Bullet Point Two Filled Out

• First ride in the back of a pickup truck (pictures will be included!).
  

Holy cow, the wind was crazy. And it was cold with that wind blowing! But a couple of friendly-seeming guys took us from Jackson to Vicksburg in the back of their pickup truck, and little did we know that this would be the first of several rides in the back of a truck.

It's kind of like a faux-hawk.

I think it took me about a half-hour to comb all the tangles out of my hair. On the way back, I made sure to braid my hair before hitchhiking.

Now we are in New Orleans

We arrived in New Orleans at around 6pm yesterday and Jocelyn and Nate were waiting for us at the station. It is a grand thing to go from cold to warm and from the discomfort of sleeping on a bus to the joy of sleeping in and stretching out on a bed. Jocelyn and Nate took us right to food, which was also a book club meeting with 11 other med school students. They were discussing the book Cosmicomics Italo Calvino, two copies of which have now been lent to us so we can read it and make sense of the discussion we sat in on last night. Everyone at the meeting was kind and interested in meeting us and once they started discussing the book, they stayed on topic very well, which impressed me.

Jocelyn is generously giving us her apartment as our own while we are here. She is staying at Nate's, which is within easy walking distance, and tonight we will head over there to have dinner with them. Right now we are at Community Coffee, which has free WiFi and is also within easy walking distance. Tomorrow we may busk a little, and will at least head to where other buskers are and get an idea of what it's like to busk in New Orleans. Today we are still recuperating from our colds, mine having reached its worst spot (I hope) last night and this morning. The queasiness of yestereve has passed into a general difficulty to breathe today, but I have high hopes that I will be mostly recovered tomorrow.

A question for our readers: What do you think about buskers? How does it make you feel to see a busker (of any kind)? Go any direction you like with this, and please post responses as comments.

Getting to New Orleans

Brendan’s cold traveled in a minimized fashion to my nose and throat, and it was good to sleep two nights at Heather’s and Peter’s home in Lake Forest. We attended a wonderful choral and orchestral concert with Heather conducting the orchestra and felt very comfortable staying there. But we needed to press on and get to New Orleans. We planned to visit Brendan’s aunt on the way in Tennessee, but knew we wouldn’t get that far in one day. So we were okay with getting as far as Indianapolis on Monday.

We set out not as early as we should have, perhaps, though it may have made no difference. We needed to walk first to the nearest highway, which was about 3 miles away, and this was a good test of how our packs feel over distance. My shoulders were aching after just a few minutes, but it was doable and will probably become easier the more we do it and the stronger we get.

We got to 41 and got a ride almost immediately from a man on his way to Chicago. He didn’t think we would have much luck getting a ride in Chicago, and he took us a little ways beyond his own destination because he felt it would be a safer spot for us. It was south Chicago, but far beyond downtown and beyond, I think, the neighborhood my parents asked of--“You’re not in south Chicago, are you?”--when I spoke to them yesterday. We were at 111th and Corliss, for anyone who wants to map it.

And at 111th and Corliss no one would give us a ride. We first stood at the entrance to the freeway and then moved to that intersection, which was at a light and caught many people leaving a gas station, and people would occasionally talk to us, but no one would pick us up. Mind you, this was only over the course of about 45 minutes, which in hitchhiking terms in not a very long time. Yet it felt like forever because of the cold.

I’m not totally sure why we didn’t check the weather beforehand. When we first arrived to stay with Katie in Waukegan on Friday, she mentioned it might snow the next day or evening. I think I translated this as “Ah, it might be unusually cold tomorrow, and then it will get a bit warmer again. That’s good.” But it did not get warmer. We were both dressed in nearly all our layers yesterday. Brendan was wearing his sweats and his jeans and every upper piece of clothing but one shirt. I was wearing a tank top, a long johns shirt, a t-shirt, a sweater, a fleece and an outer shell, and wool pants. At first it didn’t seem too too bad. But the cold quickly seeped in, first hitting our hands, which only had thin gloves on, so we took turns holding our “Nashville, TN” sign. Then it seemed to sneak under my jacket and cool my stomach, and I guess that’s how it eventually found its way to my feet, and that was the final straw because there was no getting warm after that.

So we gave up rather quickly, and I really did feel like a failure for a while. This was to be our first attempt to hithchike on this trip, and hitchhiking is to be our primary means of travel. But the cold beat us. And that’s okay. It’s why we’re traveling south anyway, to keep away from the cold, so we just found a faster way to do that. We called my parents and my dad used his internetting skills to tell us the way to get to the Greyhound station in Chicago. We thought we would have to take a bus to the L and the L to downtown, but things worked out more serendipitously. We took the bus to the L station, and lo and behold there stood a Greyhound station. It was a teeny one, but it fit our needs, and we were able to book passage all the way to New Orleans. As I write this we are on the bus and most recently went through Memphis, TN. It’s warmer already and there are many more leaves on the trees here than there were in WI and IL.

And that is all for now. Perhaps Brendan will relate the story of the woman we met while waiting for our bus, or else I’ll come back to that.