Man, the good old U.S.A. is a HUGE freaking place. Unless someone has made the big “buns of steel,” cross country drive, it’s hard to truly understand how much open land we have in this big ole country and how brilliant and efficient our highway and interstate systems really are. There isn’t someplace we’ve wanted to go and haven’t been able to due to lack of roads. We’re definitely not saying that all our U.S.A. roads are good. We’ve absolutely found some truly rotten roads. So rotten, we think that maybe someone laid the road and then just forgot it was there after that. There’s no need to remind our friends about the couple of times we ended up on roads so crappy we thought we might die. If you’d like a list of those particular death roads, we haven’t exactly created the list yet, but you can read about those experiences in prior blogs. A few examples can be found by searching the old blogs for “ghost town” and “Shipwreck Rock.”
So, here’s what we have to look forward to over the next two days. Easy Peasy!
Despite knowing that we’ll just be staring out the windshield at boring interstate roads for the next two days, we’re still so excited to keep this roadtrip going. Time to hop in the truck and leave Madison, FL, head to Hattiesburg, MS and eventually on to Hot Springs Village, AR. On paper, (ok, that sounds old fashioned. On google maps) it looks like an easy cruise. Plus we’ve made this drive several times to see Ben’s folks, aka Noni and Pop-Pop. Just under 800 miles. One right turn. As long as traffic behaves and the weather holds, this should be a straightforward drive.
We always have to keep in mind that we’re driving a decent size truck and more importantly, we are pulling a 33 foot long, eight foot wide, pleasantly rotund, silver tube weighing in at 13,000+ lbs, with a tendency towards being pushed around a little when big trucks pass (LOL Ben is “weight” shaming the Airstream again. Ugh! He just can’t let these few extra pounds GO).
There is a lot to pay attention to, as it takes a lot longer to react to fast changing conditions or to traffic patterns or poorly marked exits. So, we’ve learned to work well together in the front seat of truck. Ben focuses, no blinking, white knuckled on the steering wheel, while Ann carefully watches the routes on both Waze and Google to make sure we don’t end up in a situation that includes sitting at a complete stop on the interstate for hours. That is zero fun and we’ll avoid that situation if it means taking the backroads for a bit to avoid whatever tragedy has occurred on our regularly scheduled route. Ann also has a very important role as “drive attendant,” delivering waters and adult style lunchables, one cracker at a time. That’s right! I’m no passenger princess and no naps for me, unless I’m truck-sick, which does happen on the really bad roads.
Since we have a 60 gallon fuel tank on our truck, it is never low fuel that causes us to stop at a gas station. (Yeah, that’s Ben referring to me having to stop about every hour because I have nervous tummy when we travel. Very nervous! I’m much happier, now that we carry a bathroom behind us!).
The point is that these days are looooong days. You can hammer along at 70 mph for hours non stop (GI tract willing, of course) and barely feel like you are getting there. Our little spot on the map doesn’t seem to move very quickly, and the little WAZE app countdown moves very slowly.
Ben’s grandfather always used to say “Don’t wish your life away”, and he was right.
So, rather than wishing we were “there” already, we instead focused on the neat little towns we blew through or by, enjoyed seeing primarily rural America life, southern crop progress, slowly growing junk collections in familiar small town yards (oh, that dude with nineteen rotted out school busses and six old station wagons got a new junk truck! Good for him! I bet his wife was pissed!), and we also enjoyed the green early summer scenery.
All while quietly side-eyeing the waze countdown and calling out milestones indicating that we were getting closer to the end of the daily drive.
We slowly drove out of the rain in the panhandle and made our main turn for the trip, headed N/NW up into MS. The dogs were thrilled to be out of the rain. Bailey doesn’t have very good hair days in the rain. YIKES! She’s our 14 year old, hot mess!
We (finally) arrived at Hattiesburg, MS, for our second night on the road and our last stop before reaching Hot Springs Village, AR and home turf.
Fun fact: Hattiesburg / Okatoma KOA is very first KOA at which we stayed back in 2023 when Ben retired and we took our first big trip. We just keep coming back.
Apparently, about 7-8 years ago, the current owner and operator bought what was generally considered a bit of a dumpy campground, and they turned it into a quiet, clean, well organized, well-maintained, and reasonably priced campground.
We really enjoy staying there when we pass through, and we recommend it to anyone!
Our larger dog, Charlie, hates it.
Apparently, Charlie is convinced that the tame and mostly docile local geese and ducks, are, in fact, attack geese and ducks. We have stayed at this campground probably close to a dozen times, and every time, the geese and ducks have been quite tame and harmless, but try explaining that to a dog with birding representing maybe 1% in his genetics. Thankfully, the balance of his genetic makeup is 99% wuss, so Charlie is mostly interested in staying the heck away from anything deemed scary. Or unknown. Or loud. Like, for instance, attack geese and ducks.
So, our evening and morning walks around the lake are usually at near record speed.
Uneventful evening and night spent recovering from a long day of not blinking, we broke camp in the morning and headed off toward Hot Springs Village to visit Noni and Pop-Pop for a few days and to fix anything that needed fixing either at their place or in the airstream.
Not only do we have Airstream Fat Camp coming up, we also traversed some of the nastiest roads around Jackson, MS. Potholes GALORE and wildly undulating road surfaces that really play havoc on a truck and trailer combo. While the truck is dropping down the swale in the concrete, the rear of the trailer rapidly is going up. And vice versa on the next swale. We watched the poor rear end of the trailer bobbing and dipping nearly two feet at times over the wild and poorly maintained concrete stretch of I-20. We were duped because this stretch of I-20 was NOT on the 2026 list of worst roads. Holy smokes, I’m nominating it now!
There is a ton of fastening, bungie-cording, shelf-shimming, and cabinet rebalancing that needs to happen while we are parked for a few days. We know it’s bad when the salt and pepper from the cabinet above the stove ends up at the rear of the Airstream, in the bathroom, at the base of the potty. Baaaaaarrrrrrffffff! Food stuff does not belong in the bathroom.
The being said, we drove the next 400 miles, still not blinking, on thankfully less bumpy roads, all the way to Hot Springs Village, AR. We parked the bug-covered, OVERWEIGHT, minor repair needing Airstream at the very clean little campground in the village, and headed to catch up with Ben’s folks.
We’ll be staying in HSV for a few days, cleaning out useless junk that doesn’t need to be with us, before loading up again (Don’t tell the Noni and Pop-pop, but they’re about to have a closet with a bunch of extra crap in it, until our return, next month). Then we’ll be saying goodbye to the dogs for a few weeks, and beginning our push towards SW Utah. We’ll be on I-40 for three solid days, so we’ll need to get the airstream stuff figured out and get some rest in anticipation of some long days on the road (Ugh, I just know during Airstream Fat Camp I’m going to lose my 5 extra coats, my flannel sheets, my extra comforter, my heated blanket and I WILL freeze to death in the mountains!).
TaterTotTales 