Not Allergic to Palm Trees!

Well, readers, I took many neat pictures during our road trip across the country but they are trapped on my camera and I have happened upon an abundance of free time, so I’ve decided to update now and upload later.

In the week before we left Mississippi, the Bradford Pear trees and a host of other plants were starting to release their deathly array of pollen that coateth the houses, the cars, the runways, the planes: everything.  I had never seen anything like it, nor had such a time with allergies.  Caleb was unaffected. Sigh.

Also, an aside on Bradford Pears, if you’re not familiar: they are the great irony of the South.  These trees are beautifully shaped, the blooms are gorgeous, fluffy, white flowers(I suppose they come in other colors but on base they are white), and they line the streets and grace every other front lawn there!  The irony is that they have this horrible, horrible, odor to them!  Think rotten eggs mixed with sewage.  Last year I thought there was a feedlot next to the base that we just hadn’t smelled all winter.

Anyway, I have pictures to summarize most of the trip, except the last ninety minutes. We started at 8000 feet, surrounded by snow, some sort of undefinable precipitation, and heavy fog, and descended to--get this--sixty feet!  The experience felt somewhat akin to the Reader’s Digest condensed Narnia; there we were, winding down through this dark, cloudy, snowy, foggy forest, knowing there had to be a clearing eventually and then suddenly the clouds lifted and there was a beautiful sunlit valley full of fruit trees and horses and baby cows.  Of course there were adult cows, too, but I wasn’t nearly as excited about them.  So for the last forty-five minutes or so of our trip, we drove on gentle curves around these green pastures and orchards and, of course, palm trees!  I had never seen a cow and a palm tree in such close proximity; that really cracked me up.

Our GPS guided us to a base gate that is closed on the weekend and then we realized we had four more gates to try covering an extensive area, no idea what the hours were on any of them, and a limited supply of gas, but we got lucky on our second attempt. Whew.

So we’ve been staying in a nice hotel while some contractors finish a tiny bit of work on our house--work that we and our realtor thought would be done last week and technically doesn’t have to be completed until the week after next.  We’re hoping for sooner rather than later so we can limit the number of times we have to go digging in our truck for supplies we weren’t counting on needing.  Also it gets complicated with extending the lease on our truck or moving stuff into storage, blah blah blah.

In the meantime, there are the wonders of the modern world all around to distract us from this annoying situation! I’ve been squealing a lot every time we go drive around looking for a place to eat and realize that this area has pretty much every retail establishment you could wish for!  I won’t list all of the places with which I’m happily reunited.

Caleb has been in-processing at the base, and our little plan of he drive motorcycle she drive new car has been foiled by the rain, so for now it’s he drive new car she sit in hotel room or walk around mall.  Hence my abundance of free time.

Well there you have some new information and I’ll post some pictures when reunited with my camera cord.