Just back from a driving trip whose mileage I didn’t bother to keep track of, but it was in the thousands. Actually, only part driving. Lilly and I flew separately from Chicago to Dallas earlier this month so she could take possession of her new car — an ’05 Mazda 3 that her uncle Jay gave her, provided we could drive it from north Texas to northern Illinois. The car rattled and occasionally made other odd noises, but soldiered on all the way.

The uninspired thing to do that would have been to drive straight through, which normally would take two days by breaking the trip in Missouri, such as at the Munger Moss.

Despite being a driving trip, that would be a pedestrian way to do it. Instead I took a week off so we could take a more interesting route. We left Dallas on May 11, heading south to the vicinity of Schulenburg, Texas, to visit some of the Painted Churches, which were built by late 19th-century German and Czech congregations who gave them richly artistic interiors — all the more interesting because much of it is vernacular art.

Rain came day most of that first day on the road, but we didn’t encounter any more until yesterday in Nashville. In between the days were sunny and often hot. Everyone we talked to about the weather reported a wet spring, however, and the Southern landscape looked lush, from Texas into the Deep South and up through Tennessee.

We spent the first night in Houston. I didn’t plan it this way, but our time in Houston focused on water features: the Waterwall near the Galleria Mall that first evening (the rain was over) and Buffalo Bayou and the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern during the next morning.

The next day we drove to New Orleans, a city I haven’t visited in 30 years, and one new to Lilly, and spent two days and three nights.

We ate very well. We saw excellent live music. We rode streetcars and walked the streets of the French Quarter, Treme and the Garden District. We toured one cemetery formally and one informally, and we visited the National WW II Museum.

On May 15, we drove to suburban Jackson, Mississippi, by way of the city of Natchez and the Natchez Trace to visit our cousin Jay and his wife Kelly, who hospitably put us up for the night.

The next day we passed through Philadelphia, Mississippi, my father’s home town, stopping for a short visit — Lilly had never been there — and then went to Montgomery, Alabama, where we spent the night.

On the morning of May 17, we saw the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both only open since last year, and the very different Alabama State Capitol, because I visit capitols when I can.

Leaving Montgomery in the early afternoon, we had enough time to visit the Ave Marie Grotto, not far north of Birmingham, and then spent the night of May 17 in Decatur, Alabama. The next morning I took a short walkabout near the Tennessee River and along Bank St., named for a handsome bank building there dating from the 1830s.

By that afternoon, we were in Nashville to visit some of my dear old friends, including one I hadn’t seen or enjoyed the fine company of since 1990. Today we did the long drive from Nashville to greater Chicago — I used to do it fairly often — arriving this evening.

Mostly, things went smoothly. Even traffic wasn’t that bad most of the time in the cities we passed through.

But while driving along Rodney Road in rural Mississippi outside Port Gibson and not far from the mighty river of that name, we suddenly came to this.
That’s stagnant algae-filled water, completely covering the road. For as far as we could see into the distance. Who knows how deep it is. So we backtracked on Rodney to the main road at that point, which happened to be the Natchez Trace.