Well, damnation and hellfire. I found my draft of the looooooooong blog I wrote, edited it for spelling errors, and somehow managed to delete it. I’ll just try this again and see how much of the last few days I remember.

So I visited the Helen Keller home, which was very inspiring. Elizabeth, the tour guide, was a very charming 77-year-old who seemed delighted to have company and didn’t mind that I didn’t want to see the upstairs. She invited me to sit and visit, and we chitchatted about Helen Keller and a few other things until some home schoolers came in. I listened to her as she charmed the little ones as much as she had charmed me. What a perfect example of a gracious Southern lady. The home is full of wonderful pictures of Helen and her teacher and secretary, and includes a bronze statue of her as a child at the water pump – the first statue of a child and female, according to Elizabeth, to be unveiled at the National Hall of Statues.

On to the road. I immediately took the smallest road on the map. Northern Alabama and Mississippi are beautiful – hilly and lots of trees. Managed to spend an hour looking for a coffee spot in Oxford, Mississippi – never did find one, but did discover the Faulkner house. I must really try again to read him – an appreciation of his work has eluded me.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, except for a shocking ride through an incredibly poverty-stricken little town in Mississippi – Jonestown. Wow. Made me feel terrible for having the good luck to be driving in a comfortable car and knowing I’d have a good meal and a nice place to lay my head for the night. On the way out of town I spotted an old rundown cotton gin. Cotton fields are as ubiquitous here as fields of sunflowers are on the northern route to Montana. I had detoured specifically so that I could stay in Helena, Arkansas, since I grew up close to Helena, Montana.

Crossed the Mississippi River, which is always a thrill to me, even though lately I find driving over bridges a little terrifying, since we don’t maintain our infrastructure any more. Thanks, Tea Partiers. Anyway, made it safely across and as I was driving into Helena, Arkansas, happened upon The Edwardian Inn. What a charming bed and breakfast, and amazingly, they had a room on the ground floor available for one night only. Turns out the King Biscuit Blues Festival was starting the next day, and they told me that the next day there wouldn’t be a room available in a hundred-mile radius. The festival sounds wonderful, and I hope to be able to attend it next year.

Despite the combined efforts of the innkeeper the next morning and the lady at the welcome center, I managed to go in exactly the wrong direction on the next leg of my journey. Didn’t discover I was going south (I know, I know. I am directionally challenged.) until I’d been driving for an hour. By the time I found the road I needed, I discovered that having traveled about 50 miles, I was only 20 miles outside of Helena! Oh, well, no big deal, as I wouldn’t have seen some amazing scenery if I had gone the right way. I’m tooling along, bellowing along with Didi about no white flags above my door when I saw a row of raggedy trailers. What was notable was that each one had a pier and a dock on an amazing stretch of water, with big trees growing in the middle of the lake. By this time I was starting to sweat, as I was running a little low on gas…. yikes. I was coasting on fumes when I finally saw a rundown corner store and gas pump.

I was so relieved to see the station that I jumped out of the car and started babbling to the old guy (probably my age) at the next pump about being so glad to find gas. One subject led to another and we were talking about my travels and his having never left this rural area. He said he was shocked that someone from the city had “bothered” to talk to him, and wished me “the tender mercies of the travelling gods”. I was really touched. Just goes to show you that even though I’ve lived in cities for the last 40-plus years that I’m still a small town gal at heart.

Whew. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry and I’ll have to finish this later……..