Ruth’s Pimento Cheese Spread. It’s one of those things you just don’t realize you’ve been craving for thirteen years until you happen to see it in the Food Lion one Sunday night…

I could not be any happier than I am at this moment, being back in a city that makes sense to me and feels like home. OK, maybe I’d be a LITTLE happier if Bellsouth hadn’t lied and told me DSL was available in my new apartment, but that’s nothing a little bit of cable modem won’t fix. So maybe I’ll be able to answer email tomorrow; SMTP doesn’t seem to be working too well on my stopgap dialup account…

Pictures and commentary on the cross-country trip coming soon, I promise, along with the interesting and rather happy story of how Mark will be doing yet another one in a couple of weeks…

Nous sommes arrivés. More soon…

   

We had breakfast at Waffle House, where we were served by a big ol’ sissy who tried to clock these two guys traveling together from California. We offered neither confirmations nor denials, which probably frustrated him no end…

We looked around downtown briefly and saw the state capitol and an old Kress store which probably had at least some civil rights significance. And then we left for Atlanta, where we had to make an emergency stop so I could do some short-notice work for a client in Charlotte. We decided this would be a good excuse for another dinner at another Piccadilly…

 

And then, we started the last leg, to my parents’ house in Greensboro. We rolled in after midnight, and the trip was pretty much done. It had been rather a long and exhausting one…

   

We slept. A lot. The big dinner and the stress of the past few days had taken their toll…

We had lunch at Piccadilly and headed for New Orleans again. We’d planned to spend several nights here, but shelved that idea in Fredericksburg, so we only made a quick drive-through before heading out the Chef Menteur Highway toward Mississippi in a valiant effort to avoid the shitty freeway. We ended up taking the scenic route up US 90 all the way to Biloxi before moving back to the freeway. It was at about this point that the landscape really started looking like home to me…

Dinner was at a lovely spot called the Creek Family Restaurant in Atmore AL. Imagine listening to a country remake of “Take a Letter Maria” and eating bad catfish and onion rings with a side of something which may have been either yams or carrots, served by a surly waitress who apparently woke up that morning and realized “I have to spend the rest of my life in Atmore, Alabama, and that sucks so much that I’m going to take it out on every customer I see all day.” That was dinner…

We detoured briefly into Florida near Atmore, just so Mark could say he had, and in the process he also got to visit his first Piggly Wiggly. We made it into Montgomery pretty late…