time to our journey, and gets us off the interstate, which is always a win.

This trip will also fill in some largely unexplored areas of the US, that big open area comprising most of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and surrounding states.  We have been to some of these many years ago, but I don’t have any GPS tracking data recorded, so I can’t show it on the map.

We’re packing as much food as possible because the town of Palacios, Texas, isn’t close to anything.  The nearest supermarket is a Walmart, over a half-hour drive away.  The local stores are the smaller, Dollar General fare, with their limited selection and correspondingly higher prices.

When you are used to having major grocery stores within walking distance, a half-hour drive seems like an eternity.

The plan right now is to leave on Monday afternoon, after some last visits with a couple of the kids.  New Year’s Day is usually a decent day to travel, because the traffic is light.