Big Biloxi was rather pedestrian as campgrounds go. There was a mandatory $6 surcharge for electrical hookup, to pay for having the whole place re-wired after Hurricane Katrina. I think the point of this place is to provide old folks escaping from the snow a place to park the trailer and drive 20 miles to spend money in the casinos and plant their pale asses on the beach for a few days. There was certainly nothing noticeably attractive about the campground itself.
I explored a little in the morning since I hadn’t seen much of it arriving in the dark last night. There turned out to be a muddy little creek right behind it – there’s muddy little creeks (aka bayous) pretty much everywhere down here. As often happens, some dude came over to talk about the van. The older 5-cylinder Sprinters seem to get 21-22 mpg if these guys are to be believed. I get 18.5-ish, and I have the spreadsheet to prove it! This guy had a 3500 (the longer one, like a Fedex truck) completely made over by some RV company, that he said got like 12 mpg.
I had mailed my friend Annie, to see if she had time for coffee or something. Turns out she didn’t have to work til 2pm, so we made a plan and after a little confusion because the place we were meeting was out of business (my wifi app lied again!), we found a proper little southern coffee house and had a nice lunch catching up on the last … 6-8 years (yikes!) of separate lives. Down here a woman still puts on makeup and a nice outfit to be seen in public, even in the afternoon.
As I think I mentioned, I’ve developed an obsessive desire to see the Warriors game on TNT tonight, and to that end I developed plan to hang around the area here today and watch the game in a casino bar tonight.
It was a beautiful 70-degree day. I drove back east along the coast backtracking at 40 mph along the beach the same stretch of coast I covered at 75 mph on the interstate going west twenty miles inland last night. Past the Jefferson Davis mansion, past the miles of vacant lots that used to be fancy beach houses and mansions before Katrina, through Biloxi and it’s 3-4 big casinos (Hard Rock Casino with a 60′ electric guitar out front), across the causeway to Ocean Springs, which is the local artsy fartsy community, all the way to Pascagoula, where I used the library internet for an hour or so, then onward to a little hike in the wildlife refuge I zoomed past last night. At this point I’m only about thirty miles from Dauphin Island where I got off the ferry last night. Then I turned back, used my good ole google map to identify a road on the east side of a bay in Pascagoula where I could watch the sunset over the water, then all the way back to the Island View Casino where Annie makes a living carrying around trays of cocktails.
To my complete astonishment the casino did not get TNT. WTF!!?!? They have some kind of weird satellite package that only gets a couple of ESPNs, and the gambling addict yokels around here are evidently perfectly fine with it. I guess sports betting isn’t their thing. So I asked the security guards to point me to a sports bar.
That worked ok, but my timing was off. I was way too early, this being the east coast for a west coast game and all. There was a Thursday night NFL game which hogged most TVs and the sound, and the first NBA game was LeBron’s return to Cleveland, so nobody cared a bit about my little ole Warriors game. The joke was on me, after fighting for a TV tuned to my station the place closed at 10, and what with the cameras following Lebron off the floor and almost into the shower, I got to see about three minutes of my game. aarrhhg! The place was pretty mellow, except for the dude at the bar yelling about Sharia Law in his cornpone accent.
But google tells me that there is another sports bar a couple of miles further out on the highway, that stays open til 6AM! My kind of sports bar. Unlike the morgue-like atmosphere at the first place, this place was hoppin! Thursday night Karaoke until 3am! Oh and cigarette smoking allowed inside – yuck. I watched the whole shitty game (W’s sucked), got to Annie’s home about 12:30, ten minutes ahead of her, to the house with four dogs (three big and one little), two kids (2 and 5), and two grownups and as time was to tell, a nasty cold germ just waiting to get me. The bed was real comfortable and I could shut the door all that teeming life.
Friday we went to a seafood place so I could get a little of that local seafood I’ve berating myself for not having eaten so far. Oysters, gumbo, softshell crab po-boy, and marinated crab claws – woo hoo! Everything else was really good, but the po-boy was kind of a FAIL. The crab was small and didn’t have enough flavor or juice to carry the day buried in all that bread … sigh …
Then a little walk on the pier into the Gulf, then at about 2:30 goodby to Annie. She was headed to work and I was headin west again.
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