Trips for YouTube Part 3 (and yes, STILL no vids!)

#4 - The one that partially got away and has a bit of a backstory...

It happens to every YouTuber, you film a video and you lose the footage. Well, my excuse isn't that good and I still haven't posted anything to YouTube yet (but we'll get to that). This trip wasn't like any of my others...it wasn't planned, I decided last minute not to go, then ended up going anyway, I ended up adding more stops...stops that were bad for me (and I knew it). It was a total cluster-fudge and, as per usual, it's a LONG story!

The first part of the trip was good. When I was a baby, for at least the second year of my life we lived in a tiny town in Southeast Arkansas called Stuttgart. My birth parents were still married and, even though you aren't supposed to have memories from that age of life, I do...two to be specific. One involves our car breaking down and we had to walk home along the railroad tracks. I remember my parents fighting (my dad blamed my mom), but I also remember riding on my dad's shoulders (because I was too small to walk, let alone walk along the tracks. As they fought, it was if my dad and I were in this whole other space, just having a total blast! It was a very weird situation, but I was remember this with the memory of an Autistic infant, so who knows the real story...neither parent tells the same story, so my memory is all I have.

For some reason, I decided I wanted to visit Stuttgart, the home of my one happy memory of my parents being married. I wanted to look around and try to find the house we lived in as well. Apparently I cried a lot while we lived there (I found out why, but I'll get to that). My father worked in a furniture store that burned down, and I wanted to see if I could find that too, but we are talking like 49 years ago, so I had to text my mother (who, at the time, was on her way to Pennsylvania with my aunt, neither one I'm technically speaking to at this time, so that made the texting conversations "interesting").

I asked where the furniture store was...mother couldn't remember. I asked where our house was, she could only remember it was a block away. I asked her the name of the furniture store...she couldn't remember. I was getting VERY frustrated. But with the help of Google, I found a document that someone wrote on the history of the town that told about the burning of the furniture store (actually there were two that burned due to a gas explosion), so I had names and then she remembered which it was. The paper even gave me the location! Once I Googled it, the lots were still empty, so I could street view the block over and I IMMEDIATELY found the house and I screenshot a pic to my mother, who concurred I had the right house. She told me there was no way I could remember that because I was only 2, but I did, go figure!

This is the point where it gets weird...she reitterated that I cried the entire time we lived there, and it wasn't hard to find out why...next door was a church, and three doors down on the other side was a frickin funeral home! Seriously? Once I told her that, she just texted, "well, makes sense". Gee, thanks for ruining me in my formative years mother, make your spirit sensitive infant child sleep three doors down from dead people!

So, the day of the trip, I chickened out and went back to sleep. I woke up about 8, but I couldn't let it go, so I got up and made myself get ready. By 9:15, I was in the car (I had everything ready to go the night before, so there was only me to get ready). But I sat in the driveway for a while debating what to do. At 10:22 a.m., I left home. That was my first bad move.

Obviously, since I didn't plan this trip out well, I didn't look at the map for days on end like I normally would, so I didn't have a good plan in mind, and I DEFINITELY didn't have the route down. When I realized I was in West Memphis, I was panicking BIG TIME!

For those that don't know, there are two bridges in Memphis that cross the Mississippi River, one that goes over the I40 towards Nashville (we call it the old bridge) and one that goes over I55 towards Jackson (aka the Hernado Desoto...or the new bridge for us old people). Well, the "new bridge", which was built in the late 60's, is now unpassable (and closed) due to a broke beam that makes it structurally unsound. DISASTEROUS to all traffic coming in and out of Memphis, especially since the old bridge (build in the early 50's) can't handle all the traffic. It's been a logistical nightmare ever since since Memphis is a MAJOR transportation hub for land, sea and air, so me heading straight toward that mess scared the life out of me! There is literally no other way to get across the Mississippi other than 100 miles North or 150 miles South.

Luckily, it turned me down the Little Rock exit before the bridges, but not so luckily, every single trucker this side of the Mississippi was also going the same way! It was bumper-to-bumper semi's and I was MISERABLE! I normally prefer interstate driving, but I couldn't stand this, so the first side road that got me to heading South, I took it! Had I studied the map more, there was a MUCH easier way to go. It should have been a two-hour drive. It took me two-hours to get out of West Memphis in mid-day Saturday traffic!

By the time I got to the regular road, I was already a nervous wreck, but I continued on. The scenery was bland, but the further South I went, I started to understand something that I've been complaining about for years about people who make fun of Arkansas...maybe not all of it is like where I live and Arkansas is a little "worse for wear". I'm always very defensive of this state for someone who hates it, but I guess I've never been to the Southeast much. Stuttgart wasn't that bad, but, for the first time ever, I was a bit more scared than I normally am. I found the places I was looking for when I got to Stuttgart and took pictures (and I'll post all those below instead of in my normal format).

I was driving past the house a few too many times, and they were apparently preparing for wedding at the church, so I was attracting attention, so I pulled over and started talking to a man who was staring at me. Yes, let that soak in a bit...I STOPPED AND TALKED TO SOMEONE! I managed to mask my way through it very well, but when I got back in the car, I barely managed to control myself before having a total panic attack. I'm surprised I held it as long as I did!

Now, here is where I screwed up in EVERY sense of the word. I decided to go to West Helena where the next Mississippi River crossing is, mainly to see what the next bridge actually looks like (because I haven't technically ever crossed it to my knowledge, and, I was getting annoying because the news outlets kept calling it the Lula crossing and Lula isn't even close to that bridge and I wanted to prove it to myself and my (future) viewers!

Again, the trip across was fairly uneventful, but the areas kept getting worse and worse. I was definitely out of my element and I knew it. I go through Mississippi ALL the time and have been through most of it, but apparently not much of Midwest Mississippi. When people I work with complained that Mississippi is the state they are most scared of, I never understood that. Now I do. I would go through heavily populated areas and hear very close gunshots, I could feel the unwelcomeness of my presence (and race wasn't a factor...some towns were white, some were mixed and some were black). The poverty level was astonishing and heartbreaking, but I dare not stare, I just kept driving.

But then I made another HUGE mistake...by the time I crossed the Helena bridge, it was pushing 5 p.m. Vicksburg, Mississippi is a place I've been several times and HATED it every single time, but I've NEVER gone alone. It's like Gettysburg and Pigeon Forge had a baby in the poorest part of the South, so it's a HUGE Civil War battleground, memorial, burial ground, on the river, but with tourist attractions all over every square inch of it, but there is still a good chance you could get killed at any moment because of the crime rate. At least Gettysburg is respectful enough to keep the town away from the battleground! I don't know what made me decide to make Vicksburg where I crossed back over the river to this side, but I still dread that decision. I ended up on a street that looked like a mix of Bourbon Street in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, going 5 mph, bumper to bumper, drunk people everywhere, crossing from bar to bar, at 8:45 p.m. I just wanted to go home and couldn't get out!

I don't know how many of you have been to a battleground or cemetery of any kind, but a lot of times the feeling of not being able to escape is often felt, even by those who have no wu-wu vibes by nature. It took me well past dusk to get out of Vicksburg and get across the bridge, only to end up in Louisiana, back into more scary towns that you see on those videos about the worst towns in America. I wanted to go as far as Monroe, LA and cut straight up, but I couldn't take it anymore. I decided to take the worst route possible that would get me back to the interstate in Pine Bluff, then to Little Rock. But again, the night (and my GPS) had other things in store because I ended up going straight through both the middle of both Pine Bluff and Little Rock (as well as North Little Rock)...the latter being at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night! How I didn't get shot is still a miracle!

Needless to say, it almost put me off trips altogether, but I have since taken another one (and that's a WHOLE other story), but there is one more snag in this tale...as I was loading the videos from the trip after this one, which was HUGE and took all my memory cards, I reorganized all my vids, so that, when I get ready to edit, I'll have them all in groups. But then I discovered that, the three memory cards from this trip were the first half, the BAD half, and then the dark going home half where things started to get quiet. Apparently, I forgot to copy over the BAD half! I remember thinking as I was taking pictures, "well, no need to get this, I'll have the video!"...guess that was moot. And since I reused the card, no recovery software will work. Ugh, just ugh. It happens to every YouTuber, and I still haven't become an actual YouTuber yet! More Ugh!

Oh well, it's all over now, so on with the pics! Here's where I started to get really uncomfortable, when the world started to look like this everywhere...

The little Main Street of Stuttgart, the empty lot of the furniture stores, and my parents poor house (in more ways than one)

The HELENA BRIDGE (not LULA) that crosses the Mississippi River

Good thing I'm obsessed with water towers, or I would have completely missed the fact that I drove through the birthplace of Kermit the Frog! I had no clue at the time!

The Vicksburg version of Bourbon Street

Part of a Civil War Cemetery next to a red light with a gas station and a strip mall on the right-hand side

Crossing the Mississippi back onto "my" side...and even this far South, they had signs about the Memphis Bridge being out (and all the way through Little Rock as well)

Took this right before I heard a gunshot...I was gonna stop because I didn't think anyone was around and I liked the dichotomy of the newish Chase sign and the dilapidated building, I was apparently wrong about the alone part because I heard another gunshot just as I got past it.

If I didn't need to use the bathroom so bad, I wouldn't have stopped, but I have to say, I don't think I have ever been so happy to see this sign in my ENTIRE life, and I still hadn't gone through Pine Bluff and Little Rock yet! But alas, this was also the end of the pics (because I thought I would have plenty of video).

And that's it! Trip #4, the one that almost stopped them all! But wait for it, there is a trip #5 and it was HUGE! I really need to learn to edit videos, but now I have an issue with my old Lightroom not working anymore, so I also can't edit the pictures from that trip (hence the delay with posting this trip). I'll figure it out if I have to pull out my old Sony laptop! Which format do you guys prefer? Pictures with the story, or afterwards? Let me know!