Greetings from Southaven, Mississippi! If you look at a map and fine the absolute upper right-hand corner of Mississippi, you’ll find the city of Southaven. I have reached the final stop on this week’s road trip – two nights at my friend Pat’s house, and, since there are no good local dial-up service providers here, I’m sending this post out courtesy of his son Ryan’s laptop. (BTW, he has Microsoft Vista installed as his operating system, and all I can tell you is I’m glad I still have Windows 2000 on our machine back home. Vista is like Windows on steroids, and it clunky, bulky, and a ridiculously complicated for people who just use their PCs to surf the net, e-mail, and play solitaire, as ours does.)

Today was spent driving from New Orleans up Highway 61 through the Mississippi Delta, a place I’ve always longed to visit. My first mistake was to get on Highway 61 in Louisiana south of Baton Rouge – the traffic was horrendous (as I write this, it occurs to me that every city I’ve gone through this week – San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and New Orleans – has had horrendous traffic) and it put a real crimp in my plans to stop in at both Natchez and Vicksburg just to tool around the old parts of those old river towns. Instead, I had to put the pedal to the metal and bypass those towns so I could spend some quality time around the Delta and still arrive in Southaven before it got dark.

What to tell you about the Delta – it was an amazing place to drive around. Incredibly flat, with fields of dead cornstalks, cotton, and soybeans as far as you can see. I found me a rural dirt road and found myself at a crossroads in the middle of fields of cotton near the town of Leland. The only sound was the insects, and it was a beautiful, mystical experience – you can truly feel the pulse of the land and God’s gift to the people who make this area their home. I had gotten some honest-to-goodness southern-fried chicken at a roadstop a little earlier and relished the time spent in the middle of those fields muching on a hot, delicious piece of chicken. A cropduster passed low over me – fortunately he wasn’t dusting! – either enroute to or from his spraying for the day; probably doing a farmer’s late-season insecticide spray. Between the fields, the quiet, and the plane, it felt very timeless out there – the same scene could have been experienced by someone decades before.

After Leland, I checked out the towns of Greenville (right on the Mississippi River with a short detour across the bridge to Arkansas), Indianola (home of legendary bluesman B.B. King), and Greenwood – all fairly small towns with a modern section at the outskirts and a very old, dying downtown at the center; all very cool. I wanted to get down to Clarksdale, where legend has it bluesman Robert Johnson made his pact with the devil at the crossroads, but you can’t see everything; the sun was starting to drift towards the west and it was time to head towards Southaven.

Tomorrow, Pat is gonna give me a tour of the area, including a visit to the Mississippi River and a great view of it by a casino he once worked at, and then we head into Memphis for some beers, blues, and barbecue.