[Today: 3.1 miles on treadmill]
This past weekend we made a trip to Huntsville, TX for the annual Rocky Raccoon 100 mile race in the Huntsville State Park. I may have more to say about that some other time.
But for now, just some general comments about our trip.
Probably the most boring part of the trip is the chunk from Starkville to Jackson, MS on highway 25. I don’t know why, but that road seems to go on forever.
From Jackson, it is a straight shot west to Shreveport, LA on I-20. From there we followed the Goggle Maps directions to/from Huntsville which took us on a lot of rural farm-to-market roads skirting Carthage, Nacogdoches, and Lufkin.
The landscape in eastern Texas reminds me of western Tennessee. It is flat in a general way, and the land near the roadways was mostly grazing/pasture. There were a lot of trailer homes. There were also a lot of dilapidated houses, some with newer trailers in the same yard and some just neglected and falling down. The small towns had some substantial buildings, schools I suspect, which generally looked forlorn and probably unused. The signs were there of past success but recent (30-50+ years?) withdrawal.
The bit of Louisiana south of Shreveport was fairly nice. And once we got on I-20, the rest of Louisiana looked ok. All the way through Mississippi we were on a non-interstate divided 4-lane and most of the homes/construction along that road is pretty nice.
Some of the contrast with Texas is probably due to being off of the main roads. I’ve always been impressed with the number of abandoned houses and buildings in Mississippi. People seem to just walk away and let the kudzu take over. We saw a lot of that in Texas, more of that in Texas than I can remember seeing on any specific trip in Mississippi.
We had a nice visit in Huntsville. It seemed to be a nice town with some current development. It sits astride I-45 which links Dallas to Houston, so there is a lot of traffic in the area and a lot of restaurants and hotels. It is also home to a large prison, and the death-row where Texas dispatches their worst offenders. We looked up on google what the local tourist sights were, and spent about an hour Sunday afternoon on a tour of the Texas Prison Museum.