This was an Evinrude motor similar to one that we have.




Among other things they had little dioramas showing all the Louisiana lighthouses.


Sabine Bank

I was taking pictures and saw an empty cubicle which said "No Photographs Please". I didn't understand why they didn't want pictures of that, but I didn't want a photo of it and so I didn't take one. Then when I got around to the other side



I saw another sign and realized that they meant no photos of any of the dioramas. But it was too late - I had already done it. There was no sign on this one though




I thought maybe I could get Bob a T-shirt as there were shirts on sale, but they were sweatshirts and were children's sizes mostly.



We left the museum





and headed out



This was the last lighthouse on my list to see and the last one of the trip.

We started north on I-55 in torrents of rain which the windshield wipers could hardly keep up with and we had to watch carefully for cars ahead that didn't have their lights on as they were practically invisible from behind. The road was very rough as there were nasty joints between each section of concrete. We have been listening to whatever the local NPR station is on the radio, and the NWS kept coming up with tornado warnings. I could see from the map that the warnings were for the southern counties and we were in one of them.

The weather guy on the radio kept saying that a tornado had been spotted but I couldn't find the town he was talking about on the map. It turns out that I was spelling it wrong in my head. The name sounded like Rain, but was spelled Rayne.

The radio guy said that if we "spotted a white funnel cloud" ... and just then there was a loud clap of thunder and lightening, but there was too much rain to spot anything at that moment. And he would continue that we should get to a place of safety and listed that under a sturdy workbench would be good and that if we were in a mobile home, we should get out and go to a safer place. Then he would say that if we were in a car we should get out and go lie in a ditch. I was looking at the rain and trying to imagine myself getting out and lying down in a ditch when it was raining so hard that I couldn't SEE a ditch and if I did find one and lay down in it, I'd need a snorkel to breath, and the snorkel was in a bag in the trunk.

Eventually I decided to turn off I-55 and head across to Monroe Louisiana. The US highways proved to be much smoother, and they were practically devoid of traffic.

We stayed in Monroe that night. Some time after we got there, there was some violent pounding on the door. I thought it might be kids who had the wrong room, so Bob looked through the peep hole and then opened the door and asked them what they wanted. They apparently had the wrong room. I asked him if it was children and he said no, that it was two adult black females. When he was telling our daughter about it later, he said they were "working girls".

March 6th we got to Frisco where our daughter and grandchildren live, and we stayed there until the 10th. We saw a scrimmage baseball game and a track meet our grandson Justin was in (it was VERY cold), and on Tuesday we had pancakes at the church with Justin doing some of the cooking. I mostly uploaded photos and Bob fixed their dishwasher and also some electrical problems.

We left March 10th I was still having trouble getting the GPS to talk to me. I do not know what the secret code is. Sometimes it talks and sometimes it does not.

We spent the night of March 10th in Forrestville AK and tried to visit the little museum there but they apparently closed it early. This was behind the museum



March 12 - We got to Nashville about 1:30 and promptly ran into a horrible traffic jam. I told Bob to go ahead and get off, but people would not let him into their lanes. As bad as D.C. It was so bad that we did not attempt to do the city trolley tour.

March 12 - I decided that even if I didn't get to do a city tour, I wanted to see the Parthenon and the Capitol so I put their locations in the GPS and it guided us to them. (or at least it did the mapping - it was silent most of the time). I also wanted to go to the Hermitage which was on the way home, so we drove out there. We got a wheelchair for me. We saw the movie and went through the museum and then we went out into the gardens. They had said we would have no trouble, but they lied - gravel paths do not make easy wheelchair pushing.



This is where Andrew and Rachel are buried.

We saw the cemetery and then we got to the building itself. They had two little ramps marked left and right - the man said that one side of the step was lower than the other. No photos were allowed inside. They asked if I could walk up the stairs and I said I could if I absolutely had to so they said I could look at photos of the upstairs. I said could I take pictures of them, and the man looked taken aback - don't think anyone ever asked him that before. Finally he said no but that they would sell me a book with them in it.

We toured the downstairs and then I looked at the photos. There was also an interesting letter in there from Jackson's son or nephew trying to explain why the house burned in 1834.

We stayed in Abington VA that night

March 13 - the internet would not work for me in the morning. Also I found an ant on my pill box. It bit me. There was no cranberry juice on the buffet. I used the hotel computer but it was slow. The rest stops on I-81 have all been bulldozed - cost cutting measures by the VA governor.

We got home about 1630, and Bob turned the water on. He also found two starlings had gotten into the house and crapped all over everything.

Initially I could not get the computer to log on to the internet, but after I turned if off and waited a bit, it started to behave better.

THE END