Today was a horrible mad dash across the deep south that left us all hot, sweaty, and irritable.

We left Houma this morning at around 9:30 am Thanks to last night’s party, none of us had a lot of sleep. Jeanne tells me that Shay spent most of today sleeping in the van.

After leaving Houma we traveled up old Route 90 towards New Orleans. Before we got there, we cut across on Route 310 to I-10, which we’ve been following all day. (Except for a bypass around New Orleans on Rt. 610.)

First Louisiana, then Mississippi, then Alabama. Unfortunately the love bugs were still out in force, we we’d have to scrape their smeared remains off of the front of our cars at every gas stop. These bugs, about 1/4″ in length, swarm in huge numbers. When the vanagons pass through a cloud of them, they blacken the front with their little copulating carcasses. My eyes were hurting by midday from staring through a smeared windshield.

One time we stopped for gas, only to move on without filling up because the bugs were so thick in the air that we didn’t want to stand outside. These critters don’t bite or sting… they just land on and annoy anyone standing around.

They finally thinned out by Alabama, so we stopped at a self car wash and managed to get the worse of the bug goo off of our cars. This probably improved our mileage considerably.

Tonight we crossed into Eastern time, causing us to arrive later than we expected. We ‘cheated’ and checked into a Motel 6 in Lake City, Florida. No pictures today, as we rarely stopped.

Tomorrow we finally get to meet the fourth traveler… Tyler!

Ron