‘Gators Again

It’s funny how when you re-trace your steps and cover ground that you’ve been over before, that your initial impressions and reactions seem somewhat exaggerated and well, frankly, kind of silly.

          We are starting our Traveling Season with a quick jaunt to Florida which brings us back over a road that we drove westward on in October of 2020, namely the accursed Interstate 10. Regular Readers of this blog will immediately recognize this evil highway from the plethora of posts that have spewn forth from this Angstified Driver.

          In the post titled “Goin’ Down the Bayou“, from that same month, I described the traversing of the swamp on this ‘bane of my existence’ road as it were, as somewhat harrowing.

          It runs for millions of miles above a gigantic ‘gator filled swamp, where I know that the ‘gators are just waiting for some nincompoop to make just the tiniest of mistakes and go careening over the sides, crashing through the balsa-wood fake guardrails that they have installed there apparently just for looks.

          At least that’s the way I saw it from my seat.

          My front seat height is the same as any eighteen-wheeler’s.

          So, when we are driving on roads like this, we look out over the guardrail and down onto all of the awaiting Alligators, not like in a car where when you look to your side, you can imagine that the guardrails will hold you back because you are at their same height, not towering over them, waiting for the laws of physics like, center-of-gravity and momentum, just waiting with anticipation to be proven why they are call Laws.

          Then the ‘Laws of Survival’ take over and the last time I checked about being tossed into waters with alligators waiting with wide-open maws, well, the next ‘Law of Nature’ comes into play and involves Darwin and his survival-of-the-fittest, which, I believe is heavily weighted in the hungry alligators’ favor.

          Luckily we survived that drive and lived to write about it, but I am going to stand by my initial assessments and reactions to Alligator Bait Highway.

          Maybe someday you will be lucky enough not to have to drive this perpetually perturbing pathway to hell

           Meanwhile back at the ranch, we find our intrepid travelers pouring over maps and charts of all things westward……

          I will entice you with a short synopsis of our up-coming plans for traveling so that you have a heads-up as to what is coming up.

          For now, we are enroute to Sugarloaf Key, just a short hop this side of Key West.  On our way there we are stopping in Pensacola to visit with Kim, one of Paula’s high school chums and then we drop in on Barb, Paula’s sister, outside of Tampa.      

           From there it’s a few hours to the KOA on Sugarloaf where we’ll spend about five days before journeying up the east coast of Florida with stops in Vero Beah and around Palm Coast to visit some of Paula’s relatives.

          Then it’s back to Texas for the month of March to help Danny with his run for Justice of the Peace and to get ready for the start of the Great Circumnavigation of the Lower Forty-Eight Summer Tour and Homecoming.

          Our plan is to drive to Durango for a few days, and the head west to Las Vegas, Los Angeles area, Sequoia, Big Sur, Monterey, Yosemite, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Oregon, Seattle, Spokane, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Mackinac, (on the Upper Peninsula  of Michigan), down to  and over to Niagara Falls, Finger Lakes, Cooperstown, and finally arrive in New Jersey somewhere around mid-June.

          Stay tuned for lots of Posts as we work our way around this coming Traveling Season!