Beginning of the Cross Country Adventure - Day 1 and 2 Florida to Louisiana

Here are my two traveling companions, Joan on the left and Vicki on the right.  Vicki was my BFF from high school and Joan is her sister-in-law.  I had mentioned to Vicki during one of her visits that I would like to go back to Yellowstone and she said "Let's do it" and so the plan began.  Joan heard about the trip and as Yellowstone was on her bucket list, she joined us.  Both Joan and Vicki live in central Florida.  We began the planning almost  a year ago and got serious in January when I booked my plane trip and hotel reservations at Yellowstone as we knew it was a popular destination.  We got a US map and started planning stops.  Hotel reservations were made for the "difficult" places where we knew we wanted to be on certain dates. 

The above picture was taken at a Florida at a state park just north of Crystal River where we had a picnic lunch.  We tried to stop for picnic lunches as often as we could.  We also tried to stay on scenic routes rather than interstates wherever it made sense.  This day we had chosen to take Rt. 19 north instead of Rt. 75.  We then got on Rt. 10 which we took to Pensacola which was our first nighttime stop.  There we met up with my college boyfriend and celebrated the 50th anniversary of our breakup!  Delightful to meet his wife and discover how similar our career paths were despite strikingly different college majors!

At the Welcome Center into Mississippi, we saw these fantastic tree sculptures by Marvin Miller and his son,  They were carved out of Live Oaks that were killed by Katrina (I believe that was the hurricane).  We saw these many places along the way.

Another view I believe.

A closeup of one of the birds.  Later in our journeys we saw turtles and other sea life carved into the trees.

Several more birds! 

We stopped for lunch a bit later on in Mississippi in a small state park.  I spotted this beautiful Red-headed Woodpecker.  My claim to fame after this lunch was managing to almost get a traffic ticket for speeding!!  Our GPS kept sending us down dirt roads that went nowhere and when I got back to the main road I hadn't noticed the speed limits as I had not been driving before lunch,  Luckily the cop had pity on the three old ladies and didn't give me a ticket.  Jokingly the day before we had agreed that the cost of tickets would be borne by the offender!!  I think he realized I was telling the truth when he noted that our GPS was set to send us down another dirt road to nowhere and he corrected us!!

We spent the second night in Lafayette Louisiana as we were taking a swamp tour first thing the next morning.  We had booked it over the internet.