Quick travel update

We spent a wonderful Christmas with our Kitchener kids and grandkids, then drove off on the 27th for our final car-trek to Mexico. We drove as far as Cincinnati the first day, and made it past Nashville the second.

I started writing a post yesterday on my iPad in the car, hurtling through Tennessee and into Alabama. Everything I had written disappeared the minute I hooked it up to the wifi in our hotel room. So I’m beginning again this morning, writing from the fog of a nasty cold that Jack and I are both fighting—congested head, hacking cough, general misery. We’re just hoping we caught this from our grandchildren over Christmas and not visa versa.

In spite of that—and because Jack, who does most of the driving, was feeling better, we drove 1000 km yesterday, and are now in Lafayette, Louisiana. We seem to gravitate to this area. This is the fifth time we’ve taken this drive, and we’ve stopped here either coming or going all but once. Since this will, we’re quite sure, be our last driving trip to this part of the world, we decided to stop here for a day and try to enjoy some of the Bayou country and Cajun food despite our colds.

It’s warmer here, of course. But no sunshine. In fact, we haven’t seen the sun, except for a brief moment on Christmas Day in Kitchener, since we left Echo Bay nearly two weeks ago. Grey, dreary, foggy, drizzly. It poured rain in southern Ontario on Christmas Eve, for gods sake. Global Weirding. But if it’s not actually raining this afternoon, we’re determined to take a bit of a hike, hoping it will clear our heads and lift our spirits.

One of the things that always surprises me as we drive into Alabama and Mississippi is how wintery – without snow, of course – it looks. In my imagination, “the south” is eternally green, but of course that’s not so. Alabama is not tropical, and the evergreens, bare deciduous trees, and brown grass doesn’t look that much different than Pennsylvania or southern Ontario on a snow-less day in December. Louisiana isn’t tropical either, but it does have a lusher feel.

We are planning to slow down now, probably arrive in Laredo on Thursday, cross the border Friday morning, and either drive hard to make Guanajuato in a day or stop part way at a motel we’ve stayed in before to break up the trip.

Not much of a post—but some of you like to track our journey. I’d like to send a few Christmas pics, but so far they’re still on the camera. Maybe later, but this will do for now.