Their Hometown

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.

34,000 Rivets


There may or may not be 34,000 rivets in the bridges across the Mississippi at Natchez, but the Mini did in fact turn over the 34,000 mile mark just outside Ben and Erin Napier’s Hometown.

No Roadside America stuff today.
Didn’t do any geocaching either.
Just drove from Natchitoches to Laurel.
Took one whole picture. See above.

Using A Mini For A Hat Rack

We started our day in Paris and ended it in French Louisiana.

down There was a Dunkin right across the street from our hotel in Paris, but it wasn’t easy getting there. Exiting the Holiday Inn Express I had to dash across two lanes of traffic traveling at 55MPH and then wait on a light to make a left turn. A left turn into a shopping center parking lot followed. Then I looped around a building to get to the entrance of the store. A convenience store. Inside to the right was the Dunkin area with a line of four people in front of me and just one person behind the counter. I turned around and walked right back outside. Sigh.

up I wasn’t sad for long as I got to make a stop at a favorite roadside oddity on the way out of town – an Eifel Tower replica with a giant red cowboy hat on top. We already had a photo here from 2014 with our previous Miata in it from a Moss Motoring Challenge and of the previous Mini when we went west to attend a wedding in 2018 so it was time to add this Mini to the gallery.

way up Things peaked though for lunch when we changed our route some and ended up in Logansport, Louisiana for lunch. Donna found a place called the Crawfish Shack. This little unassuming place a block off US84 was awesome. Donna got the grilled shrimp and grits and I got four small crawfish hand pies with fries and everything was hot in temperature and taste. Mmm mmm good. The whole meal including tip was under $30.

back down Tonight we headed into downtown Natchitoches to eat a restaurant that we ate at back in 2014 and remembered quite fondly. This time though it was just a shadow of that memory. We just ordered appetizers, 2 Crab Cakes and a Seafood Dip w/ Homemade Chips. The crab cakes were deep fried and the crab meat was indiscernible from the rest of filling and the seafood dip was good, but the chips weren’t heated and slightly over fried. For the privilege of eating this “meal” set us back nearly $50 with the tip.

Burgerland

We had a long day, slightly over 300 miles, but pretty fun. A practically 2 for one Roadside America stop, a total flummoxing of 2 other sites and found the 3 geocaches we looked for. Trouble was we got to Paris during their rush hour and our hotel required a funky U-turn to get to. With that traffic and our tired minds it was kind of frustrating.

But all was solved with a burger and the best fries in the world for dinner. That’s my burger on the right, Donna’s is off camera to the left, and the fries, a small order, were to share.

33,000 Giant Arrows

Today was one of our shorter driving days, only 219 miles, but we had 8 objectives to find on our Roadside America list. We found and photographed five: Flying Fortress of the Plains in Hobbs, NM, Missile Water Towers in Seminole TX, Yard Art & 1935 Triangle-Shaped Gas Station in Snyder, TX and finally the National WASP Museum and Site in Sweetwater, TX. We saw one other, the Uniroyal Gal – Tornadoes Cheerleader in Lamesa, TX, but there were a bunch of folks out front of the tire store so we just drove by.

We didn’t see the Quanah Parker Arrow that was in downtown Seminole because the traffic was pretty busy. When we got to the second one in Snyder, I saw the arrow and its location, I just knew we had seen it before and taken a picture of it already on a previous trip this way. Even though we didn’t get those two, between those two cities, we stumbled on one in the really small town of Gail, which is where the picture above was taken.

There are not 33,000 Quanah Parker Arrows piercing the Texas Plains, just eighty-eight and each denotes a particular site of Comanche and Quanah Parker’s history. Here is an article telling about how they came to be. About halfway along today’s route the Mini crossed over the 33,000 mile mark.

Another Billy the Kid Reference

Almost 5 years ago to the date we visited Billy the Kid’s grave in Fort Sumner, NM and a week or so earlier on our way west we had stopped in the town of Hico, TX where the folks think he died there in 1950.

We did stop at the site of the Lincoln County War. Here is where Henry McCarty, AKA Billy the Kid, staged his jail break by killing two US Marshalls. Billy was awaiting execution for murder during the “war” between cattle baron factions. Every first weekend in August they reenact Billy’s murderous escape in a small replica of the town seen above.

We ate lunch in Roswell and it was a great lunch too, we both can highly recommend Geli’s Cafe. That was all we did there, I mean how many times can you visit the International UFO Museum & Research Center? But if you are into the whole UFO thing, New Mexico has gone all in on it. On the state DOT map there are 5 UFO crash sites listed, 1947 Roswell, B010, Communion Hill, Alternate and San Antonio (NM).

Big Day

In almost everything but miles.

We got a big New Mexico sky, that threatened rain and only delivered a few stray drops.

Then we were forced to park on the shoulder while a big something or other took up the whole road. Unlike Friday’s big something or other this one was coming in the opposite direction so it only caused a few minutes of lost time and no lost miles.

Lastly we visited a very big radio telescope.