My fire poker, which is actually the size of my pinky

With Forrest City being the town closest to the park (and possessing a Walmart for supplies…hell, it’s Arkansas, Walmart is a landmark), the name immediately conjured up images of oak trees and owls nestled around pristine lakes and rivers.  While this may indeed by the case, it’s a funny thing how one extra R in Forrest changes the meaning greatly.  Yes, that would be Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Civil War general and founding member of the KKK, there’s a giant statue of him in Nashville too, but you know, this is the South, so they’re clearly only revering his Civil War tactical mastery and nothing else and if you say any different you better shut your mouth.  I’m not sure if the fact there’s a majority black population is Forrest City is funny, ironic or something I shouldn’t be talking about.

Back at the zoo in Memphis

I had seen Arkansas more than once as I trudged up the Mississippi Delta in November, but honestly had no intention of ever crossing the river.  I won’t be visiting any major cities or interacting with many locals in the forest, so I’ll have to reserve judgement, but…it seems nice?  Bill Clinton is from here, he’s a man.  And as a random aside, over the last four weeks I have met two different people who mentioned they had visited all 50 states.  Why anyone would do that is beyond me (apologies to South Dakota and Nebraska) and considering I’ve only been to 13 states in the last year and a half, I don’t want to be driving around until 2017 just to say I saw Mt. Rushmore.  Or do I…?

Regardless, to kill time at the campground I busted out the old extension tubes for the camera lens and took a few macro shots, and tagged on some from the Memphis zoo to make the gallery.

Without going way overboard on tales of bohemian fascination, the immense character of the city, that everyone will have a “New Orleans moment” and it’s way safer than advertized plus you can drink on the street, well, all those things are true.  And beads and parade floats and costumes and brass bands and genuine people everywhere, both locals and tourists.

Hundreds of floats like this all weekend

After being somewhat terrified at the Muses parade Thursday realizing it was a whole weekend of that, except many thousands more people, I got in the swing quick.  Thursday was also the only day I bothered to venture out with my actual camera, so that gallery is here (not that pictures do it any justice).

On Friday after proclaiming the day before I wasn’t really big into parades, there I was back again near the start of the route in the garden district jumping up and down like a school girl waving to people on the floats for throws (my total count for the weekend was around 25 strings of beads, 2 footballs, 1 frisbee and 1 plastic cup, and I wasn’t trying).  Wandering up Magazine, or maybe Tchoupitoulas, I stopped to chat with a bunch of kids my age who lived in a house right on the parade route.  Within minutes the high fives, dance moves, and handle of Jack Daniels being passed around were all flowing freely.  I was aided in making fast friends because one of the residents had lived in Saskatchewan at some point, so got Canadian props.  Eventually I sheepishly asked to use his bathroom as those are coveted like nothing else on the parade route, then I found I never really left the house once the full drum kit and guitars came out for jamming and the bong started going around, then I have no idea what happened because I forgot to eat dinner, but I made it back to Bessie alright although I must have fallen down a few times.

Sexy shiny dancers

Saturday poured rain, I won’t bore you with the details of that or Sunday, but Monday, a.k.a. Lundi Gras is the big party day.  The cops even show up on Bourbon Street at midnight to clear everybody out, I only made it over there once and it’s not my crowd, there’s so many better places and cheaper bars with more character.  Like for example, Parasol’s, rumoured to be where the Po’Boy was first invented and open since the 1950’s.  It was there dealing with the one and a half hour wait for two sandwiches with a friend I’d made earlier in the week that we met Frank and Leroy…

Sitting on a sunny stoop across the street as every table was full, a man in his 50s with wild wavy hair and a sequined Mardi Gras visor came over in his wheelchair and informed us he called this “the office” because he’d always sit there and drink with his acquaintances, which was every single person who walked by.  Having been diagnosed with MS a few years earlier definitely didn’t slow Frank down, in fact it probably sped him up thanks to her service dog Leroy, a beautiful and friendly red lab.  Within minutes, Frank asked if we wanted to see him go, so he went out in the street, screamed “GO!!” and off Leroy went.  They have apparently been clocked at 19 mph as you can learn from this local news segment about the two of them.

That about sums it up

After hearing of Frank’s plan to run for congress, how he partied with Cyndi Lauper in the 80’s, that he was going on tour with his one man guitar set when his record came out in a month and how he wanted me to get a ramp into Bessie so I could be his tour bus, well, you get the picture.  Then the reporter who did the story stopped by with the weather girl for a visit and a drink at “the office”.  Then…

OK, that was 3:30 PM and I stayed out until about 2, so you can guess for yourself plenty more happenned, but I’ll stop rambling.  I was originally going to say that everyone should do Mardi Gras at least once in their life (well, if they’re young, or young at heart and like to party) but I can tell you this, I’ll be going back for another.

Fine, I'll just go listen to Tom Petty by myself!

I believe it was Plato who famously complained about the youths these days, and having been proven wrong over thousands of years it’s something I make a conscious effort to try not to say or believe even if deep down I sympathize.  Being in the college town of Gainesville, home to the University of Florida (yes, Tim Tebow’s alma matter, we’ll skip that commentary here) I figured it only made sense to CouchSurf with some college kids, so I broke my rule of not seeking out people more than 5 years my junior.  Oh I don’t regret it, we went to an Oregon Trail themed party and a rager house party with 50 people at a three bedroom house mainly spilling out onto the street.  There was even a dude with a mullet and a shirt that read GAINESVILLE FUCKING FLORIDA!

However, because this is the American south, the term we use in Canada called “student ghetto” still applies, but in a literal sense.  A transient kid population just looking for a cheap place to live begets slum lords, rundown properties and depressed values, which in turn causes actual riff raff to move in.  I didn’t really think much of some of the neighbours coming over and crashing the party, other than laughing that kids had the audacity to complain when there was blaring music and 40 people blocking the street at two in the morning.  Soon enough someone had ordered a Jimmy John sandwich, the delivery boy propped his bike on the side of the house when he went in to deliver it, then found it gone when he came back outside.  Quickly borrowing someone else’s bike to search for his own, after some minutes he angrily sped back towards the full crowd, someone stepped in his way and he totally wiped in front of all the cool kids and threw his helmet against the wall screaming he would shit in their sandwich if they ever ordered one to that house again.

***

“What’s espresso?”

For some reason this question from the person in front of me in line brought a beaming grin to my face, unlike the Tom Petty inquiry.  It was in response to the scripted sales pitch at McDonald’s for their new McCafe deal, and if it wasn’t for the piece of paper to answer, I’m pretty sure the cashier didn’t know either.  By this point in time I was in the absolute middle of nowhere in the Florida panhandle, returning from another adventure of camping in the middle of nowhere (best spot ever FYI, check the gallery).  It was the only McDonald’s for 50 miles in any direction, there probably wasn’t a Starbucks, or for that matter an espresso maker for at least 100, and I’m not sure why, but I like that, even though I like espresso, and Starbucks.

The Gulf

What I didn’t like was hearing the 6 year old kid in the booth next to me make reference to “the 51 states” and not be corrected by her mother.  I mean, maybe Puerto Rico counts because this is Florida, but these were white country folks in the panhandle.  Somehow miraculously diffusing the reaction growing in my mind was the fact I was drawn into it as the mother turned to me and asked while pointing to the parking lot “what state does that license plate say, New York?”  It was very far away, but I have fighter pilot vision and have been able to beat anyone reading the letters at a distance since I was a child, so after a brief squint I informed her “no ma’am, Michigan”.  Thank God Bessie was out of view so we didn’t have to get into which state Alberta was.

Vultures are fucking hippies.  Everyone else does all the work, they spend all their time high as the goddam sky swooping in for a freebie whenever they can, and I love them for it.

Acton, Florida

But the tick…upon finding the first ever in my life latched to my thigh, I plucked it while musing “I have fabricated the evolution of man from antiquity to modernity solely within my own mind, the internal combustion engine facilitating my journey of thousands of miles, only to be the vehicle for the greatest distance you will ever travel, from shrubbery bush to squashed fingertip residue.  At least I have the capacity to pretend I have hopes and a will of my own, and to perhaps falsely ascribe the same virtues to the vulture.  But you tick, are an automaton, feeding without knowing.”

***

Having done “civilization” for far too long, I decided to return to my western US roots by boondocking in the middle of nowhere in Florida’s Ocala National Forest.  Problem is, being an hour from Orlando and the ocean in Daytona Beach, this isn’t the middle of nowhere like, oh, all of New Mexico.

Lake Eaton

My sanctioned $8 a night campground hosts at Lake Eaton told me of a couple free places to park in the middle of the forest, but warned me to watch out for “rainbows”.  I had already come across what that meant in Florida-speak researching the area online, so proddingly asked “you mean gypsies?”  To which I got the amazing response “no, worse…hippies.”  Fucking hippies!

Funny thing is, they use that term pretty loosely, it really just means vagabonds with unwashed hair, and there’s a huge difference.  When I heard tales of bonfires, yelling and drinking until 1 AM, that sounded like something to seek out, not avoid.  Yet when I drove 3 miles down the highway and saw at least a half dozen people with dreadlocks, a pitbull and their thumbs stuck out on the side of the road, I realized this unsanctioned campsite may very well have been the mistake the 60 year olds made it out to be.

Scowls.  Scowls that I knew of their perch in the bush where the ranger only stopped by once a week to boot them out.  A scowl like I got giving an extremely (and accidentally) quizzical look to the man who walked into Burger King a week ago in Daytona Beach demanding free food with the unspoken threat that he would either start screaming uncontrollably or shit in the middle of the floor.  Oh he got his food, the manager even knew his name, but I know now that he was a rainbow, not a hippie…a tick, not a vulture.

Open the pod bay doors

FYI, I’ve been doing a belated Christmas with my parents the last 8 days after refusing to return home for the holidays.  It was alright then, but currently is -30 in Calgary, so I stand by my decision to not take the chance.  I’ll take the Kennedy Space Center, Sea World and fresh shrimp over ski hills, overpriced drinks and everyone pretending we don’t live in Siberia any day of the week.

Just to expand on a point I made in my last post (yeah, I know they’re getting less frequent, eat me), I do laugh at the international perception of Americans as jackasses the deeper I get into tourist locations.  I forget how much closer Disney World is than Disney Land to Europe, so the concentration of our friends from across the pond is dramatically higher in Florida than California.  And when you’re standing in a grocery store with a 6 deep line and a 13 year old kid with a thick Italian accent walks right up to the front when the cashier is ringing someone else through and yells “hey, hey, HEY!  How much this costs?!?!” it all becomes clear.  Yes, Americans are loud and obnoxious, and to some degree entitled.  But at that exact moment it made me realize that the type of American that is able to be a globetrotter (only 20% have passports) must have money, probably thinks they’re better than everyone and is an asshole, probably fitting the exact same demographic of Europeans coming here.

R.I.P. Yuri

Ummm, I have no point whatsoever here.  But I took a bunch of fun pictures of Cocoa Beach and Orlando, check them out in the gallery.

Now this is happenning, the Atlantic

So FYI, it’s not that difficult to drive all the way from coast to coast in America, even if it takes you 12 months.  And you’ll see a lot, and eat and drink just as much.  You might also find that camping under the stars in the middle of nowhere is just as rewarding as plopping down on a bar stool next to one of the 300 million people that live here.  They’re all very different depending on where you go, but football and beer some to be pretty common threads.

I lost track of where I was going anymore sometime around the middle of Texas.  Now I’m just a guy in a van.  A friend wondered this before I even began my journey, when I would become “guy in van”, and that happened at the exact same time in middle Texas.  In the beginning it was like “wheee, look at me go!”, but then it gave way to “where am I going?”  But the real distinguishing mark is I don’t remember what it was like to think this whole idea was new and fresh and explain it to people like some revelation, because it’s not, it just is.  Not that I wouldn’t highly recommend it, and Bessie will be for sale in maybe 2 years when I get sick of this, but for now the south is pretty fantastic.  I also highly recommend quitting your job and telling anyone who will listen to play a game of hide and go fuck themselves.

Ocean still got forests

It’s become painfully obvious that anyone who doesn’t stop and say hello crossing paths with you on a nature trail or a not overly crowded city street is most likely from Europe, and the fact they generally start speaking French, German or Italian immediately thereafter is telling.  But even if they spoke fluent English, they wouldn’t stop to say hello, and I don’t know why.  You’d think I would have some insight, having never done it myself back in Canada, but it’s something American I can’t explain, same as how I picked up saying “riiiiight” every time I agree with someone.

The Florida coast is somewhat similar to the California coast, but with less money, which equates to more charm if you aren’t rolling around with a few thousand in your pocket.  Jacksonville Beach, St. Augustine, sure there’s plenty of nice stuff, but you don’t have to be a millionaire to live there, and a bar with a $2 pint or a pornography super-warehouse are never too far.  Even Jekyll Island in Georgia where I took all these shots, I didn’t even clue in as to why there were 4 golf courses on a tiny island with a campground, then getting there to find a castle, marina and “Millionaire’s row”, well I was still able to camp in a lovely spot of $20 a night, and I’ll gladly spend that all the way down to the everglades.