More than a week after my arriving home, it occurs to me that if I don't update the final leg of the journey soon, I'll forget anything worth saying about it. And so, finally, here is the account of the last day.
I awoke in Vicksburg and, after updating the blog, returned my final room key of the trip. Comparatively, the last day would be a short one, so I had time to spend tooling around historic Vicksburg, following the Scenic Drive signs. A wall of murals along the river allowed Frankie this photo op:
Along the scenic drive, I happened upon a restaurant I'd seen advertised in the hotel and stopped. You see, on this ride home I hadn't found many roadside attractions, and certainly none akin to the “Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere!” I'd found on my way through Groom, Texas on the drive west, so when presented with the opportunity to stop for lunch at a restaurant featured in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, I took it. The Walnut Hills Restaurant serves "southern plantation cuisine" in a round-table-boarding-house fashion similar to that of Miss Mary Bobo's in Lynchburg, TN, and though I'm not a fan of "southern food" as a rule, I find it hard to complain when it's done that well.
I took my seat at an a la carte table (an option not available at Bobo's to my knowledge) and was given my choice of the salads, meats, and veggies they were serving at the round table for a more reasonable one-traveler-alone, controlled portion price. The cole slaw (my salad) may have been the best I've ever eaten. The rest was pretty darned good as well. And of course, when you eat plantation style, you drink tea. I don't generally like tea, but even that was a pretty tasty and refreshing treat after a few hours photographing rats by murals in the morning sun.
After lunch, I completed the scenic circuit and continued home, through the rest of Mississippi, crossing Alabama, and into Tennessee. These states did not offer much in the way of new exploration to me as they are so close to home as to have been visited many times, and the flora and fauna of the American South is relatively constant, so after lunch the day consisted mostly of driving through the rain which plagued all three states and limiting stops to rest areas and gas stations on the continuing search to complete the keychain-from-every-state collection I was creating for both myself and my goddaughter.
I arrived at home not late in the evening and was greeted almost immediately with company ready to welcome me back. A lot had happened in the small town while I was gone and I would hear much about it in the coming days. I would also be staying in the house which for the last several months has been under renovation and which has not yet been connected via cable or internet to the rest of the world. And so this update would have to wait.
When I finished the drive west in 2006, I completed the posts of the trip with an audit or sorts -- a record of what was spent and what was learned along the way. I do plan to share a similar audit of this experience, but that will be the next post. This one, at least, got me home.
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