Back from the Gulf Coast. Made it all the way to Perdido Key in Alabama – for those of you following along at home, that’s pretty much Pensacola, Florida. But not quite. Thankfully.
To me, a trip along the Mississippi and Alabama sections of the Gulf of Mexico is essential viewing when you’re in the neighborhood. Alabama’s beaches in particular are incredibly white and pretty and the seafood rocks, while the culture on Missisippi’s coast – v. French – isn’t what most Northerners expect of Mississippi. (Then again, Mississippi has a way of not playing to type quite as much as Yankees expect. How inconvenient for us.)
The most interesting part to me, though, is when you leave New Orleans by car, it doesn’t matter which way you come back, but if it’s night time, you really get a sense of the fantastic isolation of this city that’s halfway to the Caribbean.
To wit – you’re up in Mississippi, already hardly Crossroads of The Western World, and from there it’s an hour down through the swamps, with only an orange light tinging the haze to let you know there’s anything going on up ahead. Amazing, really, that in this day and age, when we’re all wired to the hilt, Bluetooth’d and Blackberry’d and goodness knows what else all is coming down the pike, geography is still such an effective barrier.