It’s been a few days since my last update, for reasons that will shortly become clear, if the title did not help. I am writing this post in a shitty motel in Fort Myers, Florida. My motel room door has a a sign that lists a human trafficking number, which is not a great sign, and I mean that metaphorically, not literally, although the context works either way.

We last left off in Austin, Texas, where I arrived after a hellish drive across West Texas. Austin itself is supposed to have weather similiar to Houston (where my dad’s side of the family is from, and really the only part of Texas I’ve experienced). So it was very odd when I arrived to find it stifling hot and incredibly dry. I passed a pleasant evening doing laundry (without soap, because the hotel laundry didn’t have any detergent for sale) and having my Doordash delivery driver get hopelessly lost and my food arrived cold. The next morning dawned, pissing rain, with a wave of humidity that makes you break out in a warm sweat the moment you walk outside. Ah, Texas.

I stopped off at a food truck – Rosita’s tacos Al Pastor for some delicious migas tacos (h/t to Bon Appetit for the referral). Austin, of course, is known for a lot of things that have shut down during the pandemic, so after tooling around downtown for a bit, I headed out, stopping briefly at McKinney Falls State Park.

As waterfalls go, not the most impressive, but still nice to see.

From there, it was a quick hop skip and a jump down to Houston suburbs, where, as I think I’ve mentioned, my dad’s side of the family lives. I haven’t seen that side of the family in something like 13 years (as I recall, it was 2008 when I last visited). I caught up with my grandmother, aunt, and uncle, along with a few delightful nieces and nephews who I have never met.

I spent the night at my grandmother’s, and went the next day to visit my grandpa’s grave.

My grandfather, John Cochran Conley, or “Papa” (pronounced “Pawpaw”) had his ashes interred at the Houston National Cemetery after he passed from pancreatic cancer late last year. He was a paratrooper in training at the time the Korean War ended, and did not see combat.

On my trip, I’ve been carrying with me a souvenir baseball my father bought for me on September 4th, 1998 – the date he took me to my first professional baseball game, where the Orioles kicked the shit out of the Mariners, 10-1. I got to spend some quality time talking to both my father and my grandfather, even though they weren’t able to hear it.

I spent some time at my nephew’s birthday party (technically, it wasn’t his birthday, and more technically, he’s not my nephew, he’s my first cousin once removed, but they all addressed me as Uncle Joe and I’m not about to pass up the opportunity for more nieces and nephews, I’m trying to build an army here), and then headed out towards Louisiana.

I rolled merrily out of Houston toward Baton Rouge, filled with mental images of True Detective, oil processing plants, and food that could kill me. Along the way, I kept seeing roadside signs for Whataburger. Now, I’ve never had it, I’ve seen things online about it, and it seems intriguing. After a long day on the road, I grab some shortly before I get to my hotel. It’s tasty! It’s not In-n-Out, but few things are, and they fucked my order up slightly, but these things happen. I finish my dinner, get to my hotel, and collapse, exhausted.

I awaken after an hour or two in extreme pain. Recognizing telltale signs, I sprint into the bathroom and violently throw up everything inside my stomach. Maybe half the first attempt makes it inside the bowl. This pleasant exchange between me and the porcelain god continues for quite some time. Finally it’s over, and I wash out my mouth, drink some water, and crawl back to bed –

PSYCH! back into the bathroom to throw up the water I just drank, a few odds and ends that my stomach had apparently forgotten about – some old pennies and a baby from a king cake I evidently ate when I was a kid, a spare rib, I think at least one of my kidneys – it was all coming out.

The worst part about food poisoning – aside from things just erupting from all your bodily orifices – is the dehydration. Eventually I found myself lying on the bathroom floor, so dehydrated my eyes were drying out, and my mouth tasting like I’d been licking the underside of an old fast food deep fryer. My bottle of water was empty, and the water from the sink tasted and smelled like rotting eggs. Luckily, it’s 2021, and I was able to get on Doordash and order some water, gatorade, and extras delivered directly to my hotel room.

After a few hours sleep, I got up and set off, exhausted, white-knuckling it toward Tallahassee. Neither Mississippi or Alabama are all that interesting to write about, at least not the parts that I drove through, so let’s skip over that and get to Florida.

I quite like Florida, to be honest, which is a bit of a surprise. It has drive-through liquor stores, and when the doors are closed, unlike those fascist fast food restaurants, they allow people to walk up to the drive-through window:

Plus, all of their rest stops are patrolled by armed security.

You’d think that rest stops wouldn’t need that, but this is Florida we’re talking about. After a stop in Mariana, I headed south, eventually landing in Fort Myers.

Next step: feed something to an alligator in the Everglades.