Day Two--on the road

Starting out about 9:30 this morning with the Porter boys and Bonnie. Our first big stop was Mount Pleasant, Texas where a butt load of Porters were buried in the cemetery. Some of the tombstones were so old that we couldn't read them, but I'm confidant that our direct ancestors Reese and Benjamin Porter are buried there. We went to two other cemeteries where NO Porters were buried, so by process of elimination we can assume that at least one of the unreadable graves was GGrandfather or GGGrandfather. We had a movable feast of Richard's famous tuna sandwiches on croissants. He makes the tuna salad with pecans and apples. Very tasty.

After lunch, I drove the rest of the way across Texas and most of Arkansas. While I drove, Richard filled us in on some more details and passed around photos of some of the ancestors. This is everything I expected and more. It's fun and educational at the same time; I do love to multitask. Later in the afternoon, after his nap, Richard took over driving again and Bonnie and I took turns reading aloud from Mother's memoirs. I had encouraged her to write down her life story after she broke her hip. It kept her occupied and we now have four legal tablets full of her story, written in her own hand. It's amazing; she was a good writer, very entertaining and her tales are full of details that none of us had heard.

I spent a good portion of the morning teaching Bonnie to knit. That's a laugh, not her knitting (although that's fairly amusing), but my trying to teach her when I get so distracted and knit when I should purl and can't follow a pattern worth a darn. I'm sure I'm not the best teacher, but she's determined if nothing else.

We stopped in a little town called Pine Bluff for dinner. It was outrageous, a little family owned buffet that featured downhome with a capital DH cooking. They served catfish, fried chicken, crawfish, hushpuppies, pea salad, banana pudding-all homemade. We are in West Memphis tonight, just six miles from the Mississippi River.