I followed the road right next the Gulf until I ran out of Mississippi. As usual I angled around on the side roads trying to avoid the interstate, and I got the good and the bad of it today.
On the good side, I followed a bumpy little county road around the corner of a giant sugarcane field, and suddenly I was driving past the prettiest little stretch of waterside houses you ever saw. The bayou was out back, most of ’em had a boat or two tied up next to the house, which was on stilts; most had a screen-in porch that ran the length of the house, a little grass out front, and a little drainage canal and sugarcane across the street. No other streets, not even an houses on the other side of the street, just a very long, skinny neighborhood. downright picturesque.
Then for the bad. At Slidell I realized that I had run of out places to get food for the night. I continued my quest for the gulf seafood experience and stopped at a seafood shack, but on Friday evening they were out of everything prepared, except for one interesting item sitting all by itself that turned out to be a stuffed artichoke – not even seafood at all! I bought it anyway and that was all the dinner i would need as it turned out.
But I had my usual fear of famine, so I also stopped at the Winn Dixie, to stock up on whatever interesting things the deli offered, which will I guess be tomorrow’s meal.
In that little bit of time traffic went completely bad. It was normal when I went in, and full Friday night rush hour hell – country edition – when I came out. When those two-lane roads back up in the bayous, there’s not much to do about it – no side road shortcuts because there might not be another bridge over the bayou for 5-10 miles. So my last few precious bits of daylight slipped away looking at the taillights of a schoolbus for about 11 miles. aaarrhh again.
Fontainebleu State CG was listed as $12 even on their own damn web site, but really cost $22 – how is that possible? Well, the cost of the sites is now $16, and there is a mandatory $6 reservation fee, even when you don’t have a reservation! Great huh? I was really, really in a snit about this reservation fee when I didn’t make a reservation thing, and I was probably not the most enjoyable camper they registered that night. All you small government types who love outsourcing, this is what you get – a corporation whose mission is to make a profit off of you, rather than a sleepy government agency who’s mission is to provide you a campsite.
I found my site, parked, and walked straight to the beach – we are right on Lake Pontchartrain. The sun was long gone, but there was about ten minutes of pinks and magentas shading into deep reds, the tail end a raging sunset. Once there I could see the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway across the water, not that far really. The setup here started making more sense. Even though this seems like the deep woods, we are very close to New Orleans, about eight miles off of the northern end of the causeway. It’s Friday night and this would be option #1 for families looking to get a little use out of that RV they bought in a quick weekend getaway. And sure enough the place is quite crowded with a lot of sort of annoying suburban kids loose in the woods into the wee hours of the night.
Then I discovered that there was camp-wide wifi, so my heart warmed to the place a little bit. It turned out to be heavily censored wifi – I couldn’t FTP, some sites were blocked and some weren’t, according to no logic that I could discern. My theory is that they were piggybacking on the official state provider – that is, wifi that state employees would use at work which would be censored to keep them from time-wasters. Which was too bad, because I’m all about time-wasting when spending the evening in my little 6×10′ space!
Saturday
This is a very busy place on an 80 degree pre-Christmas Saturday. Birthday party at the pavilion, kids swimming in the Lake, an entire festival of what looked like former military types getting together, maybe 8-10 tents of men and boys having a manly time together.
I discovered a little hike on the side that would have been awesome last night at sunset; a boardwalk out over their own little piece of swamp – so many different flavors of swamp around here. This particular swamp was very … swampy … I can’t really describe it, and regrettably I didn’t take my camera so I can’t show you either, but it had birds I’d never seem before and a peculiar stillness and humidity that was really neat. I saw a new (to me) bird here; I can’t remember the name but I’m including this useless observation to remind myself to add the name whenever I remember it.
I did eventually leave, and went looking for wifi in Mandeville. I failed on that, but I did stumble on a really awesome slice of the good life New Orleans style. I often rant about the downsides of weekends when traveling, but here was an upside – this place probably wouldn’t even be open on Tuesday afternoon. The Broken Egg – I got in just before they stopped serving at 2pm. All the staff were (white) kids from the neighborhood, and were uniformly preppie to a degree not seen on the left coast. The busboys all wore polo shirts, and the servers wore Ann Taylor-ish stuff. The busgirls were more functional in apres-field hockey outfits! Food was damn good and very rich. I had some kind of crab omelet that was mostly cream cheese, I think.
Last night’s traffic jam traumatized me so that I wanted to book some miles today, no more back road traffic jams thank you. I got on I-10, for that super-interesting part where the road is on stilts for about 30 miles of the Atchalafya Basin, which is a very wide, very slow-moving river.
I was running out of daylight when I stopped at the large Visitors Center complex right on the other side of the basin. It was closed, but there were a few semis and a couple of giant RVs parked there, apparently holed up for the night. I planned to stop at a walmart about 30 miles away, so why just stop here instead?
Sunday
It worked out awesome! The downside of just parking your ass somewhere is that there’s always the chance you’ll get a tap on the window and have to move. And if that happens at 4am when I’m all snuggled away in my pajamas, that would be annoying.
Anyway, that didn’t happen! The sun came up on Sunday morning, the bipolar weather had swung back from 70’s to 40’s and bitter wind again, but the Atchafalaya Basin Visitors Center was open for business, with fresh coffee brewed and the nice folks chattering away in their thick cajun accents. They can switch to regular american to talk to us visitors, but when they start yakking away at each other, I have no idea what they’re saying.
My plan (in italics because plan is a little too strong a word) had been to blow off the Louisiana bayou country. I’ve been in some version of this half-land half-water ecosystem for about four weeks, from from the Carolina lowlands through the Everglades and the Gulf shore. It’s extremely photogenic and full of life and very interesting, but I’m kinda over it and ready to move on.
But now that I’m here pretty much at ground zero for the whole bayou thing, relaxed and energetic in the morning as opposed to tired and stressed in the afternoon, it’s all looking pretty darned interesting again.
The Atchafalaya Basin was a bay in the Gulf 10,000 years ago and has gradually filled in over the years to be a 40 mile wide slow moving river/swamp. Then in the last 200 years it filled up with cajun people, who eat interesting food and make interesting music, and are about as distinct a subculture as we have here in the US. So my new plan is a little hiking around the swamps and then taking a midday meal at some establishment that shows Sunday football and serves oyster po-boys.
I did exactly this. I have strong memories of this area from eight years ago. So it’s very cool to get another little bite-sized taste of it. There are indeed sketchy looking little roadhouses with drive-through daiquiri windows. Looking back, this would have more punch if I had taken a picture and maybe even ordered a daiquiri, but neither occured to me when I was here on Sunday morning.
I did not quite make it to New Iberia, home of one of my favorite fictional detectives, Dave Robichieux(?), but I did spend some time in St Martinsville, the next town up and the next best thing. It also is built around Bayou Teche, which would be called a river anywhere else, about 60 yds wide, placid looking but actually moving pretty fast and very, very pretty, lined with big houses with wide lawns that go right up to the water. I ended up driving through the poor black part of town on the way out. I think I recall that St Martinsville is the poor black cousin of New Iberia, but I might be making that up. Anyway, it was Sunday afternoon, church was over and everybody was out chatting with the neighbors and walking around the ‘hood. very pleasant in an old-school kind of way. … except for the car full of banger-lookin dudes giving me the stinkeye for being in their hood.
Google had identified a likely sports bar in Broussard, so that’s where I went. This place gave out little free beers for every Saints touchdown, and I was there for 21 points worth of a 35-?? victory, so I got a little drunkie. I also had my oyster po’boy, and I think I’ve got that out of my system now. I have memories of good cajun seafood (I just love even typing the words crawfish etouffe), but fried oysters at a crappy restaurant have more in common with crappy fried food everywhere than they do with real, succulent oysters.
After this, I headed north for to plug back in to the I-10 experience. The terrain quickly changed from swampy-flat to dry red dirt-flat, and two exists later I was in cattle country. I got to the end of Louisiana and crossed the Sabine River into east Texas heading for a walmart in refinery-land.
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