There is probably nothing more ideal when you are sick than standing naked in hot water. My sinus passages had proudly inflated to their fullest extent, and it seemed likely that my head was now the size of a beach ball. I bent that beach ball forward, until I was looking at the water running down my thighs, and all the pressure of my sinuses moved with it. It is a fun game you can play when you are sick—something I like to call I Forgot I Had Sinuses But Now I Can Feel Them Very Well.
It was the last shower before the big road trip, when camping would likely restrict wonderful hot showers for a few days at a time. The steam seemed to be helping, so I stood there idle, soaking it into my bones, or sinuses, or anywhere willing. I watched a drop of water run off one breast and then sadly take the long hard fall all the way to my foot, while a more cautious drop fell between my breasts, then ran carefully down the length of me. If I was a drop, I would be the cautious one, and I would have enjoyed my slow meandering journey.
A slow meander was precisely what we were planning—a slow meander from North Florida to New Mexico, then a slow curve upward, and a slow meander back. It is one big loop, covering lots of states and lots of different environments. It would be almost a tour of the Southern United States.
I decided I had wasted enough water to be the equivalent of the next two nights I might miss showering. I got out and the beach ball came too, just bouncing around on my shoulders with brown hair glued down to it and dripping the excess.
Morning Came Entirely Too Early
I want to say that the streaks of yellow light bursting out of the clouds piled up on the horizon were really beautiful. I want to say it, but I have such hard feelings toward the terrible earliness of dawn that I won’t elaborate on it. It just doesn’t deserve that much admiration.
The children hunkered down in their seats in the back of the van seemed to agree. They stared bleary eyed out the window, but refused to close their eyes because there was excitement mingled with the misery of being awakened before dawn.
And so we drove, and stopped, and drove some more, while I blew my nose. I blew my nose out past the annoying busyness and curving interstate roads of Jacksonville. I blew my nose out I-10, where the remoteness of the Florida’s panhandle is appealing but pretty uninteresting. I blew my nose some more, all the way out to Southern Georgia and its many speed traps.
Southern Georgia is one of the uglier places on this continent to blow your nose, in my opinion. It lacks anything of interest, except the over-weight police officers in uniform pants that are a tad too tight and brimmed hats bent at the sides in a grouchy manner. If there ever was a real life representative of the donut-eating good-old-boy cop stereotype, I’m pretty sure you can find him on a Southern Georgia highway aiming a radar gun at you.
We escaped Southern Georgia without any flashing red and blue lights and made it to High Falls State Park, near Atlanta, for a short break and addition nose blowing. It seems to me we have touched on something brilliant with this plan. When traveling as a child, we stopped off at yucky chain restaurants and grungy rest stops. My brilliant husband and I have come up with something better—taking a break at one of the hundreds of state parks that dot the interstate all over the country, and wearing the children out with a bit of hiking.
The girl, wearing her characteristic inappropriate clothing for hiking, hurried ahead of me in a polka dot dress and announced that she was now a puppy named Spot. Puppies on hikes do very cute things, like stopping to bat pinecones with their paws, and staring with trepidation at big rocks that the puppy must be coaxed to leap over. Puppies are, overall, excellent hiking companions. After we had seen the “high falls” and both the puppy and the boy were tired, and we had all sufficiently remembered what ground that is not flat feels like, we loaded back up and off we went. And I blew my nose.
Onward Ho
We went through too busy Atlanta, where there are just way too many humans, and through Birmingham, where there are still too many humans. The sun was turning gold and yawning sleepily in the direction of the western horizon when we made it to our first stop for the night: Clear Creek Recreation Area.
The folks at the office were long since gone, but had left our pass taped to their door. I was bouncing around in the seat with an over-inflated head along with a new problem—a bladder stretched out to max. Hurrying my husband along, we made it to the campsite and I bailed out to get to the campground restroom nearby.
Inside the bathroom is where this campsite in Alabama earned the award I’ve titled Southern United States Most Dysfunctional Bathroom. Which is pretty special, considering the multi-state competition which includes bathrooms at vulgar truck stops and one very seedy bar. There were three stalls, and only one still had a toilet in it. Beggars with full bladders can’t be choosers, so the saying goes. Next, I went to the sink and there was a full dispenser of soap, of which I liberally applied to my hands…and discovered that the sink didn’t work. No water. No matter.
My beach ball head and my soapy hands and I walked back to our campsite and found a lovely view of the lake and a husband already pitching the tent. Under the wide spread of some chestnut trees we set up camp while the children tinkered around on the rocks at the edge of the lake.
A friendly man on a golf cart cruised by and spoke in that heavy, beautiful Alabama accent, and I felt a wee bit guilty about playing banjo music in my head when I had been looking at that water-less sink.
At dark I was peeing behind a large chestnut tree (in protest of the bathroom,) while squinting out toward the lake. In the growing darkness it looked as though a two-foot-tall stump was on the ground about twenty feet from me. It was a bit later with a flashlight that I realized the stump had apparently walked off.
All thoughts of walking stumps were forgotten when I brought the kids down to the clearing between our site and the lake. A million stars winked at us and the spilled milk of the Milky Way was clearly outlined in the blackness. The children finally got a good long look at what had been mostly invisible above us for the last two years of our stargazing. I sucked in that Milky Way like my sinuses sucked in that steam.
We went to sleep early that night, all nestled together in our tent like a family of squirrels nuzzled into a nest in the knot of a tree. At one o’clock in the morning the coyotes in close proximity howled to their hearts content. I was the only one in our crew to awaken, and lay there squinting blindly at the stars through the mesh above my head. They howled on for some minutes, and a dog somewhere on the other side of the campground took up a very domesticated version of the howl as well.
I took this opportunity to blow my nose and let out a sigh. Despite the beach ball head, and the hustle and bustle of packing, Day 1 was fabulous. A bit uninteresting, as I reviewed it in my head, but fabulous. The coyotes seemed to agree.
In the AM it would be time to pack up again for a longer stop off in the Arkansas mountains on Day 2...