The hills are alive – Poverty Point Historic State Park, Pioneer, LA

History comes alive as you climb (but not wheelchair) 3,000 years into the past on a towering Indian mound

A system of grassy mounds tell the story of an ancient Indian city that thrived on the banks of the Mississippi a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Poverty Point Historic State Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (and US Historical Monument), one of 22 in the US recognized by the UN cultural body as the most impressive places in the world. The site is particularly interesting because it was a city of hunter-gatherers, when most every other ancient city was made possible by the introduction of farming. The Poverty Pointers were overachievers.

Site of an ancient building.

Panning for relics: This scientist was so cool

We just happened to visit on International Archaeology Day and the center had live demonstrations all day long in ancient fire-starting, toolmaking, archaeology and most unusual, the sling-like weapon called the atlatl. Now the Mab throws atlatl: beware! Rangers, guides and scientists were all super-informative and fun to talk to. There was plenty for kids to do, too.

Atlatl

Making arrow tips

The museum, grounds and sidewalks are all level and easy to use. There is a tram tour Wednesdays – Sundays at 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m., March through October, weather permitting, and it is wheelchair accessible. Though it was a challenge to shoehorn my Permobil F3 (45 inches length including feet) into the available space on the old tram, we made it work and it was well worth it.

The only thing that isn't accessible is the greatest feature in the park: the climb up the wooden steps to the top of the majestic Bird Mound, shaped like a gigantic bird and dominating all the other features in the area. I hear the Acropolis in Athens is now wheelchair accessible, but this is a Louisiana State Park (and a seemingly well-run one at that). But it was wonderful watching Mabster scale the stairs that climbed the length of the tail and spine all the way up to the head of the ceremonial bird, maybe three stories tall.

Like the national parks, UNESCO World Heritage Sites like Poverty Point are awesome destinations, especially if you like history and native cultures.

They stand vigil over the river - Vicksburg National Military Park, Vicksburg, MS

On a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi 60 miles from Poverty Point Historic State Park is the site of one of the nation's most important battles. During the Civil War, the river was the lifeblood of the U.S., and whoever controlled Vicksburg controlled the lower river. Here the river winds like a snake, and the Confederate fort at Vicksburg, perched on a high bluff and stacked with artillery, could obliterate anything going by. Both sides needed Vicksburg.

The Union, led by Ulysses S. Grant, laid siege, pounding the fort with heavy guns. We already know that the Confederates had the artillery to hit back. Both sides dug in and let loose, making hell on earth for weeks on end.

This is going to be a picture-heavy post. That's because there are no words to say it like we seen. In the park you drive a narrow loop a couple miles long. Everywhere you turn you see monuments to the detachments, commanders and the states who fought here.

This batch, the Illinois Monument, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome

The place is hilly and green with moguls: these are the entrenchments and bunkers where the cannons fired from. You drive a long, narrow loop. Only a couple hundred yards over those low, rolling hills you can see the cars of tourists on the other side of the loop. Those cars are in enemy territory. These boys firing the massive iron balls were practically on top of each other. This realization, and the sheer number of dead, are the things that affected me most.

You settle into a somber, respectful silence as the battlefield tells the story more viscerally than all the books and documentaries you've ever seen. Honestly, I would have liked even more help visualizing where the actual walls and other landmarks stood - but the experience is profound.

The visitor center is easily accessible. By itself it did not strike me as a great museum resource, but there the Park Service offers a number of free or cheap resources like guided or self-guided driving tours to do. We spent three hours max, and covered some 80 percent of the park, all from inside the car.

National Park Service: Vicksburg National Military Park

Rollin' on the river - New Madrid Historical Museum, New Madrid, MO

As a kid in Illinois, part of the folklore that got drilled into my head alongside Abraham Lincoln and the Great Chicago Fire was that the biggest earthquake in American history did not take place in San Francisco or anywhere near California, but in southern Illinois - a tremor so strong that it rang bells in Philadelphia and made the Mississippi River run backwards. Later on I found out it was really centered just south of Illinois, in New Madrid, Missouri, and occurred in 1831, but in my mind it was still a monster on a par with Godzilla. The New Madrid earthquake was something I've always wanted to learn more about, especially having driven through the area several times over the past few years. It killed me that there was never enough time to pull over and check out this storied place. But now, with the RV, we can.

New Madrid lies in the bootheel of Missouri, flat river lowland prone to flooding, and it was here that I first saw cotton fields. (The lady at the museum told me how in the days of Big Cotton, one of the growers was so powerful that he nixed his land going over to Arkansas and arranged for it to go to the Show Me State instead, creating that crazy, lazy bootheel hanging there like an appendix, that makes you scratch your head whenever you see it on the map.) Present-day New Madrid has a few thousand people and its own levee on the Mississippi River, which you can see and drive upon in a beautiful river outlook that is also a part of the Trail of Tears, where Cherokee refugees waited in the cold for ferries to bring them across from Tennessee.

Gorgeous Mississippi River overlook on the levee

Less than 100 yards downhill stands the historical museum. It is only two rooms, and then a second floor. No problem getting in with the wheelchair, but there is no elevator to the upstairs so what they do is show you a photo album of the items there. This tiny place really couldn't raise the money for an elevator, I think, plus the woman who showed me the pictures told some pretty good stories that the folks going upstairs weren't hearing. The earthquake exhibits are all on the ground floor. Otherwise everything is flat and no surprises for the chair.

Upstairs

Half of the museum is about the earthquake, and the rest is mostly Civil War and Indian artifacts, plus some 19th-century household and heirloom items that were contributed by the oldest families in
town. It was all interesting, and we spent an hour and half.

If you're interested about the earthquake, it hit during a winter night and turned everyone out shivering in the cold as they endured the aftershocks. There were three quakes stronger than 8.0 on that first night (scientists now lump all three into one rolling terror) and there was a 8.0 earthquake the next day and another in the days following. Each one of them was a monster quake, and then there were hundreds of smaller ones for months afterwards. It changed the course of the river, split open the earth and left features in the landscape still visible today. (At least one of them is doing duty as the friendly neighborhood sand trap at a nearby golf course.) The cool thing is that there is a New Madrid fault to this day, although you can't see it because it's under several feet of caved in earth and sand. But I see a movie coming on here... Paging Tom Cruise and Ben Affleck.

The museum is $5 and definitely worth a visit if you like history. Be sure to check out the Trail of Tears river outlook right up the street.

The mystery of the locked RV wheels

What? We just got this thing!

We started on our latest trip - we've been keeping to one every month since we shelled out for the RV - and man, it was rough going. When we reached the stop sign at the end of our block, I wondered whether or not we had lined up our emergency numbers before we shoved off. (Because they certainly came in handy couple of months ago.) The rig was shuddering as we continued along.

A couple of blocks later we could no longer ignore it and pulled into a warehouse parking lot. We smelled burning as we came to a stop at an empty corner of the lot.

We tried to drive around. We tried to. We found out that the front tires of the trailer were locked. It has four wheels, and the front axle was completely locked. We were literally leaving rubber on the pavement. So we had been dragging our wheels for three whole blocks!

It was a Friday afternoon and we frantically googled and dialed phone numbers before 5 o'clock weekend closing times. We did so for three hours, puzzling over what was wrong and how to get out of this jam. Not only was the trailer screwed, but we had no way of getting it anywhere. That we were ironically so close to home didn't matter, because can you even tow an RV trailer? Thank god it was at least beautiful weather. But time was running out.

Meet the Breakaway Switch

A few of our frantic calls hit pay dirt. AAA came out and could not help us. Time to cancel their extra RV service that we pay for. But we did learn was that it was the breakaway switch on the hitch, where the lanyard had come unplugged. This was courtesy of Winnebago Chicago (over the phone he was gruff but helpful) and Frank from Illinois Tractor and RV Repair who came out to do a field call. Frank said our lanyard wire was too short and so the lanyard probably pulled loose during a tight turn. He pulled out some slack and provided a few other pointers about hooking up the trailer better.

Long shot: Breakaway switch and lanyard with white tag, underneath hitch. 

Close-up: Here you can see the wire lanyard

From below: The lanyard loop is attached to the plug, all fixed now. 

The lanyard runs back from the van, and if it pulls loose it stops the trailer - a safety feature.

Three hours later these newbies were back on the road. This lifestyle's going to be a learning game. Despite the late start we covered the length of Illinois that night and crossed the Mississippi by moonlight, bedding down in the bootheel of Missouri. Old man river won't you keep on rolling.

Roll On

Out on the road, things don't always go as planned...

We took off on a big trip west. It came together quickly. The perfect small travel trailer came on the market, and they don't last long, so we put our money down. It's a toy hauler, meaning the back flips down into a ramp that will be great for the wheelchair, and it's 16 feet long, so it should be OK for us to sleep and eat but still be able to fit in most campgrounds at the national parks which is our goal. The catch is that the toy hauler is all the way on the other side of the country in Arizona, but we've wanted this for a long time, so now the trip is part of our adventure.

The big day comes, and we got a late, late start. We don't travel light: as my health becomes more and more involved, so do the number of suitcases, bags and the like. Stuck with the work as usual, Mab has a hard time planning and packing. What can be packed, and what will still be needed in the morning before we leave? What will we need handy in the car? In the hotel? In the RV? These things frustrate her.

To make things worse, in loading the van, the stacked containers she uses to store the luggage toppled, creating more confusion.

Then when we finally loaded up, the van lift that transfers me from wheelchair to passenger seat had no charge. Sometime during the past week a button had jostled and turned the unit on. So, while we embarked and the lift was charging up, I sat in the back of the van. I'll do this for short trips when it's not worth the hassle of transferring. But being in the back of a cargo van (no windows installed yet) can be a drag, especially during a road trip. The music's garbled, there's no one to talk to and nothing to see. I sit tall, so all I see through the front windows are grass, pavement and sometimes the bottom half of cars and buildings flashing by. So here we are, driving down colorful Route 66, but all I'm getting is Route 33.

But I remembered something Mab has told me about travel, and she's done more than her share. She said that no matter how much you plan, things rarely if ever go exactly according to plan. You've got to be willing to deal with whatever comes up, and roll on to experience your trip. And sure enough, the traveling I've done has gone that way, and so it was today. It's kind of the way you have to be with a disability anyway, willing to roll on.

UPDATE: 48 hours later, we were driving through the desert brush and oil pumps of arid west Texas. We weren't where we were supposed to be: We should have been a couple hundred miles to the north, but we took a wrong turn for Abilene instead of Amarillo, because we were both punchy the night before and they both start with "A." But we rolled on until our newish vehicle with only 15,000 miles on it lost all power on a four-lane interstate. We pulled over on a thin strip of shoulder with loaded oil rigs whipping past on one side, and a steep ditch on the other, so that we were stuck there in 100° heat. Of course it was Sunday afternoon and the roadside services were slow to help.
I have MS, so after two hours in the heat I was seeing Jesus. Jesus was wearing a brown law-enforcement uniform, and turned out to be a sheriff, hallelujah. Big Thanks to him and Nissan Roadside Assistance and to Dale at Westwind Transport of Big Spring, Texas, who towed us to a completely accessible hotel with lovely air-conditioning. Thanks to these guys, the middle of our story has a happy ending.

We were stranded in the hotel until Monday. On Tuesday we lost the room to somebody with reservations. All that day we sat in the lobby, with Hoyer lift and all those bags around us, while we furiously made phone calls to the Nissan warranty garage 100 miles away. (We were waaaay out in nowhere.) It was a little bit exciting where we'd end up.

But long story short, we got the van back and on Tuesday night were back on the road. The rest of the trip was brilliant.

Roll on.