Departed the Big Easy headed east into Mississippi on I-10. Today was a short drive of only about 2 hours including stopping at the Mississippi VIC near the border. The VIC is in a very nice rest stop area that is also the driveway to the NASA Stennis Facility which I guess is a science center although I can’t be sure because we didn’t go there. Mississippi is actually quite pretty (at least along I-10) but the ground is close to the water table or sea level unless their civil engineering is faulty. Nothing seems to drain and there is standing water everywhere – on the freeway, on the roads and, most importantly, in the campground where we stopped for the next few days. The place is called Martin Lake but the lake just seems to be a suspiciously regular square excavation where water collects. They offer free fishing w/o a license which is of absolutely no importance to an angler like me. Our campsite was only covered by an inch or two of water surrounded by bog-like lawn areas. The humidity is ferocious; 80% or more.
Since we arrived early, we took a spin through Biloxi’s waterfront and continued into the same in Gulfport, an adjacent community. The first thing I noticed was that there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of beachfront property directly across the highway (Hwy 90) from the Gulf of Mexico that only had a few beautiful mansions standing on it. After a bit of thinking I realized that all the vacant property was only vacant after 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina which delivered a glancing blow to New Orleans but hit Biloxi and Gulfport directly in the teeth. Virtually nothing stands between Hwy 90 and the rail tracks about 6 or 8 blocks north of the shore. A great deal of construction has generated many new houses, rebuilt in exactly the same spot where they were washed away before. Casinos used to be located on river boats but now are brand new large-scale developments built on the shore. The river boat flotsam is probably in Tennessee.
Water kept forming on Charlotte’s windshield and Peg & I were hard pressed to determine if it was light rain or just the humidity hitting our cold glass. If it is this gooey when the temperature is 78 degrees, I wonder how awful it must be in the summer.