Day 3: LaPlace LA -> Natchez MS

The story so far: You have learned from bitter experience that some motor-cars understand the concept of a .m3u playlist file while others do not.  Yes, Chrysler Corporation, I surely do mean you, with your making me spend an entire evening in Calgary renaming files because of that Shitbox Dodge.  Thus preparing one's holibobs listening has already involved:

• generating a playlist of the Stuffs I want to listen to, in the order I want them presented
• using this to copy the music files to a temporary location, where
• SCIENCE can be applied to rename each one with a four-digit prefix to its file name, such that the correct playing order is preserved, before
• copying them to a USB wossname

Which, as we have already seen, does not play nicely with the POB's stereo.  Reformatting the USB wossname and repopulating it didn't work either.  So the next task is this:

• copy all the music files to one's portable telephone; fortunately I had a copy on my laptop
• discover that Android apparently doesn't have a music player built in
• install VLC

VLC finds the music files and helpfully lists them in alphabetical order.  By song title, not by file name.  This is not what I want, but I know that VLC does understand playlists, ergo:

• use mp3tag to generate a playlist with all the tracks in the right order
• copy the playlist to the phone
• persuade the POB to register the presence of the VLC-equipped phone and the associated playlist, and actually start playing the damn' tunes
• but Soft!  Why does the playlist only show 17 songs instead of 1976?
• open the playlist file in notepad++ on the laptop, observe that the 18th song is Ljubav Se Ne Trži by Croatian purveyors of post-rock excellence Daliborovo Granje. Could it be that VLC doesn't like that beastly FOREIGN "ž"?
• move offending title to the end of the playlist
• save it
• copy it to the phone
• poke "refresh" until it shows the revised playlist, which now has 76 tracks
• repeat the above exercise removing:
• another "ž" (Laibach)
• … ellipses (Red Sparowes, Biffy Clyro)
• Japanese characters (Ningen Isu)
• Anything with "#" in the file name (Michael Nyman, Herbal Mixture, The Handsome Family, The Bevis Frond, Iggy & The Stooges)
• Creedence Clearwater Revival's version of Ninety-Nine And A Half.  No idea why this one causes indigestion
• until the phone finally concedes that the playlist contains 1957 songs

This takes many hours and put me in a bad mood, but…

This morning, success!  Bangin' choons ooze from the POB's Harman Kardons as intended.  No more being earwormed by John Fogerty banging on about having been born on the bayou which, as any fule know, he wasn't.  No bayous in Berkeley.  Let us away!

Back onto I-10 eastbound, there to get caught in the tail end of the New Orleans rush hour.  Escape onto LA-23, the Road to Nowhere, which runs parallel to the Mississippi some seventy miles south from Noo Awlins to almost, but not quite, the Gulf of America Mexico.  Not the most exciting road in the world - a mixture of petrochemical plant, trailer homes and RV parks catering to fishing types - but just beyond Venice we find:

A billboard plastered with stickers, Louisiana, Friday

That's the POB in the background, BTW.  It's the southernmost point in Louisiana that can be reached by road and, if you look around, you will not see the Mississippi, because they keep it hidden behind a levee.  In order to see it you must drive your Chevy^[1] to the levee, get out and walk.

Oh look! There it is!

They have to keep it there, y'see, because the area is flatter than a flat thing that's been recently ironed and thus prone to flooding.  Smart locals build their houses on stilts:

Even some of the trailer homes are twenty feet above ground level.  What it was like in these parts when Katrina came to call doesn't bear thinking about.

Because this is a dead end, there's no option but to retrace back to I-10 in New Orleans, and because the river is totally invisible, even from the bridge across it, retrace on I-10 back to Baton Rouge.  I-10 west of New Orleans is also on stilts, which makes the traveller ponder the logic of building a city on a patch of dirt mostly below sea level between an inlet of the Gulf of America Mexico and the continent's largest river.

I left I-10 at Baton Rouge and after some inconsequential other roads reached the Blues Highway.  US-61.  No sign of God, Abraham or Louis the King, but because it runs all the way to Duluth MN^[2], maybe they're up that end.  Down here it's a very quiet dual carriageway through the woods and after the summer we BRITONS have had all this greenery is a bit unexpected.

And so to Natchez, which rhymes with "matches" so as not to be mistaken for a Mexican or something.  It hav a very interesting history if you ae interested in hist. wich few boys are, but we shall go into that tomorrow because I'm here two nights and I'm tired.

1. Other vehicles are available
2. His Bobness was born there; back then Highway 61 went all the way to the Canadian border