I woke up around 6am to the sound of raindrops on my tent. My first thought was one of panic, thinking that the storms I had outrun from Dallas had caught up to me. While rain is generally just a nuisance, given that I was camping down a dirt road, I was worried that might be stuck and unable to get out of the national forest. As I sat there thinking of what to do, the rain started coming down harder. I tried checking the weather radar on my phone since I still had cell service luckily, and it looked like it was an isolated cell. Things finally calmed down after about 20 minutes, and I popped up and checked on the road. Turns out, the road was actually more of a roadbase/gravel material than just sandy dirt, so the rainwater didn’t make things too muddy. So with that, I packed up my stuff as quick as I could and got out of there, foregoing breakfast in case the rain came again. When I got back to town (Alto, TX), I stopped at subway for a quick breakfast sandwich and gas then got back on the road. I went east and finally made it across the Toledo Bend Reservoir and into Louisiana. As I crossed the state line, I saw a ‘welcome to Louisiana’ sign and a little park, so I decided to stop. I realized I was feeling pretty tired after my abrupt wake up, so I took a nap on a picnic table in the park for close to an hour, then made some tortilla with peanut butter wraps and got back on the road. I pressed on through Louisiana then across the Mississippi River into Mississippi. It was cool getting to see some of the smaller towns and the architecture. It was getting dark, but I kept heading east toward my campground in the Desoto National Forest (http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/mississippi/recreation/camping-cabins/recarea/?recid=28843&actid=29). I had originally planned to make it into west Florida, but my late start meant that I’d have to stop in Mississippi and my dad had found this campground for me and told me about it on the phone. It was seemingly more remote than my first one, though ironically more improved. I drove way off the highway down a road, then turned down another country road. I think I passed maybe 2 or 3 cars in like 30 to 45 minutes, and just a handful of houses. A few more turns onto more and more remote dirt roads and I was there. I saw a truck a few hundred yards away and thought it might be another camper, but it came over to me after a while and turns out it was some 20 somethings swimming in the creek at midnight. They said they don’t usually see people at the campground since it’s so far out there. The campground actually had a bath house with a hot shower which was nice, you just had to push the button every 20 seconds to make water continue coming out.
