Bear-ly Keeping ahead of Disaster

We’re just past the midway mark of our year-long journey and we’ve been having a great time without any major incidents to date.  But upon reflection, it seems like we’ve been just a few steps ahead of calamity on several occasions since entering the southern US.  We were in the Great Smoky Mountains (as well as Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge), Tennessee a couple of weeks before extensive wildfires caused 14 deaths and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses.  We were in Montgomery, Alabama two days prior to a dozen tornados that ripped a massive path of destruction through the central part of the state.  We decided to forego Pensacola, Florida and instead travelled to the Gulf Shores of Mississippi only to discover that the campgrounds in Pensacola had been evacuated the previous day due to exceptionally high winds and storms.  And we were in western Louisiana just hours before torrential rains caused flash flooding around the state park we had been camping in.

In other words, we’ve been pretty lucky.  That, or like a Napoleonic march, we’ve been leaving a ‘scorched earth’ (literally) path of destruction in our wake [and Papa Bear is still a bit worried about a voodoo doll he picked up in New Orleans who’s head fell off].  Hopefully that’s not the case.  But if this trend continues, the distance between us and catastrophe is seemingly shrinking.  So while we’ve been successfully cheating Mother Nature’s fury for the past month, in case this blog goes dark for any period of time, you’ll know our luck ran out.

The next weather event in the forecast is for freezing temperatures in Texas (we’ve just arrived in Galveston).  But as hearty Canucks, we should be able to handle a bit of cold weather.  Our main preoccupation now is trying to get that damn Glen Campbell song out of our heads…