Where’s Nico?

Well, we are underway! If you’re reading this within the next few days, the answer to “where’s Nico?” is:

Gulf Islands National Seashore!

It’s been quite a few weeks here in Nico’s world. I officially retired on March 8th – retiring is awesome, but the folks I had a chance to work with over the years were pretty awesome too. After my department gave me a nice sendoff during the week, I had a retirement party on March 9th at a local brewery called Border Brewing, where I’ve slung beers about once a week over the past nine years. The party was a lot of fun and gave me a chance to catch up with several folks I’ve gotten to know over the years. Also, I used to play in a local cover band, and we reunited to do a ‘final show’* at the party.

* Final show before the inevitable acrimonious split up, substance abuse issues, heavy litigation, VH1 Where Are They Now special, and cash grab reunion tour.

If you’ve never played in a band and think it sounds fun – you are right! And I definitely recommend you get some buddies together and come up with a good band name and give it a whirl. Talent is optional – it would have been great if we had that, but my band had a really fun run over the years despite our lack of it.

Anyway, on March 10th, we hopped in the truck and hit the road.

Here’s the “before” pic. I may look a bit more Unibomber-meets-Willie Nelson by the “after” pic. The first day, we drove down to Table Rock State Park, where a good friend from an old job, Bruce, volunteers as a camp host with his wife Gail. We spent three great days down there, biking and hiking and having a cocktail or two with our hosts.

From Table Rock, we decided to head farther south. I titled this blog post ‘We’re on the Road to Nowhere’ because one of the great things about this trip is that we don’t have to be anywhere at any specific time ever again, other than early bird specials and colonoscopies! We have a few general goals, but we get to call an option any time we want. In fairness, I also named this blog post as I did because we can all use a little more Talking Heads in our lives.

After a wonderful stay at Table Rock, we decided to head down to coastal Mississippi, where Kristen had grown up. It was a two day drive, so we broke it up with an overnight at Valentine Lake in Kisatchie National Forest. We didn’t get a lot of time there, but it was very pretty and we saw the first gator of our trip, right on the edge of our campground.

Nico was rather disinterested in the gator, but I’m guessing the gator would have been plenty interested in Nico had the opportunity arisen for them to meet up a bit closer.

The next day, we drove down to Gulf Islands National Seashore, by Ocean Springs, where we’ve been for the past few days. We LOVE a good storm, and we got our wish as we were making the drive down. It poured buckets down on us! But by the time we arrived, the rain had abated, and the next day was a gorgeous sunny day. We took full advantage of it, hiking and biking around the area. Nico is quite a fan of bike riding – he views himself as the Captain Kirk of the effort, with me being Scotty – constantly trying to get me to get the engines going a bit quicker. As you can tell from his face, he’s not always a benevolent taskmaster…

But he got a bit happier when we got to the hiking trails.

Later in the day, we took Nico to the beach. He had never encountered a beach before, and he found it pretty magical. It was awesome to watch him run up and down the shore and roll around in the sand.

Anyway, we now find ourselves one week into our six month adventure, and it’s been everything we were hoping for so far!

– Ken 3/17/24