Well, another fairly successful trip - this time to Baton Rouge in Louisiana, to visit my friend Dudley and play a tournament in the city. We drove down on Thursday, a seven hour drive through southern Arkansas, a bit of Mississippi, and north Louisiana. The drive itself went smoothly, on the US65 & US 61 highways, but - man - some things surprised me. I've been told that Arkansas is the second poorest state, but Little Rock & the surrounding area all look pretty prosperous and well-kept - even the slums of South Little Rock look passably prosperous, even if incredibly threatening and dangerous (the lines of police yellow tape seem to be the common decoration for houses).
So, I thought, well, sure, Arkansas is poor by American standards, but that doesn't mean poor. Wow, was I wrong - southern Arkansas is rural poor, with a capital P - shacks I wouldn't put a dog in, ruinous 'mobile' home trailers, and squalor that reminded me of the worst bits of East Cape: actually, worse than that I think. Lots of the land seemed to be cultivated & unfenced, which (apparently) is due to being owned & farmed by big Agribusinesses, which I'm sure is economically efficient, but not so great for the individuals left living there. The bit of Mississippi we drove through looked much the same (not too surprising, as Mississippi is the one state poorer than Arkansas).
Funnily enough, once we crossed the state line into Louisiana (Loosyana), it changed like the click of fingers, and there were lots of fairly prosperous looking medium-sized farms, with neat, well-maintained farmhouses.
Staying with Dudley was, well, not exactly what we'd expected: Dudley was a Sergeant Major of Marines, and I guess I was expecting him to have carried their ferocious discipline to his home, but not so much. His wife was away (her annual trip back home to Oz) when we arrived, and he had 3 teenagers still at home to handle: I guess because they were stepkids, he was much gentler with them than I'd expected. Unfortunately, it also meant they had the usual teenage effect on the environment.
He'd kindly taken Friday off to get ready for the tournament, and to show us around the town, which was great - the capital building & the spot where Huey Long was assassinatied were particularly fascinating.
Saturday was 3 games (thru til 9 at night), plus one game on Sunday for the tournament. Hard going, and I lost my first game - being fairly rusty - but managed to win the other 3 games, and sneak into 3rd place (the guy that beat me wound up 4th, having gotten a draw in the last round). Reasonably pleased, but my position was mostly due to a moment's inattention by my 3rd opponent, and some truly heroic dicing on the part of my light horse, in the last game - I really didn't deserve to win that one.
After the Sunday game, we drove back home - for some reason, on the way back the GPS routed us through a ton of back roads and avoided both the highways we'd used to drive down. Cat got quite wrought at this & was convinced the GPS had gotten us lost, but I insisted it had just determined a fractionally faster route (which I think is correct, it saved us 5 or 6 minutes off the 7 hour trip). I wish there was some way of turning that option off, though, the extra stress it causes isn't worth the small saving of time, and the much greater concentration required on small, windy roads. Finally got back to LR around 8, then went to a local cafe for dinner, and home by 9.
Since then, I've had 3 days off work : I originally arranged for a week, as the original plan - truncated for financial considerations - was to take more time, and visit New Orleans as well. Oh well, next time we go there, I guess. Nice to have time to catch up on simple stuff, and goof off, too :)
