Exploring Starkville

Starkville is home to Mississippi State University, the reminders are everywhere.  Flags on houses, good wishes from local businesses, maroon MSU t-shirts on citizens, and

At the public library, there were many paintings on display of the MSU mascot.  For the first time in all our travels, this library does not allow access to Facebook, chat rooms, Ebay, Google's blogger or gmail, and quite a few other websites.  Although Yahoo and Hotmail were accessible. 

Beer must be the beverage of choice because the local grocery stores had a couple of aisles dedicated to refrigerated and non-refrigerated.

Meanwhile, the entire wine department was an end-cap which gave the top shelf to more beer.

One of the main grocery store chains in the south, the name makes me smile everytime.

There was a BIG home game on Thursday against Louisiana State University.

Football is huge in the South.  There is reserved seating at high school games and they are televised live on Friday nights.  This game has been sold out for the past year.

The traffic in and around town began to increase on Wednesday.  Tom warned us not to even go to town on Thursday, but Dick was so curious, he rode his bike.  Yup, lots of traffic!

Tailgate parties on campus, although you had to park quite far away and walk in.

About 6 miles from the campus at the Mississippi Horse Park

many more RVs were gathered.  Dick thought there were mostly Louisiana license plates here.

Petty's BBQ - great food, I must say.  I wish we were going to be here long enough so I could sample the BBQ from every joint in town like The Three Little Pigs or Little Dooey. 

I know they put the barbecues out front so the smell makes to turn in and make a purchase.

At the local Hardee's (outside the midwest and south, it's called Carl's Junior) fast food restaurant, you can order a fried bologna biscuit.  At McDonald's you can get a biscuit with sausage gravy for $1.  At the grocery store, I saw a huge bin filled with the stuff on the blue plate.  They looked like gigantic peanuts, but they were soft and slightly damp.  Were they raw?  Were they bold?  I mean "boiled."  This is an example of the difficulty I have at times understanding what people are saying.  It's English, I know, but my California ears don't always get the Mississippi accent.  To me, "bold" and "boiled" are pronounced alike in the South. 

That's all for now, y'all.