Let me start with a disclaimer: Pedophilia is a horrible thing.

Now that I have your attention, let me continue by saying that sitting in an empty parking lot between the hours of 10 and 11 p.m. with the windows of your car open – while people come out of neighboring stores to stare at you and whisper – is enough to make you feel like a pedophile. This behavior was necessary, however, to get my work done.

After yesterday’s drive out of New Orleans, we pulled into small-town Mississippi, Lucedale, to be exact, and drove around, marveling at the quaintness. The main store had a craft-style depiction of a pumpkin sitting outside. The Church’s Chicken prominently featured a sign touting its support of local churches (‘Church’s for CHURCHES’ was the exact wording) in the form of fried-chicken dinners. All the businesses closed at 5 p.m., ostensibly so all the children could get home in time for a family meal and for hand-holding and group prayer (that last part was an extrapolation, but you get the point).

So when we found a large-ish Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of town, we thought the famous Southern hospitality would be a main selling point. And it was. But they just didn’t have the amenities we needed: they could give me free Macadamia-nut and white-chocolate cookies, they could give me a USA Today crossword, but they couldn’t give me what I needed the most. Internet access. Apparently it was down for the week.

“Y’all will just have to go down the road,” the front desk girl explained. “Take a right, go across the bridge and the train tracks, then take a right at the second stop sign, and you’ll pass the Pizza Hut, and take a left into the little shops there.”

“And … what will I do there?” I asked.

“There’s a little coffee shop that has internet,” she replied. “But he closes at 9, so you can just sit there in the parking lot and turn on your computer. Y’alls have wireless?”

This was Southern hospitality: Sure, you’re completely screwed, but we’re dang sure going to deliver that news in a twangy accent, with a smile.

So there I was, answering e-mail and putting up yesterday’s post at 10:15 p.m., sitting in the empty parking lot of The Hot Spot coffee shop with the windows down. And there came my brush with that pedophilia feeling: I was some big-city creep who just happened to find himself in Lucedale.

Moral of the story: If you can avoid stalking the parking lot of a coffee shop in rural Mississippi while you’re searching for a wi-fi signal, do so at all costs.

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Postscript the first: We put Edna, our fearless Buick LaCrosse, on a ferry across Mobile Bay this afternoon. She was well-behaved, and even served as our air-conditioned oasis on the watery desert, because it is damn hot in the Gulf Shores. We had just visited Fort Morgan, site of where the founder of my fraternal organization met an untimely demise – and permanent infamy – when he became the first Alabaman to lose his life in the Civil War. While you may think that’s actually pretty hip, that this valedictorian from the University of Alabama-turned-preacher also founded the largest fraternal organization in the country and gave his life in the service of what he believed in, his death is a little more … homely.

He fell off a gangplank and drowned.

He wasn’t drunk, as he was a preacher, and he most likely wasn’t in a fight because, remember, he was a preacher – he just fell while boarding the boat. So we took a picture of the sign commemorating his sacrifice and got the hell out of Dodge. Or Gulf Shores, Alabama, as the case may be.