Leg 10 - New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi

I am finding that I fight with Google maps.  Each morning before I start driving, I use Google maps to find the route to my destination.  It gives me an estimated drive time.  GM is an optimistic travel partner.  She forgets that I dally and drive like a grandma (so my daughters tell me).

Note for those of you who are van-lifeing, or rving – driving always takes longer than you expect.

I drove six hours that day.  The trip was supposed to be 1 hour, 27 minutes.  I drove the back roads, because that is the purpose of this trip – to see America.  I saw the NASA Space Center; I saw houses on stilts by Lake Pontchartrain; I saw herons wheeling through the sky along all the waterways.

The houses I found so fascinating sit on a small spit of land between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne in Louisiana.  This land that is covered in water – the gulf, lakes, bayous, rivers, and swamps are mysterious and soulful and green and lush.  I don’t think I would ever live here…all my family is somewhere else.  And that is the reason to live in a place – family and friends.  But it is so beautiful.  If I did live here, I could picture myself every day taking off in my little boat to go explore the waterways.

Another rainstorm rolled in around 1:30 pm.  I was coming up on Bay Saint Louis, and hungry, so I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that was open and looked out over the marina.  Bay St. Louis has an old downtown that is filled with big plantation home-style houses with huge green lawns that slope down to the beach.  I found it interesting, though - there were no people on the beach.  It was miles and miles of white sand beach, and not a soul.  I wonder why not?  I did see large pipes running from the land to the gulf about every 50 yards, though.  It made me wonder what came out of those pipes.  Maybe that was why there weren’t any people on the beaches.  Maybe whatever comes out of those pipes isn’t something people want to be around.

When I drove up to my camping place for the night, I was in disbelief that this was a campsite.  It was at a large plantation home from the early 1800s called Beauvoir.  I had to drive through a multi-acre sprawling lawn before getting to the parking lot of the plantation home which had been turned into a museum.  Set in the lawn were massive old oak trees that stood at least 50 feet tall and were covered with dripping Spanish moss and resurrection ferns on massive limbs that sometimes rest on the ground.

The plantation house had been turned into a museum and rents out parking space on Harvest Hosts, which is how I found it.  The email said to check in at the gift shop, so I went in to find out where to park.  When I got into the gift shop, I asked one of the two women working there where to park, and she said, “Oh, on the grass anywhere on the west lawn.”  Now…two things:  First – Truly - Anywhere on the grass?  And secondly, which way is west?   Where I live, we protect our grass like gold.  Not only would we never let someone park on our grass, but sometimes people also don’t even let anyone walk on their grass.

I was able to find the “camping sites” easily enough.  There were a couple of electric hookup sites in the middle of the grassy lawn.  They weren’t well used, so it honestly looked like there were just electric stub-outs planted in the middle of a lawn. 

I took the tour that they offered of the “big house”.  The house was built by a wealthy Madison County planter named James Brown.  It went through a couple more owners before being given to Jefferson Davis, who was president of the confederacy at that time.  In 1873 it was owned and managed by Sarah Dorsey.  She sounds like she was an amazing woman, especially for her time, when women didn’t normally have positions of power.

As much as I loved the place I camped, I didn’t sleep well.  There is a road that runs between the plantation and the beach, and it was quite busy all night.  Not sure where all the traffic is coming from or going to, but it was loud.  I don’t like to put my earplugs in when I am in campsites, because I feel like I need to be vigilant, being a woman alone.  I watched way too many psycho movies when I was young.  It is ridiculous the things I am afraid of - like the pecan grower who I thought was going to slit my throat in the middle of the night.  Another reason I didn’t sleep well was because it was hot, of course.  I had the fan going, but it didn’t seem to be working as well as the previous night. 

I have a story to tell. 

I am telling all the women I run across my story, hoping…what?  Hoping to motivate them to do the things in life that they want to do but are holding back from?  I think that is easy to say, and hard to implement when you are young and trying to live your life.

What do I want? 

I want to leave a trail across the US of a woman who is living out a period of grief and is…looking for something?  Running from something?  Killing time?  I know I still just need to get through more time.  And sitting in my house every night watching the news, then watching mind-numbing tv was me slowly inching my way toward my own death, in a very mundane way.  I didn’t want to be that person. 

So I am killing time.  But I am also exploring.  I am doing what I’ve always wanted to do – see things.  There is so much in this world to see.

I think that what I am doing on this trip is trying to figure out where I am going with the next chapter of life:

Hello.  I am R. Everywoman.

I went through a phase in my life, many years ago now, when my career had lost its luster, my children were grown, I was divorced, and I knew I was on the precipice of my next chapter.  So I went looking.  I read books and magazine articles and newspaper articles and listened to podcasts and watched documentaries and movies and tv series (what is the plural of series?), looking for my next chapter.  And I found the most heartwarming and inspiring stories:  “woman with nothing makes a million dollars developing a bungee for all your household cords”; “woman at 60 finds the cure for cancer”; “woman at 65 has never written before, writes a novel that sells a million copies”; “woman who always sang to her children recorded an album that sold a million copies”; “woman whose children were grown wanted to help sick children in Africa goes there to work, wins a Nobel Peace prize”…  And on and on.  There is no shortage of inspiring stories of people who have done amazing things for their second career.  And so I started looking for my niche.  I’m not medical - the sight of blood makes me pass out.  I still leave all the cords in my house in a massive mess that looks like an ant’s nest.  I can’t hold a tune.  I’m terrified of getting yellow fever from mosquitos in Africa, so I don’t want to go there.

I tried many new things.  I won’t say I failed at them, I will say that I discovered that I didn’t really enjoy them, after all.  One of the things we all read as we are looking for something new to occupy our time, is to think back to when you were a child – what did you like to do then?  So I did that.  One by one I tried all the things I could remember liking as a child:   President of the U.S. – way too much responsibility.  Plus, I don’t like debate.  Running a cat shelter – too much poop.  Being Jo from Little Women – I would need more sisters.  Camping out and playing cowboys and Indians – I don’t like sleeping on the ground anymore.  What I came to was that perhaps the things that we dreamed about as children - we didn’t fully understand what was involved in doing those things, and come to find out, we didn’t really want that dream after all.  I said to a group of friends once that I have figured out that at some age you just put away those dreams you had when you were young.  One of my friends replied “You are never too old to accomplish those dreams”.  He misinterpreted what I had said.  I didn’t mean I was too old, I meant that I had learned that I no longer wanted that childhood dream.

What I found as I went looking for inspiration for my next chapter was that all these stories I read or heard about showed me someone who had done something really big.  They went from rags to riches, or they did something that landed them in the spotlight somewhere.  I doubt that I will ever do something that big. I'm an Everywoman.

What if…

What if my next chapter will be something less grand?  Will that still be enough to make me feel like this part of my life is worth living?

What if I give a cup of coffee to a person who is down and out, and I sit with them for an hour (or however long they need) and listen to their story?

What if I put a Band-Aid on a child’s knee who just fell down and scraped their knee?  And sat with them until their tears were dry.

What if I help an abused woman find a job so she can move out of her abusive environment?

I’ve always believed in helping locally, rather than trying to help in faraway places like Africa or India.  There are plenty of abused women and children in my own hometown, and there are plenty of people who go to bed hungry in my hometown.