A driving trip from Kingsville, Texas, to Baton Rouge, Atlanta, and Brevard, North Carolina, then back home. I don’t know how many times I have driven to Baton Rouge, where my parents live, possibly 3-4 times a year for 30-40 years, approaching either from the West (Texas) or from the East (Alabama) where we have lived. That makes about 120 driving trips to Baton Rouge. So, not much is new on the road, maybe some new construction projects, new fast food places, etc. but the road and the terrain as well as most of the “pit stops” are familiar to us. We left the house early in the morning, discovered we had left the camera, went back to the house for it, needed some cash from the ATM, the first one was out of commission so a drive across town to another one. Luckily Kingsville is a small town. Then gas up and run through McDonald’s for our usual trip breakfast—two egg McMuffins and coffee for husband; yogurt parfait and plain biscuit with butter and grape jelly for me. Finally, about an hour after first leaving the house, we are on the road. The fields lush with foot-high cotton, maize with bronze heads, an early morning rain adding a sparkling glisten to the scene. The grasses and mesquite trees are greener than usual for this time of year because of the storms that have whooshed through. Winds clocked at 90 miles an hour hit Kingsville just days before, leaving broken tree branches and debris, electrical outages in parts of town, including the university that cancelled classes for a day.
From Kingsville to Houston mesquite scrub brush, cattle country, gives way to progressively taller trees and gently rolling hill-lets. We stop at Prasek’s Smokehouse in Hilje for some good Czech kolaches and pigs in a blanket. If it were lunch time, we would opt for some good barbeque sandwiches. Prasek’s, part bakery and smokehouse, part store for Texas goods, is obviously one of the highlights of the drive to Houston, the dividing point in the trip to Baton Rouge. The land south of it is more southwestern, flat and drier. The land east is greener and beginning to look like bayou country. The highways are fast and crowded from Houston on; I call the highway the I-10 speedway because 70 or 75 mph just seems to be a suggestion. The land flat, signs for boudin and crackling announce our arrival to Cajun country. At Vidor, Texas, at one time a KKK headquarters, the freeway now rushes past the McDonald’s where I used to stop when my toddler and I drove from Texas A&M University-College Station, where I was attending graduate school, to Baton Rouge. It was the place where my husband, when we were dating, had to get out of the VW fastback and give me a push so I could pop the clutch to get going. We fly past Orangefield, the Stuckey’s that used to mark the road to a house we rented for a year in the piney woods now gone, a victim to highway construction. Past Orange, where Cameron was born, and then across the Sabine River to Louisiana. The way too familiar to be remarkable—Lake Charles, Lafayette, and the Atchafalaya Spillway. When my son was young, he was given a pair of kid binoculars to look for alligators as we crossed the vast swampland before coming to Baton Rouge. Over the Mississippi River Bridge to Baton Rouge, this time with no delays, but I have been backed up for an hour because of traffic funneling onto the bridge.
