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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

January 6, 2005 - Volksmarch in Jackson, Mississippi

We awakened to birds chirping in the early morning, but since we had been up a bit later than usual the previous night we just turned over and went back to sleep for a couple of hours. I slept well, mostly I think because I had slept in the bed in the trailer often enough in the past year that it now felt like "home". I don't know how many other people have trouble sleeping in strange surroundings, but I'm confident I am not the only one and that is one of the big advantages of sleeping in an RV rather than a motel.

We all had a late breakfast in our trailer-I cooked pancakes on the griddle while Monika cooked some eggs and sausages from Lloyd and Sandy's larder on the stove. I used the table extension that I had built during our stay back at home and was extremely gratified to see that it worked exactly as designed-Lloyd sat on the couch and ate on it with no trouble whatsoever. Huzzah! During breakfast we talked about out respective families and also made plans for rest of the day.

The first item on the agenda we worked out was to drive over to the Mississippi Agricultural Museum and take the Volksmarch that started there. The museum itself was quite an extensive collection of old farm buildings and exhibits, including a nice collection of 3 antique crop dusters. Some of the outbuildings apparently included a petting zoo and exhibits on different aspects of country life, and the whole complex looked like it would be well worth a more thorough exploration some day.

But first and foremost we had to do the walk, so we signed up, grabbed a map, and started off across the street. The first part of the walk led us to a nearby state park that contained a golf course and a beautiful new natural history museum. Out in back of the museum was a network of nature trails, and our walk included one of those loops. The checkpoint was a huge piece of petrified wood, and I think we were all surprised that petrified wood could be found in Mississippi. As this trail was also a nature trail, several explanatory plaques were found at points of interest and many of the trees were carefully labeled, including several I had never heard of at all.

We wended our way back to the entrance of the park, at which point Sandy and Lloyd decided to take the direct route back while we continued on to loop into the city past a small college campus. The Belhaven College campus was quite pretty and dated from 1883, although most of the buildings were clearly newer than that. I also enjoyed seeing some of the old houses in the old residential area surrounding the college as we looped around it and returned to our starting point. We thought this Volksmarch was quite a nice mix of the loop through the state park and the loop around the college plus the possibility of visiting two very different museums along the way. I didn't get a chance to thoroughly visit either of them, but I would allow a couple of hours for each one if you like to thoroughly read the signs and look at all the exhibits.

Lloyd and Sandy felt like sampling some local cuisine, so we stopped at a nice restaurant advertising "New Orleans style" food. As it turned out the food was different, distinctly spicier than typically bland Midwestern fare, but really delicious. I particularly enjoyed a Navy bean soup made with chicken that purported be as rich as chili; it was in fact nice and thick and savory. Really it was soup so hearty that you could have a big bowl of it and just call it a meal. I also had a blackened chicken BBQ sandwich that was actually a blackened grilled chicken breast on a bun, which was probably low fat, covered with bacon and melted cheese, which was definitely not low fat. But it tasted great so what the heck.

After lunch we drove north to an RV supply store where Lloyd and Sandy stocked up on the various kinds of specialized supplies you need for life in an RV. Things like a pressure reduction valve for the water inlet, three-inch flexible drain hose for the waste water system, carpet covers for the entrance steps, and such like just are not available at your local neighborhood hardware store (although predictably many Wal Marts will carry some of that stuff). We decided to return to camp using US 51 rather than the interstate, both to avoid a traffic jam and to find a Wal Mart, but none of the strip malls we encountered along the way had one.

As we approached the campground I saw a Wynn Dixie grocery store across the street and asked Monika if we wanted to stop and shop as she had earlier mentioned augmenting our foodstuffs. Much to my surprise, Sandy answered that yes it was the right type of store and we did indeed want to stop and shop for food. It was exactly the right response, but from Lloyd's wife instead of mine. Monika, who had not heard my question, immediately concurred and we all stop and went in to buy groceries, but getting exactly the right response from someone else's spouse raised to my mind an intriguing possibility. Namely, are the spouses from really good marriages at base interchangeable?

I think it was Tolstoi in the beginning of Anna Karenina who said something to the effect that all happy families are essentially alike, and it is only a short step from that to say that all happy marriages are essentially alike, and just another short step to say that all spouses in happy marriages are essentially interchangeable. Of course, taking enough of these short steps could well walk us over a theoretical cliff, but that's another matter. Still if happy marriages result at least in part to learned, general relationship skills (rather than a unique set of adaptations to an idiosyncratic partner), then you would expect some positive transfer of training from a good relationship with one spouse to a good relationship with another spouse. Probably that idea has already been tested by marriage psychologists, but if not it is worth testing, I think. After we had stocked up on groceries, it was dark and we just drove back to the campground for the night. After a quick dinner of meat and cheese sandwiches, Monika played games on Daddy while I worked on Baby for a while to bring the journal up to date. We later met with Lloyd and Sandy to chat and strategize for the next couple of days, and then turned in for the night.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 05
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February 2005
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