[Today’s run:\u00a0 Watson Road\u00a0 3.4 miles]<\/p>\n
Yesterday was a busy day.<\/p>\n
After our two weeks of vacation I had a bit of an add-on. I dropped off on the return trip at our son’s house in Greenville, MS on Sunday the 19th.\u00a0 He needed someone to tend to his household while he started his new job in the Newton, MS area and secured housing.\u00a0 So I worked from his place and took care of his dogs and such.\u00a0 It worked out fine for me.\u00a0 And he was successful in securing a rental house in the course of the week.<\/p>\n
I finally made it home-home from vacation on Friday evening.<\/p>\n
Saturday I ran with the group in Starkville.\u00a0 Wife had a meeting in Jackson so I was watching our dog while she was off doing that.\u00a0 We had a bit of excitement when I arrived home from Starkville to discover that the house was locked but I didn’t have a house key.\u00a0 I was able to find a way into the house and the dog didn’t take me for a burgler.\u00a0 In the afternoon I went to Lowes and bought two more copies of the house key and a push-button garage door remote which I programmed and mounted.\u00a0 So, hopefully no more lock-outs for me.<\/p>\n
Early yesterday AM I drove back over to Greenville.\u00a0 Greenville is on the Mississippi river and Columbus is on the eastern boarder of the state, both on US-82.\u00a0 So to get to Greenville you jump in the car and get on 82 and go west until you get there, about 2-1\/2 hours.\u00a0 Son had everything all packed in the old pickup truck except for just a couple of items.\u00a0 Soon we were on our way.<\/p>\n
I was driving the old Ford truck with the furniture and such in the back.\u00a0 He had his little Kia car with some stuff in the trunk and his two dogs and himself. His new place is in the country near Walnut Grove, MS, south of Carthage.<\/p>\n
I went in the lead, mostly because I wanted him to see if anything was shifting around or flying out of the truck.\u00a0 We could do 55-60 mph and everything looked good, so I stuck at that speed.<\/p>\n
We went south on 61 from Leland to Hollandale.\u00a0 The road is old concrete in pretty good shape. And the landscape is flat with fields on both sides.\u00a0 I had a strong reminder of\u00a0 crossing Iowa on my bicycle 40+ years ago in RAGBRAI.\u00a0 I remember miles and miles of that old concrete, with numbers stamped in the panels every so often.\u00a0 I didn’t stop to see if 61 had numbers stamped in it.\u00a0 Greenville, Leland, Hollandale, are all in the “Mississippi Delta” which is a very flat area along the west border of the state, very good for growing row crops but prone to flooding.\u00a0 I saw houses with little dikes surrounding them.<\/p>\n
I was keeping an eye on the load and everything was riding fine.\u00a0 A roll of paper towels was tossed in on top of some other stuff, and it decided to start unravelling.\u00a0 So we stopped and I gathered that up and put it in the cab.<\/p>\n
We proceeded from Hollandale eastwards to Belzoni and then south again to Yazoo City.\u00a0 We crossed the Yazoo River on a tall bridge.\u00a0 That guy in the Civil War tried to run gunboats up the Yazoo River as part of the Union attempt to get into western Mississippi, eventually being successful south of Vicksburg.\u00a0 Yazoo City was the end of the Delta driving, we went up into the rolling hills and left straight roads for curvy roads.\u00a0 At Yazoo City we caught highway 16 toward Canton.<\/p>\n
I was driving in the lead, following the Google Maps directions on my cell phone.\u00a0 It routed me around the north side of Canton on some little roads.\u00a0 I was kind of hoping we would go through Canton because I was getting thirsty.\u00a0 But I followed the directions.<\/p>\n
Along the way I remember seeing a large lady sitting in an SUV on a bit of an inclined driveway, probably to a church.\u00a0 There was a bunch of little kids attempting to push the SUV up the inclined gravel driveway while the lady had her door open and was sitting behind the wheel.\u00a0 It occurred to me that having a bunch of kids on the downhill side of\u00a0 big lady in a big SUV, in neutral, was probably not the smartest idea.\u00a0 But we zoomed on by before it registered.<\/p>\n
We were on one of those little two-lane roads (Old Mississippi 16, east of Sharon, MS) with large ditches on both sides, with woodsey, probably swampy, land.\u00a0 It was a straight section and I was cruising along at about 55.\u00a0 A deer,\u00a0 I’d love to say it was a large buck but really I don’t know what it was; this deer appeared in front of the truck.\u00a0 I let off of the gas, but I did not slam on the brakes.\u00a0 Any deer that appears in front of my old Ford truck deserves what he gets.\u00a0 There was a thump and then a rubbing sound.\u00a0 I slowed to a stop.\u00a0 It smelled like hot rubber.\u00a0 I thought maybe the deer was stuck under the front end and dragging on the ground.\u00a0 There wasn’t any shoulder, so I just slowed to a stop in the lane and Son stopped behind me in his little Kia car with the dogs.\u00a0 He put on his 4-way flashers.<\/p>\n
I went around to the front of the truck while he walked back to see what happened to the deer.\u00a0 Everything on the truck looked OK except that the chrome bumper had bent down on the drivers side so that the tail of the thing was rubbing on the tire.\u00a0 I grabbed on it and gave a good pull, but I wasn’t able to budget it at all.\u00a0 I thought about trying to use the jack to use the weight of the vehicle to attempt to bend it back, but that seemed unlikely to work. Son came up and said the deer was DOA.\u00a0 (I figured the deer got what he deserved, but I’m glad he didn’t suffer.\u00a0 Lesson\u00a0 #1, don’t be jumping out in front of a 90’s-era Ford pickup truck doing 50+ MPH.)<\/p>\n
To make a long story shorter, we got out tools from Son’s household goods and we were able to remove the chrome bumper from the brackets.\u00a0 We secured the bumper to the load.\u00a0 While this was happening we had 4-5 cars go by.\u00a0 It was a slow day for traffic, being Sunday morning during church time.<\/p>\n
So this slowed down our good progress and put us just after noon on the clock, I think.\u00a0 It was close enough that I was starting to feel the need for some food and drink.<\/p>\n
We proceeded on to rejoin highway 16 again between Canton and Carthage, only about 30 miles to go.\u00a0 Then I saw an object in the road, after I passed it my mind registered it as a screwdriver.\u00a0 I looked in the side mirror right when it went under the front tire of the Kia.\u00a0 I saw it bounce out from behind the Kia and gave a sigh of relief (this is called foreshadowing).\u00a0 I was cruising along again, not much farther along, when my cell phone went off: it was Son, calling to tell me he had a flat tire.\u00a0 Darn that screwdriver.<\/p>\n
So, he got the car off the road into an unused driveway and he unloaded a jack and tire tool.\u00a0 His Kia didn’t come with a spare tire.\u00a0 I asked if he wanted to wait with the dogs or have me wait with the dogs.\u00a0 He elected to wait.<\/p>\n
I put in my GPS to go to the Walmart Supercenter in Carthage, a mistake it turns out.\u00a0 It was 11 miles to Carthage.\u00a0 Carthage Walmart did not have an auto repair facility.\u00a0 No tire place in Carthage was open.\u00a0 I was directed to the Walmart in Philadelphia, MS, another 25 miles away. (I realized later that if I had searched better before starting out I would have saved us some time by going back to Canton instead of going to Carthage.)\u00a0 I went on to Philadelphia where their Walmart did have an auto center.\u00a0 It took awhile.. a loong while, but they eventually replaced the tire (it having been patched two times already).\u00a0 I sat and drank a Sprite and worried that Son and dogs were baking in the little Kia while I waited.\u00a0 Hopping back into the truck, all this time filled with furniture and etc.\u00a0 (I’m glad it didn’t rain!)\u00a0 I drove back to Carthage.\u00a0 I stopped at a convenience store and bought some bottles of water. Then 11 more miles where I found all still alive at the Kia.\u00a0 We watered the dogs and got the tire back on right at 4 PM.<\/p>\n
We proceeded the last little bit to his new home in the country where we unloaded the worldly goods with no trouble at all.<\/p>\n
Leaving Son with a sweaty hug, I drove back up to Philadelphia and had a sandwich at the Wendy’s and made a stop for gas.\u00a0 I proceeded to drive highway 21 to Shack-a-lack and then up US-45 to home, arriving just as it was starting to get dark.<\/p>\n
So I got the grand tour of central Mississippi yesterday and everybody made it home to a peaceful night’s sleep.<\/p>\n
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[Today’s run:\u00a0 Watson Road\u00a0 3.4 miles] Yesterday was a busy day. After our two weeks of vacation I had a bit of an add-on. I dropped off on the return trip at our son’s house in Greenville, MS on Sunday the 19th.\u00a0 He needed someone to tend to his household while he started his new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mississippi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6559"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6564,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6559\/revisions\/6564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}