Today and tomorrow are scheduled down days at a VRBO here in Laurel. The population of Laurel is roughly half of what Klamath Falls has, but somehow it seemed twice as crowded as our home town. Especially around Mississippi route 15 which runs north/south and is that street in every town that is lined with practically every chain restaurant & stores.
Today we drove into downtown Laurel to walk around a few blocks and this place has Ben and Erin Napier’s fingerprints all over it. Because it is a weekend there are lots of tourists (like us) wandering around both on foot and in cars. We walked into a couple of the stores related to this HGTV juggernaut, Scotsman General Store & Woodshop and Laurel Mercantile Co., and looked but couldn’t find anything we really wanted to spend money on.
We also did not take the 7 Passenger Golf Cart Tour through Laurel’s Historic District and ride by featured homes from HGTV’s Home Town, but it did seem like wherever we went there was a tour golf cart there too. Somehow all this has turned the downtown into an under construction Disneyesque place. There are a lot of HGTV/Hometown/Napier shiny new things interspersed with still unoccupied, rundown buildings.