Storms in Alabama, Mud in Mississippi

Watching TV

The day we left Alabama, it was supposed to rain. David went outside to start prepping for departure and then came to the door and said, “Jane, we have a problem.” That bad? I’m not sure I want to know. I don’t ask, but he goes on to explain that the truck has a flat tire. He changes the tire with the spare while I clean up inside. When I go outside to see how he’s doing, it has become very windy. Another camper wanders over, looks at the sky and says, “It looks bad.” I look up. The clouds are low, billowing and ominous. There’s lightning and thunder. I hurry back inside. David just finishes changing the tire when the bottom falls out. There are tornado warnings, and one touchdown in the area. After about an hour of heavy rain, the storm appears to have passed. The rain is lighter. We decide to leave. The cats get wet as we carry them to the truck, and they are unhappy. We’re driving on country roads. Then we come to a low spot where water is covering the road and flowing across it. The two fifth wheels ahead of us make it, so we proceed across. Then we come across another low, flooded spot and another. “If I had known it would be like this, I would have stayed in the campground,” David says. He is concerned that the drum brakes in the trailer will get wet and fail. It begins to rain hard again with thunder and lightning. Neptune is agitated and won’t stop meowing and bouncing around the truck. Plato has his paranoid look and stares out the window nervously. Perhaps they feel our anxiety. We still have a long way to go before we get to the Interstate. After about the 4th or 5th flooded spot, the two campers in front of us pull into a parking lot. Almost immediately we get a “tire sensor fault error” on the dashboard. David pulls into a gravel parking area. He checks the tires and doesn’t see any problem. We assume the error is because the spare tire doesn’t have a tire pressure sensor. David is leery about continuing because of all the water on the road, but the storm is traveling west, and we are heading east. We decide to continue. We finally make it to I-10, drive past Mobile, through the tunnel and on toward our next destination--Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. 

By the time we get there mid-day, the storm is gone. However, ravenous no-see-ums have emerged and dine enthusiastically on David while he sets up the trailer. It’s too wet and buggy to go on the hike I had planned, so instead we drive to Biloxi, ten miles away. The big draw there, I guess, is Beach Blvd, which runs alongside a pretty white-sand beach. 

We drive by eight huge casinos, which had been destroyed by Katrina and been rebuilt. You can still see damage from Katrina--damaged buildings, houses under repair or just empty lots where homes had been. You also see new construction. A huge casino barge had swept onto shore and destroyed the Ohr-O’keefe art museum, which was being completely rebuilt and was partly open. We wonder if this is partly why the casinos are all solid, land-based buildings and not barges. We stop to look at the building. I take photos of trees that had died in the hurricane and been turned into sculptures where they stood. 

I also take photos of a white, cast-iron lighthouse. We visit the Katrina memorial, which lists the names of everyone who died in Mississippi because of the hurricane. 

The Hard Rock casino is across the street, so we wander over. It is so weird to see all these people sitting at gambling machines, pushing buttons. You don’t have to pull a lever on the slot machine anymore, and you can play other gambling games by yourself at machines. Does anyone ever win? I try my luck. I stick a dollar in a 25-cent slot machine, push the button and lose. I push again and lose. I push two more times and lose. That's it for me. We drive around downtown Biloxi, but it looks pretty depressed with a lot of empty storefronts. Mardi Gras decorations still adorn some of the windows.

The next day we go to the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge where the only population of this subspecies of cranes lives. 

There are only about 132 of them. They are non-migratory and live only here on this refuge. The exhibits in the visitor’s center are excellent, some of the best we’ve seen. We walk a trail through their habitat, a wet pine savannah, one of the last tracts of this ecosystem left. 

Then we drive around some neighborhoods trying to get a glimpse of the birds. They like to feed in people’s backyards. A glimpse is all we get. They’re huge, grey birds with some red on top of their heads. I spot two large grey lumps in the far end of someone’s yard. They raise their heads and walk off.

After lunch we go on another, longer trail. We walk about a mile when the trail starts getting muddier and muddier. Soon it is covered with water. We try bushwhacking through the thick, thorny underbrush, but the trail never gets any drier so we give up and turn back. 

Where's lunch?

Before returning to the trailer, we stop at Shearwater Pottery and look at some great pottery by the Andersons.