May 2nd

Spent the night in Pensacola last night and awoke to overcast skies, high humidity, and temperature in the 70s. Since Pensacola is the home of the Naval Air Museum, we decided to see it before we left town. The museum is loaded with antique planes going back to WWI. They also had a static display of planes outside, but we wanted to get on the road for New Orleans. It was certainly a place to visit though. Can't imagine how they ever managed to acquire all those planes.

New Orleans is only about 230 miles from Pensacola, but I managed to get a little lost going from the museum to Interstate 10. Sheila was on the cell phone making reservations in New Orleans for tonight and tomorrow night and she hit the mute button on the radio so she could hear the hotel operator. The GPS voice shouldn't have been affected by the mute button, but it was, and we could barely hear the instructions. It finally straightened out and off we went.



We haven't hit the highway construction delays, other than those going from Homestead, FL, to Key West, on this trip like we hit last year in the Corvette. We have hit work areas, but no delays. Fortunately, we haven't seen any accidents while we've been traveling this year. There are certainly a lot of crosses and markers on the highways where people have lost their lives in traffic accidents however.

We have also seen a lot of road kills along the roads ranging fron the usual "wonder what that was" to a turtle the size of an Army helmet, armadillos, etc., but the biggest surprise was seeing an alligator about 4 feet long that had tried to cross Interstate 10 in Louisiana. Yuck! As luck would have it, I had alligator as an appetizer tonight. I will say, it was some of the most delicious mystery meat I have ever had.

Hit light to heavy rain about 100 miles from New Orleans, but just overcast when we checked into the hotel. Took a little walk around before we unpacked the car and got caught in light rain and were slightly wet when we got back to the hotel. We dried out, I got the umbrellas out of the car, and we walked around looking for a place to eat. Of course, it barely rained then, but since we got back to our room, if we had been doing our "tourist thing", we would have been caught in a major thunderstorm. K