Texas to Florida

If you are still reading this, thank you for checking on our progress.

Well day 24 we made it back to Florida, decided to stop in Tallahassee and finish up on Friday. We never a actually expected to ride all the way home today. Since we left the crickets in Wichita Falls on Tuesday, we traveled highway 287 and 82 in Texas to avoid the interstate for a day and ended up in Alexandria LA. Other than oppressive heat there is little to report for the ride through Texas. I went to Walgreen's early on Tuesday morning to get some pictures saved to CD and that took an extra hour so we left without coffee or breakfast. About an hour before arriving in Alexandria we stopped for dinner in a small college town Natchitoches, and found pizza and lots of water since we really had not eaten much or stopped to rest like we should have. Since we had no planned sightseeing, we just tended to ride on rather than stop. This is one thing we would probably do differently next time. We met a couple who were interested in our trip and had recently returned from an RV vacation to Canada, passing through some of the same areas we had been. The hotel in for the night was one step above the Travel Lodge that we stayed at in Missouri, and I felt the need to check on the bike a few times during the evening.

Wednesday we went to Biloxi, and found an interesting mix of beautiful new hotels/casinos and ruins of buildings damaged or destroyed by Katrina 2 years ago. The city (at least the beach area) is very low with no dunes to protect property from the storm surge, so it is not surprising the amount of damage they have suffered. We had a wonderful room at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino... this hotel was set to open for the first time on August 30, 2005 but was heavily damaged by the hurricane losing most of the rock & roll artifacts that decorate the property.

Most all of the hotels on the beach are newly built or rebuilt in the past 2 years, but there are dozens of properties that appear to remain just as they did after the storm, with no efforts to repair or even clean up the debris.

Tonight, Thursday I believe, we are in Tallahassee at the same hotel where we stayed just over 3 weeks ago as we were beginning our trip. Just as we got to town we were welcomed by some rain along with thunder and lightning, so even if we had planned to go farther, we probably would have stopped anyway.

Check back next week and hopefully we will have some updated pictures and video to share