Today, Friday 15 September 2023, was the day of the funeral that I came here to Texas yesterday to attend. Yesterday was a great day, with me traveling to places where I had not been and getting a few pictures in both Louisiana and Texas in the process.
The host noticed that I had lost weight. That’s great! The cargo shorts that I wore yesterday are the newest pair of cargo shorts that I own, and, when I took off the belt in the bathroom last night, the shorts slipped a couple of inches down on my waist. I need a belt to hold them up, which is a good sign. I need new cargo shorts.
I wasn’t able to sleep well last night, and I don’t know if it’s because of the bed or the HVAC system or whatever, but it’s probably something to do with my food routine having been disrupted. I ate pizza last night; after that, I couldn’t sleep.
So, I got up and came out to the truck to get my almonds and some fruity trail mix, and I brought that inside but didn’t end up eating it because the hosts still had corn chips and dip. So, even though that stuff is not really healthy, it’s dairy, it settles me down, and all of it got me to thinking about how long it’s been since I have traveled.
That’s two afternoons/evenings in a row that I eat pizza. Pizza does not help me sleep. It’s mostly bread. I miss my salads and beans and all of that.
I looked terrible in the mirror, and I was 20 pounds heavier two months ago? Yikes.
I start with an early-morning walk in the neighborhood.
All of this got me to thinking about how long it has been since I traveled really and how much my diet has changed since I last traveled. That, at one time, was not a big problem. You go on a road trip, you eat your junk food, and you go to sleep; you eat healthier once the trip is done. It’s been so long; it was a very different time back then.
The last time that I stayed in a hotel or anywhere that was not a residence was when I did the Bogalusa line chase in the middle of December 2014, and I ate some junk food then, especially from Ward’s.
The last time that I came to the Houston area, I would eat at Whataburger often and was far more in shape.
It was a little bit breezy out here, with the temperature in the mid 70s Fahrenheit.
The funeral was good.
Afterward, we went eat at a restaurant.
Alan said that, when he was in high school, before a high-school football game, he’d eat the entirety of one of those big chicken-fried steaks.
I ate a salad. It was good, but not filling.
I think that somebody made a snarky comment about me getting a salad at such a place. Had this been my first meal in Texas, I’d have eaten something else, something more Texasy. I had had little control over what I ate in the last 18 hours, with too much starch and carbohydrates.
I made some joke about this, that I hadn’t just arrived in Texas, but they laughed before I even got to the punchline, which is weird. It made me think of that time that RaeAnne laughed at a joke not only before I even got to the punchline but before I even said enough relevant information to set up the joke.
We talk in autistic spaces about how neurotypical people are just fake and don’t even get the joke, don’t even wait for the punchline. They sense that you’re telling a joke and laugh.
This makes me realize the superiority of unexpected deadpan!
Stanley looked at me and speculated that the bill must be about $200.
That was a great experience. We returned to the house, and it was time for me to leave to return to Louisiana . . . which may have been a mistake, at least to try to do it today.
At 15:27, I left the house before the boys returned, needing to not leave late because I was intending to take the same route that I took to get here.
I was in the mood for grub from Taco Bell, not from Whataburger.
Whataburger is now coming to seem a little bit less exotic now that I live nearer to a few of them than I ever have before.
It’s funny that, after my salad at a meal with Texas relatives, I was now craving more Texasy food.
Political-ideological stuff is why I keep a distance from these people now that I didn’t keep before. The truth, of course, is that they always were like this, but I just didn’t appreciate what that meant.
There is lightning to the east-southeast. I guess that I will get rain, and I guess that I won’t go to Englewood Yard.
I was texting with TS.
At some point, I noticed an inopportunely-timed problem. I noticed that one of my headlights was burned out.
Here I am on a relatively small trip that is also my biggest trip in many years, and this is when the light goes out. This problem led to two delays, one of which was caused by another problem that this problem caused, that made me regret taking this long, scenic route back to the house.
I got off of I-69, which was at a crawl, at one of the Kingwood exits and went into a Taco Bell at 16:52 to take a leak and get something to eat. I got three of those chicken ranch $2 burritos at and am still hungry after I ate them.
I proceeded eastward on Northpark Drive to get to an Advanced Auto Parts store. I bought some new headlights and tried to put one in, but I couldn’t get the thing to firmly stay in the holder, and I figured that I didn’t have time to mess with it. So, I left with it somewhat in the chamber, at least providing some illumination in the reflector chamber.
Things then got worse.
At 17:32, after leaving the Advanced Auto Parts place, I was stuck in a crawl of traffic on Northpark Drive in Kingwood trying to get back to I-69, because there was a traffic light blinking, I think at the intersection with Highway 494; so, it was a one-at-a-time stop-and-go thing at the intersection. Houston area is just terrible with traffic.
It made me wish that I had tried to spend another night at the host’s house, and I probably would have been allowed to do so. I could have gotten an early start and enjoyed the US Highway 190 route in daylight.
I can’t remember if I had considered aborting that mission and heading south for I-10, which would have been the logical thing to do.
At 17:57, I finally got back onto I-69 northbound, with a delay of more than an hour for the headlight and brief stop at Taco Bell.
At 18:24, I saw a train. UP 7757 was on the southern end of a train that appeared to be stopped.
I was yawning. That plus the fact that there wasn’t much daylight left is a sign that I should have been going via I-10.
My only SLR-camera pictures for the day are from Woodville, where I again made a brief stop, this time, just across the street – also, the highway – from where I had stopped when I came through yesterday.
This first image shows where I was parked yesterday.
You can see the flowers growing in the concrete!
Here is the theater just to the west.
Finally, here are a couple of images of the southern side of the street and highway.
That is okay, I guess.
I left. Yo me voy.
At 19:40, very tired, I crossed the Neches River eastbound.
I could not wait to eat again at the Whataburger in DeRidder. That’s why I stopped at the Whataburger in Jasper.
Inside the restaurant, there was drama going down in a table in the corner, with a contentious conversation with an employee, a young male person who said that there was no way that he was working past 11pm.
I was and am so sick of eating fast food! I miss my green beans and my salads and my fruit and my white beans and my 15-bean soup!
Emerging from Jasper or Newton, I saw flashing headlights in my rearview mirror. Oh, crap! I was worried and thinking all kinds of things.
I learned that I was being pulled over for not having two working headlights.
It ended up being a pleasant conversation. I told him the story of what had happened, and I popped the hood to show him that, actually, the headlight was working but just wouldn’t stay in the holder.
He wrote me a written warning and was really nice and cool. I talked to him about my feelings about headlights and the irony that I get stopped for it.
That was another delay, about a half hour, caused by this headlight issue. That’s now 90 minutes total of such delays.
I just felt like sleeping, and I wasn’t even in Louisiana yet.
I enter Louisiana at 21:12 via same bridge on which I entered Texas yesterday.
At Elton, I got out of the truck and gave another try to getting the headlight working, and I got it fixed! I figured it out. I vaguely remember imagining before I got out of the truck a way to make it work.
I feel like I got out to get coffee somewhere, maybe Jennings.
Back in Lafayette, I see this.
One officer told me to not turn left, and the other did. When I turned left, the first officer started fussing at me before until the second officer told him that he told me to go.
I ended today on the road, because, as you probably can glean, I am not writing this ‘today’.
As Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” was playing on the radio, I finally arrived back at the house ‘tomorrow’ at 00:10.
This was a great trip.
Jim
