by Dave Knechel

Created on: August 15, 2007

The Road Trip

A little over two years ago, my brother-in-law underwent a bone marrow transplant for Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. (He has been in remission since.) He and my sister were living in Houston, where he was a long term patient at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. They'd been there for quite some time while he underwent chemo and other treatments. She kept asking when I would come to visit, and so I did...

My life-long best friend, Stewart, and I left Orlando in his wife's Chrysler Crossfire. She sold items on ebay and the car had a vanity license plate that said "Ebay Lady". Oh boy, I told him, everybody's going to think we're a bunch of old queens riding around in that tiny little car. We're both in our 50s. HELLO?! Two guys in a Beemer convertible kept a watchful eye on us for a while until I tried to put my arm around Stew and he pushed me away. The nerve.

Along the way, we stopped for the night in Rayne, Louisiana. Did you know that Rayne is the frog capital of the world? I didn't think so. All over town, we saw handicapped frogs getting around on miniature rollers and we couldn't figure out why. "What happened to their legs?" we asked. No one would answer us.

When we were back on the road the next morning, Stewart called his wife. "How was the room?" she asked. She's pretty gullible. He told her that when we got to the hotel, the only thing available was a room with one bed, but, don't worry, he slept above the covers and I was tucked in. But we had to share a pillow. Hmm, I'm pretty sure she started to wonder about the ebay boys.

We drove through the gambling district in Biloxi, hugging the coast. Pretty interesting. Casinos couldn't be built on land, so they all floated on barges. Jefferson Davis had a home there, which is now a museum. A lot of shade trees with Spanish moss. Then we went through Bay St. Louis, which is a very nice little community. He and his wife once thought of buying a home there. From Bay St. Louis we went into the French Quarter of New Orleans and took some pictures. We went to one of the above ground cemeteries with all the mausoleums, St. Louis #1. Eerily interesting. This was just months before Katrina struck, so we got to see a lot of the areas that were destroyed. I'm very glad we had that chance. The rest of the drive was rather boring to look at. Lake Charles to the west is nothing but a giant chemical town. Next door is the town of Sulphur. I looked for Birthdefect on the map. I thought it would be nearby. Cough.

Houston

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