10/4/2006

Day two dawned with all of us up bright and early – ok, maybe early, but not terribly bright without food or caffeine yet. As we did need sustenance for the road, we took ourselves downstairs for breakfast.

Barb had one typical breakfast: eggs, grits, bacon, toast.

Mom and I both had a more typical Southern style breakfast: biscuits and gravy, with bacon. My portion was a mass of bacon-y goodness, chewy and slightly greasy. Of course, I was unable to eat even a quarter of it, but what I did have was tasty (although both Barb and Mom said the bacon was slightly too salty for their taste – my benefit of screwed up taste buds, I suppose, is that it really does take an extreme in order for some things to seem out of whack to me).

While we were eating, there were seniors appearing for breakfast as well, most of whom were wearing Senior Olympics shirts. Despite my overwhelming curiosity and desire to ask them about it, I refrained and we got our show back on the road.

We crossed over the mighty Mississippi River – the first time I’ve ever crossed it other than in an airplane.

One thing I did not know about Louisiana and Texas was the amount of rice farming done in those states. Louisiana also has a good amount of sugar cane farming.

Of course, oil and gas are huge, and it isn’t strange at all to see working machinery in the midst of what appears to be otherwise arable farm or pastureland.

Along the way, in front of yet another sugarcane field, we saw some workers in very fashionable prison garb.

Since we had no particular time constraints, we made a stop at the Atchafalaya (ah-CHA-fah-lye-ya) information center.

This was still in Louisiana, and is on the eastern side of the Atchafalaya swamp.

We watched a short movie about the swamp – which really is a tourist infomercial, as most of these things are – read up about the area…

…and then pushed on, ever westward.

The map of the swamp shows a myriad of oil and natural gas fields, and the bridge over the swamp reminded me a great deal of the Chesapeake Bridge in Maryland – except with more trees and, you know, swampier.

Driving is hungry work, so we stopped off in Iowa, home of the Yellowjackets, according to the water tower.

Our goal was Big Daddy’s, which we found after driving down the main street in Iowa and then back toward the highway.

Alas, crawfish were not running when we visited, so there were no crawfish to be had. Instead, we had the buffet: fried chicken, corn, beans, mashed potatoes, spicy meatballs, salad, and a couple of desserts (banana pudding and bread pudding).

The chicken was tasty, as were the beans and corn. The meatballs did have a bit of a kick to them, but with the shape my mouth is in, too much for me. The rolls were bought, and the puddings were uninteresting. One of the strangest things we encountered during this trip was the absence of sweet tea. In Louisiana and Texas, very few places at which we ate served sweet tea, and Big Daddy’s was no exception to this. But the meal was satisfying enough and the tea was freshly brewed, and thus sated, we piled back into the car to continue our journey.

10/03/2006

The adventure begins, but not without some trepidation. When you own your own business, and that business is a 24/7 operation, and you haven’t actually had a real vacation in many years, and you’re worried about something going wrong that would require your presence when you’re four states and 18 hours away…yep, that adds up to a little bit of worry creeping into the back of your head about whether or not leaving is a good idea after all.

Still, everyone needs a break now and then, and after this past year and a half, I could certainly use one. So, we headed west.

If you should ever find yourself going across the state of Florida for some reason – moving from point A to point B on your map – keep in mind that Florida is really, really flat. And that many parts of Florida, particularly if you are, say, moving west from Jacksonville toward the Panhandle, are still farm and pastureland.

There is a lot of this between here and our destination, all of which just served to whet my appetite for a piece of land somewhere.

A cow, a few chickens, a horse, lots of veggies….but I digress.

After stopping off in Tallahassee for some lunch – Chinese – we were back on the road to Alabama.

We wound our way to Mobile, searching out a restaurant recommended to us by a friend. You can’t miss it, he said. It’s right next to the battleship (the USS Alabama, as it happens). We missed it, having missed the turnoff, so had to backtrack. He couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant, but lo and behold, there it was.

We arrived just as they were setting up for dinner, so there was almost no one in the restaurant. I’m so used to Florida, where smoking in restaurants is verboten, that I was caught offguard for a moment by the question about seating in a smoking area versus a nonsmoking area. In deference to mom, who continues to smoke despite all the nastiness associated with it, we chose the smoking area.

To start: drinks and some fried mushrooms.

Fried platter for Barb (left).

Hearts of palm salad and shrimp cocktail for Mom.

Fried catfish for me.

Since this was, as Barb put it, a culinary journey as much as anything else, we also had dessert: key lime pie and coffee.

All of this was served up by Jim, one of the fastest moving and nicest servers I’ve ever met.

As we left, I took some (non-moving) shots of the heavy gear outside.

We chased the sun as it set.

The sun was always a step ahead of us, beckoning us to follow.

Eventually, it led us into Mississippi.

And stayed with us for a bit more.

Before beginning its final descent.

And bidding us a farewell after a day’s work.

Our work was not yet done, and we continued to make our way toward Louisiana.

With the moon and stars as our guide now…

…we ended our own day’s journey in Baton Rouge.

Over the course of three days, I’ve managed to collect over 2000 photos. Sometimes, it’s a little disturbing just how many photos you can take with digital cameras. The only problem with this is that once you unload them, you have to pick out the ones you want – the ones that best represent what you’ve been doing, so they’ll illustrate your narrative in the best way possible. Those images then have to be resized, renamed, and uploaded. That, my dear readers, is a large task after a full day of travel, or, in the case of today, our first full day in San Antonio, after a full day of walking around everywhere in 90 degree weather.

So, I’m sorting through these batches, working on getting some images up. Friday, mom and I will be following Mission Trail, which links the five Missions that originally laid the groundwork for what became San Antonio. And you know what that means: more photo opportunities.

In the meantime, greetings from San Antonio.

When we first started looking at houses, and I prequalified for a ton of mortgage, I never really considered the process to be all that stressful (except for the prequalification itself, which was nerve-wracking, since I’ve never owned anything as large as a house). It was tedious sometimes, and sometimes it was nice looking through those houses, but I wasn’t terribly concerned with where I wound up as long as I liked the house and grounds.

Then we started looking at properties.

For most of the day, I’ve been dividing my attention between work that needs to be done for month end and property listings. Two and a half acres here, 14 acres over there, and 20 acres out yonder. Here’s nine acres, there’s ten over there. Some have houses, some have mobile homes. Some are fully cleared, with pasture land, some are half cleared with wooded areas running wild.

And then, there’s the one I want, which no one wants to touch to finance, it seems – at least no one that we called today. We’ll be calling a few more places tomorrow. Having something at your fingertips that remains just ever so slightly out of reach for the moment is the worst sort of aggravation. It reminds me of the itchy sensation that crawls up the numb left side of my neck, which cannot be scratched and which jolts me from that rare, deep sleep I manage to get sometimes: annoying, and not much that can be done about it except let things take their course. Just like those episodes, though, it’s stressful and leads to worrying.

I’ve read memoirs and writeups from people after they’ve successfully gone through treatment for cancer and come out the other side. Many of them are poignant, with a new outlook on life, a new appreciation of all the little things. I find myself wondering, sometimes, why I am not so poignant, why my outlook on life now – while appreciative that I didn’t die – is fairly the same as it was before, with the same kind of worries, the same kind of joys in my family and friends. I have no touching tales to tell about how I found myself, how I found others. Is that a sign of being too self-absorbed, or a sign of not caring? Either way, it can’t be good.

Ah, and the dentist. Nice guy. Referred me to an oral surgeon with more experience treating patients who have gone through radiation treatment and all it entails. That oral surgeon also has a panoramic xray machine, so we can get some good xrays of my jaws and choppers. The visit will have to wait until we return from San Antonio, though, so our look to see if there really is anything suspicious in the left mandible will be then. My surgeon, recently returned from New Zealand, doesn’t think there will be anything out of the ordinary, but as they say, always better to check than to let it go.

A friend of ours is a bus driver – Greyhound, not school – and called the other day to tell us that he’s moving to Wyoming to drive trains loaded with coal instead. He’ll be joining us for half the trip to San Antonio, and will leave us when we get to Baton Rouge. I’ve always loved trains, and many years ago thought it would be the height of fun to work with them. Instead, I content myself with knowing that one day, the train sets I have packed away will be happily chugging around tracks near the ceiling in some room in some house. Everyone needs a hobby, right? Or three or ten.

“You want to live where?”

“A bit further out than I live now.”

“How much further out?”

“About eight to ten miles or so.”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“This is why.”

We went to the property Wednesday morning. Our realtors, patient people that they are, appeared on our doorstep just after 8 AM, awakening me from a strange dream whose details continue to escape me: all I know is that I was happy, once my feet had hit the floor, to be awake rather than asleep. Our appointment to see the property and the buildings on it was for 9 AM. We had another appointment after that to see a different property, but everyone knew we were seeing the second one just to see it, and that the first was really the only one that interested us.

As I had a dentist appointment scheduled for 11, I drove myself in the event we went to the point that I would have to haul ass to have yet another party poke around in my mouth. We arrived just before 9. It was a stunning morning to look at the place and walk the grounds.

The evening temperature had bottomed out around 70 degrees, and by the time we got to the property, it was only 75, with dew still glistening on the grass and the sun making its climb into the sky from behind the rear treeline. We met the lady of the house, who said her husband – a transplanted Nebraska farmer – was off at the doctor, but she’d be happy to show us the two places, although not walk the property, as her health was not up to the task. No problem, said I, I’ll walk it alone – which is my preference, without someone blathering on in my ear to disturb the flow of thoughts in my brain and disturb what is almost a frightening stillness in the morning air. I requested permission to take photos of the grounds. “Certainly,” says Fran. “Just don’t set us on fire,” she added, smiling. We laughed, and I left the four of them talking while I walked the entire perimeter of the property.

First stop? The rear of the property, at the far eastern corner. This is the view facing NNE from the eastern corner.

I walked north along the fenceline and found this guy digging furiously for bugs while it was still relatively cool.

He was so preoccupied that he didn’t realize I was walking up to him until I was about three feet away. He stopped digging, gave a little hiss, and then ran into a circular stand of trees that sits in the midst of the huge plot of cleared land in the rear of the property.

The owners, over the course of almost 30 years on the property, have done a fantastic job of clearing the property while retaining what few hardwood trees were there and planting additional hardwoods. The man of the house is, by the wife’s account, the gardener of the two, and up until a few years ago, had quite the garden going. Now he has what seems to be a million pots of sago palm starters.

The green line is the sagos, to the right is a pile of brush and branches – this is the sort of thing that happens when people continuously occupy a property for a good number of years: piles of stuff – and in the rear behind the marching line of sagos is what used to be a compost pen and what was destined to be converted into a chicken coop, but what is now a receptacle for more brush and some odds and ends. Behind that is the circular stand I mentioned, into which my armadillo buddy escaped my intrusion.

I walked to the front of the property and looked back to the ENE along the fence/hedgeline.

There is also a line of baby sago palms at the front of the property, along the front fenceline near the road.

We found more sagos near the little greenhouse, along with assorted other plants awaiting their fates. From the front of the property, I took another shot facing one of the two homes.

It’s amazing what people will tell you if you let them. The second home was for the woman’s mother, who died last November (in her 90s, no less). They were still working on clearing out the last remaining items, and of course this is hard work – not physically, but emotionally. As she said, though, you do what you have to do. There is a very nice fishing boat on a trailer on the property; this belongs to one of their sons, who also fishes in the annual kingfish tournament held on the shore here. The husband and wife are leaving the property for something a bit smaller as they’re both getting older and both have some health problems.

The stovetops in both homes, along with the water heaters, are gas. This would be a welcome relief from living entirely on the local utility teat, especially since the utility bills in the current place are exceeding $400/month, primarily because the air conditioning unit is too small for a house this size and runs constantly.

“Tell me again why you want to live here. There’s nothing here except a few piles of junk, a bunch of grass to mow, and a couple of trailers. They look nice and all, but come on – it’s trailers, when you boil it down.”

“Yes, I know. But tis is not to say that I’ll be living in a trailer for the rest of my life. It’s a temporary waystation. See all that land in front? Perfect for a new house, lots of room, no worries about spacing, facing issues on the lot, or anything else. And the land won’t need mowing everywhere – there’s a rather large garden area envisioned on the back side of the property, about where the man had his before he gave it up. The piles of junk? A dumpster costs $50/day: you load it up, they haul it away and dispose of it. This is what happens when you eye a piece of property rather than just a lot where they’re going to toss up a house with no yard and no room for much of anything at all. And there’s this, too.”

Now, the fun begins: finding someone to finance the damn thing. Random statistic found during research: one of every three homes in Florida is a mobile (or, rather, manufactured, as they call them now) home. The problem is that a lot of banks and mortgage brokers – including my own, where I prequalified to buy just about any existing or new home construction I would want otherwise – don’t want to touch anything like that these days. This sort of sent me into a tailspin after I took myself off to visit the dentist – and weighing myself three times at Publix while waiting for a prescription to show myself that I was really seeing 102.5 didn’t help – because I don’t want to see this slip away for this reason. But there has to be someone out there to finance this sort of thing, because the people living on the property just refinanced three years ago, and that random statistic up there means that someone is backing all these people. I just really, really want the next person they back to be me.

I spent a good deal of time this afternoon sitting around in the waiting room of yet another medical office, waiting to see the surgeon who had thoughtfully extracted my gallbladder and freed me from constant worry about doubling over in agonizing pain after eating something. Followup visits have been the story of my life this past year.

Luckily, I had a book with me. In the 40-odd minutes I waited, I read 140 pages and engaged in some side discussion with the woman sitting next to me, who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and who was there to schedule her procedures. My discussion and visit with the very kind surgeon lasted less than ten.

Which is fine, really. After all, the surgery went well, I’ve had no complications, and the worst I feel of it now is when I try to lift something heavier than I should be lifting, or try to push or pull something at waist level. The cement used to patch the incisions is starting to flake and peel off, and underneath one patch is a very thin, light scar. The other three will probably not be quite as thin or as light. But as I am not a belly dancer, I imagine this will not cause me any sleepless nights.

After I finished up at the surgeon and came home, thunder started rumbling in the distance, and the clouds swept in, blown by a quickly-moving cold front that promises us temperatures only in the upper 80s instead of the lower 90s. I wasn’t expecting any rain, but suddenly the wind shifted, the chimes out back started tinkling as they rocked back and forth, and the clouds opened up, draining themselves as they scurried along.

That made it a good time to go take a look at the property that has been keeping me up nights.

The reason for the look during torrential downpours is because – as our realtors keep reminding us – the front half of the property is in a flood plain, or so it says on the city’s maps. The owners say the land has never flooded, something I believe but our realtors don’t, but the best way to find out is to go look during a storm in progress – especially down here, where we can go a long time without significant rains, which makes the soil hard, which in turn can lead to minor flash flooding when a good storm rolls through (or major flash flooding, if the conditions are right).

So, I gathered up my mom and we rolled out another eight miles or so and turned down the road to what I hope will be my new abode. What we found was absolutely nothing: no water pooled anywhere except in the parking lot of a dead convenience store on the corner and in the ruts of a couple of unimproved gravel or sandy driveways leading back to other homes. Other than that, there was no standing water anywhere. That’s rather heartening.

Besides, I’ve pretty much decided I don’t care what our realtors say: that property is calling to me unlike any of the other places we’ve seen in the past two and a half months of looking at house after house. Must be the inner farmgirl coming out, or maybe it’s the anticipation of building the house I really want instead of settling for something already built but without all the pieces falling into place.

I’d like to walk the property before I leave for San Antonio for a week. I’d like to see if what’s in my head for planning matches what’s available on the land. I’d like to be able to continue my planning of putting in tomatoes with basil and mint around them; strawberries and borage nestling together, with squashes coming in after the strawberries for the high summer months; nasturtiums and marigolds all around. I’d like to continue my recovery and rehabilitation in a place where I can make things grow, where I can touch new life.

The details of my 20th year high school reunion are up. Mid-October, at a place I’ve never heard of, in the town where my high school is located.

It doesn’t really seem like it’s been that long. I don’t feel 20 years older. I don’t look 20 years older. I don’t have 20 years worth of emotional baggage. And I’m quite happy about all of that. I’m going to skip the reunion, as I’ve not really kept up with anyone from high school and I’ve not stepped foot in Maryland since 1988. Besides, I’m going to San Antonio in early October for a week, and I’ll be recovering from that trip.

I wouldn’t mind going up for a visit, though, perhaps to see the Inner Harbor again and take a trip to the Eastern Shore. It would have to be when the crabs are running, though, and when the silver queen corn is coming in. It’s great dumping out a bushel – or two – of steamed (not boiled!) blue crab on a long newspaper-covered table in the backyard, then dumping a pile of boiled silver queen corn down next to those crabs, then having several platters of Eastern Shore tomatoes next to that, and then chowing down while talking with friends and family and drinking some icy beer. And then after eating all that, cracking open an ice cold watermelon and eating it, letting the juices run down your chin, spitting seeds as far as you can as the sun sinks and the fireflies start appearing.

That would be quite a day, and well worth a visit.