I guess I’m a little behind on sharing photos with y’all—back in early November, Erica and I took an early-holidays trip down to Vicksburg to visit Tricia and go to the Mistletoe Market in Jackson.

When we were looking at booking a hotel, I asked Erica if there were any bed and breakfasts in town. She laughed—nearly every antebellum house in Vicksburg was now a B&B, so our choices would be endless. We ended up booking a room at the Duff Green Mansion. The Mansion is, of course, haunted and a walking ghost tour showed up just as we were checking in so that the most monotonous-voiced ghost tour guide I’ve ever heard could remind us of all the death and bloodshed the place had seen. But fortunately the rooms are completely new spaces down in the basement of the place, and I don’t think the ghosts could find their way down there.

The Mistletoe Market was a lot of fun, and we also took a tour of the Vicksburg Military Park. Lots of people tour the Park with some sort of guide who tells them all about the history of the Siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War. We had something better—Tricia told us all the spots where local teenagers would sneak to make out, and the place where Christopher saw a ghost cow.

In an astonishing coincidence, Shannon, who now lives in Oregon, was accompanying a tour group on a riverboat tour of the Mississippi and was going to be passing through Vicksburg during our very short visit.

Did I mention it was a super-short visit? Well, I took off for 24 hours of it and drove over to New Orleans with Erica’s oldest friend Melissa’s husband Grady to take in a Saints Game. Super thanks to Grady’s friends Mark and Bethany who hosted us for the night. It was such a short visit that I didn’t eat anything inside the city that wasn’t in the Superdome. That, my friends, is an unusual circumstance.

This is a cloud that looks like a snake’s head.