A Time Zone Closer to Home - Florida - Alabama - Mississippi -Louisiana - Texas

Sometimes when I'm moving closer to home a way to measure how close I'm getting is to take note of how many more time zones I need to cross before I get home. Staying in Florida we were in the furthest time zone east of home, or 3 time zones away. Yesterday we moved through a time zone in the panhandle of Florida; our next time zone crossing will be tomorrow when we enter Mountain time as we move from Texas to New Mexico, then we're only one time zone away from home.

Yesterday we spent Wednesday night in Lawrence, LA; the highlight of the day and of the night was our authentic Cajun meal at Prejeans. As you enter the restaurant you can't help but notice the 14 ft stuffed alligator near the hostess station; wow, can you imagine catching this guy?:

We had an authentic Cajun meal complete with great Cajun music; the only problem for this Yankee is that with all the Cajun spice, it was hard to tell the alligator from the crawfish or visa versa. The duck gumbo was really good and the homemade rolls were yummy.

We're spending a lot of time in the car now, but we try to do something of interest along the way. We ended Friday in Dallas and visited the museum for the John Kennedy assassination. The museum is on the sixth floor of the building where Oswald stood when he shot the president. It's a very eerie place to be since little has changed as far as being able to see what Oswald saw that day and from almost the exact location. (you can't actually stand where he did, but you can stand very close to it).

Once outside we walked the route of the motorcade and looked back up at the window. There are X's painted in the street where the bullets hit the president. On the sidewalk was a news crew and two older gentlemen. Later we were eating dinner and there was a report that came on CNN about how there is now a new book written by two secret service agents who were with Kennedy that day. I believe now those were the gentlemen I saw on the sidewalk with the news crew. Very serendipitous when you consider the 47th anniversary of the event is on Monday! On Monday a new section of the museum will be opened on the 7th floor. If you were alive I bet you remember where you were that day; I was in 5th grade and the announcement came in the classroom, we were too young to understand all the ramifications that single event would mean to the nation and to the world.

This is map of the route used on that fateful day

This is the building from which the shots were fired

We are trying to stay south for as long as we can to avoid bad weather, but it looks like the bad weather will be unavoidable. We elongated our summer for as long as we could.