TwoMonthsTraveling

  I just returned from six weeks meandering around the south and west, then another three weeks with Beth in Texas and Georgia.  Her business  prevents her from accompanying me full time at the present, so I take the van and drive mostly back roads on impulse, sleeping and hiking and golfing where the road takes me. I escape the cold and snow of the north and discover new landscapes, sleeping in National forests and Walmart parking lots and wherever the evening finds me.                                                  To that end, as much as I do not agree with the conservative politicians in Texas, the state is very friendly to spontaneous people like myself, for they allow overnight parking in their roadside rests- which are numerous-and the small towns in the western part of the state have free parking for RV's -including electricity and water if one wants it. People in the south generally are more friendly than northerners , with store clerks saying 'thank you' and other civilities, although the abundance of Baptist churches gives the area a religious overtone that is a little uncomfortable. That is, beneath the pleasantries there is a residue of prejudice that is hard to define, as if some of the whites cannot quite admit that the civil war-which one town in South Carolina calls the "Confederate war"-was fought and lost because of slavery. The focus to them is on their pride for the bravery of the individual soldiers and generals rather than the reasons for the fighting. It is as though it would be acceptable for Germany to display the Nazi flag simply because the German soldiers fought well; the larger moral questions are ignored.  But politics aside the south and west are a wonderful winter escape, and I drift to the rural areas and small towns. Florida is an exception, for the overdeveloped congestion in that state is to be avoided unless one enjoys such things.                                                               The pictures show a Trump store for fanatics in Virginia, an exclusive Victorian era hotel on Jekyll Island, Georgia, a solar array in Texas, a sunset over the Mississippi river at the town of Natchez, and some of the fantastic landscape in east central New Mexico. ( click on the pics to enlarge...)