Sunday, November 1st, 2026

One of the challenges with travel is that you are not home. And even if you can’t do much, even if you were there, managing the stress of a major weather situation remotely isn’t easy. For the second time in a week our town is likely to experience major flooding. The last time our property had some damage, but no where near what many friends and neighbors have experienced. Many haven’t even been able to start the clean up from the first flood. It feels like we should be there. But we are not there, we have started into the heavy travel part of our lives. It is something we need to get use to, this split brain between what is happening at home and what is happening where we currently are at in the world.

We had a short ride from Clarksdale to Memphis, Tenessee yesterday. Since we had time before we could check into our next AirBnB, we took the Old Highway 61 that parallels the newer Highway 61. Even though our new route didn’t have much in the way of turns, it was much better to be on slower roads. And it gave us a chance to ride through towns that you would never see from the highway. Tunica Mississippi was one of the small towns we rode through. It has a well maintained main street, and felt more alive then most of the other towns we have rode through of a similar size. We were met with stares as we rode through. I didn’t get the sense that we were not welcome, more that they don’t often get people who leave the highways to see their home town. Like most of the United States, the highway system has enabled speed and efficenicy but at the cost to communities that the highways bypass.