I awoke in the dark early hours unable to view the ‘sea view’ from the hotel window. When daylight finally arrived Mississippi was dull and dreary and the palm trees along the beach front were bowing in the wind. Surprisingly it was warmer outside than it was inside the hotel room. We decided to give a morning ride along the beach front a miss and hoped to head into better weather later on. Only we hit a very large squall line stretching vertically down across a few states and for part of the drive it battered the car with torrential rain conditions so bad you could hardly see the road. We pulled over at a rest stop for a coffee.

When we pressed on we found a ‘tornado watch’ on the weather report and it wasn’t long before the conditions for one presented themselves quite nicely to the west of us. A large heavy rumbly black cloud loomed in the sky with several areas along the bottom seemingly being pulled down by cold air. We continued on leaving whatever carnage may have developed, behind.

The scenery along the beach front was still showing the wrath of hurricane Katrina by way of buildings with shattered and missing windows and large square concrete foundations where houses once stood. Some rebuilding is taking place, other lots remain empty spaces of weeds and brick steps leading to front doors than no longer exsist.  Interstate-49 was bland and much the same as most scenery in the south – pine trees, swampland, rivers..  With nothing really to look at and a long northerly trip to Shreveport to connect to I-20 it was nearly an entire day of driving just to get out of Louisiana with the highlight being that of driving through a patch of Skunk stink. And christ did it stink.

600 miles later Dallas, Texas welcomed us in all it’s largeness.. The freeway snaked between the colourfully lit sky scrapers of downtown with roads firing off here, there and everywhere. Imagine driving along one strand of spaghetti in an entire bowlfull….yeah, that. But somehow we managed to find our way to my sisters house tucked away just on the edge of the centre of town amongst a host of little cafes, bars and restaurants. After a short shopping trip to the farmers market my body welcomed a meal of salad and smoked salmon before crashing on the couch to sleep.