Mississippi, Louisiana, Mississippi, ALABAMA!

We got an early start this morning (even for us), leaving Movietown RV Park in Canton and heading south on Interstate 65. Our GPS Sally really wanted us to go east on I-20 and argued with us almost half the way -- she so wanted us to cut across to the other side of the state and go down I-69!

This is a small portion of the VERY large automobile factory just outside of Canton. Opened up just a few years ago, it has a great deal to do with the improved economy in this part of Mississippi --

The Nissan factory covers acres of property and is its own small town --

It was an overcast day. We had an occasional drizzle, but seemed to be running just behind the real rain storm. There was lots of water on the road being sprayed up by the trucks. As we left the North Delta area of  Mississippi, we were no longer in farmland, but in the pine barrens.

We drove south through Mississippi and into Louisiana, driving north of Lake Pontchartrain on I-12 until it changed into I-10 and took us back through the 'heel' of Mississippi along the Gulf Coast. What a different looking route it was from the first time we had driven it following Katrina. You have to really look to see some of the broken-off trees still visible amongst the greenery. It felt sort of funny to see the sign pointing towards Pass Christian, which was where our folks from Menno did our first service with Mennonite Disaster Service following the hurricanes.

It was a l-o-n-g day, we had driven twice as far as we normally do when we finally crossed into Alabama. It was another fifty-three miles, close to four-thirty and almost dark when we found our site at Styx River RV Park. I don't think anyone will be getting up very early tomorrow.

Two States -- To Get Groceries?!

This morning we watched Juni and Tom go down the road --

and leave the RV Park here in Tunica are their way to Red Bay, Alabama and the Allegro Bay factory where they are going to have some warranty work done.

We were out of orange juice, so went into the Piggly-Wiggly in Tunica. I wanted to re-stock some staples for the kitchen as well as pick up a few things for next week. The prices were extremely high; the vegetables all looked wilted; and the meat department area smelled bad. I decided that I'd much drive the extra twenty miles to the Krogers that the GPS had shown.

I always forget that the GPS shows mileage as the crow flies... It was more like 30-35 miles! It was a nice drive through what they call the North Delta country. We saw this line-up of what looked like round bales.  But, when we got closer, we realized

that they were actually tightly packed bales of cotton. Quite a bit different looking then the boxcar-sized rectangles of cotton we saw in fields in Arizona last winter.

Not much later we found ourselves crossing this narrow two-lane bridge over the mighty Mississippi River into the State of Arkansas. The store in Helena, Arkansas that the GPS said was a Kroger, no longer was. It still wasn't great, but it was a lot better than the one in Tunica.

We got back to Mid-South RV Park just as the sun was setting --

These first two pictures were taken facing east --

While this one was towards the west --

Sunsets in Mississippi are gorgeous!