Coming to you live from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, it’s another installment from those two crazy Aussies on their jaunt around the US. We departed Slidell yesterday, having sorted out our registration and title transfer for the vehicle. For the record, anywhere that makes you pay for your vehicle registration (US$497.78) in either cash or cheque only is a bit demented. It seems that nobody wants to accept credit cards here, which is a bit of a challenge sometimes.

We also met our SPOTD in the form of a woman named Betty. She is the ~60yo notary that works in a little building in “Cars R Us” in Slidell, Louisiana. We were dealing with Lake Motors across the road, but since they did not know whether we could buy a car in one state, insure it in the same state and register it in another (to save on taxes), they sent us to her.

She was going on break from 1pm-2pm when we arrived at 12:50am. I asked her if she could quickly help us because we were from Australia and did not know where the DMV was, and she just said that she was going on her break, and that it did not matter how special we were. Even though she was 10 minutes early, we did not begrudge her the time she took off, but when we asked for directions to the DMV, she just mumbled them. I asked again, this time asking for directions with references to things along the side of the road, since road names were meaningless to us, and she just replied with road names again in a huff. SPOTD? I think so.

Left Slidell about 4pm, and went off up Interstate 59 to Mississippi. As we crossed over the border, there was a welcome centre for tourists, so we went in there. Armed with maps and free Coke, we set off again for whatever was up the road. The rain was coming down quite fiercely in places, and we were not surprised, since there was a flood warning for most of the state. Why would we drive into a state with a flood warning in effect? I dunno. Perhaps we were trying to win the SPOTD award back from Betty…

Pulled into Hattiesburg and went to get a pizza for dinner. Went into Pizza Hut, but there were no menus up on the wall. The girl behind the counter asked what we wanted and we requested a ham and pineapple pizza. She looked at us blankly. Thinking it was perhaps called “Hawaiian” or “Tropical” as it is in Australia, we tried those names and she still gave us a blank look. She agreed to make us a ham and pineapple pizza though, but wanted to charge us $13.99 since it had more than one topping. Yes folks, these zany Americans love to have such exciting toppings on their pizza as cheese. That’s it. Just cheese. Or perhaps ham and cheese. Or pepperoni and cheese. But that’s an exciting pizza and will be charged more for since there is more than one topping. It’s very strange…

We told the girl at Pizza Hut (herself a contender for SPOTD since she would not speak loud enough for us to hear her and we had to ask her three times to repeat what she’d said) we were not interested and went to Papa John’s for pizza instead. Took 35 minutes since they were (1) very busy with phone orders and (2) they cooked a ham and mushroom pizza by mistake first. Delicious when we got it though.

Drove over to Walmart and had fun wandering up and down the food aisles, looking at the bizarre things on offer. Will have to take a few photos of the cereal boxes here - you would not believe how awful they can look. Slept in the van in the Walmart carpark overnight, and ate some of the cereal this morning.

We’d bought a multipack (lots of little boxes of different types) the day before, and so Diana had Cheerios while I tried Lucky Charms. Diana declared the Cheerios to be “fruit loops without the fruit” while I found the Lucky Charms to be pure sugar. They are basically little puffy pieces with the consistency of Nutrigrain, but there are multi-coloured pieces in it as well. The coloured pieces are actually little bits of hard meringue. It is very odd eating slivers of brightly coloured pavlova in a breakfast cereal, but the sugar rush you get out of it is probably enough to keep you going for hours.

Now in the public library, filling in the morning since it is pouring rain outside and we’ve got no desire to go traipsing through the forest on a day like this. The information guide we got at the welcome centre informed us there is a mural in the library, but really, it’s not worth coming to. It’s nice and all that, but if it were not for the internet access, coming here would have been a waste of fuel.

Anyway, must dash. Got a bit of stuff to look up on the net and only 15 minutes of my half hour remaining. Yes, for all those people bitching out there about how long this has taken to read, it only took me 15 minutes to write. This is why I write long emails - I write fast, so it does not seem like much until I read it later. Or read the hate mail about how long the last one was….*grin*

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001