road trip: day two overview

day two started decent enough: really good breakfast, nice conversation, and getting on the road. seeing as it was halloween, i put on my halloween outfit. we took i-10 to 383n to us190 to baton rouge, where we met a friend of linc’s (my brother) for a late lunch/early supper. we ate at the chimes, right by lsu. (i always forget how many attractive young ladies there are around college campuses.) the food and conversation were both enjoyable. we left right around 5pm, but it got dark pretty fast. we originally didn’t want to do much night riding since we wanted to see the countryside, but we needed to get more distance. (that’s foreshadowing.)
we took highland road out to 42, which then detoured to places unknown for awhile, then 42 to 22 to covington, where we looked for a place to stay. no luck. (at some point here my brother hit a bird that splattered guts onto his jacket, and we ran into a talkative fellow who claimed to be from austin and was doing roofing.) so we headed up 21 to bogalusa, which in addition to being a scary, smelly town (at least the parts we saw), had no vacancies. so we took 21, which turns into 35 at the mississippi state line, to columbia. which had no vacancies. so we took us98 to i-59 (at hattiesburg…which we had already been told had no vacancies). we stopped in laurel…no vacancies. (see a pattern?)
it was now after 11pm, and it was cold. we were stopped for a break at a convenience store lamenting our bad luck, so it of course immediately started to rain…a little, harder, harder, pour. so we moved under the roof over the pumps and put on our rain gear. then it stopped raining. but the ground was wet and since it might rain more we kept the gear on. we took off and drove all the way to meridian. somewhere around 1am i started losing it. it’s scary to be falling asleep on a motorcycle, but we needed a place to stay. we rolled into meridian around 2am and found a place with vacancies. it was a nasty excuse for a hotel: a cockroach greeted us, and there was some kind of fleck of raw meat or something on the wall. but i didn’t care at this point. i hit the bed and fell immediately to sleep.