Greetings all. We rolled into New Smyrna Beach about 4:00 this afternoon. Was it a long and hard journey? Oh yeah. Anytime you drive across country, even in a luxury charter bus, it’s a long and eventful trip.
I won’t bore you with all the details, as there are just too many, but I think it would make a pretty good mini-series….along the lines of the Weather Channel show “So you think you’d survive?”. One night in particular stands out. We arrived in Lake Charles, Louisiana well into the evening. I spent some weekends there when I was at Ft. Polk (a couple hours away), after getting drafted out of grad school. I remember it as being a nice seaside town back then. Of course compared to being in basic training in the Army with drill sergeants yelling at you 24/7….an old train car on the tracks looked good. Boy, has time ever changed poor old Lake Charles. What a dump.
We were tired and hungry and wanted to just park the truck, drink some wine and crash. Nope…wasn’t going to happen. It was time for one of those “moving stories” I’ve written about over the years. In the pouring rain (naturally), we pulled up to the La Quinta parking lot and it looked small. Too small for the big rig I was driving. Claudia went into the motel lobby and asked the manager about turnaround areas for the truck. She showed her an area to use and I foolishly entered the parking lot. You know the feeling….the uh-oh I shouldn’t have done that feeling. Once you enter a parking lot in a 60’ rig, there is no turning back….you can only go straight, or hope for a miracle trying to back out. No sooner than I pulled into the lot than I realized that a pickup truck could turn around, but a large rig could not. Hmmm…I guess the manager didn’t understand the geometry of a 60’ rig vs a pickup truck. Oh, where did math skills go? Long story short, it took me an hour in the pouring rain, with Claudia outside in the pouring rain directing me and praying, to somehow turn the truck enough to make the 180 degree turn at the end and not hit any cars along the way. Mad? We were steaming. We parked at the entrance to the parking lot, basically blocking most of the entrance, but we were in and we weren’t leaving.
Then comes the next chapter. We didn’t get the ground floor we requested (Tuck literally loses it in elevators). We got a third floor room. Oh the joys of a crying lab (bless his big heart) going up an elevator. We used the stairs. A quick call to the Pizza Hut nearby and dinner was served. We drank a bottle of wine and made a vow to never set foot in Louisiana again. I made the same vow in 1971 and I broke it. Serves me right for breaking a nearly 50-year old promise.
Tomorrow we unpack the big truck at the storage facility. Unloading goes fast….trying to find the stuff you need a week or two later is much harder. At any rate, our stuff goes into air conditioned storage for an extended period of time while we explore the coast. I’ll post some pictures later this week. For now…we’re off to bed.
Cheers!
Wayne, Claudia & Tuck