Bay St Louis, Waveland, Swamp Pop: Mississippi

25th Feb – 6th March

Our slow easterly trajectory continued and we found ourselves spending the weekend at The Hollywood Casino, Bay St Louis. Most casinos have adjoining hotels and many also have RV parks on site. They are usually pretty good and relatively cheap, subsidised by gambling losses no doubt. Our visit here was a happy stop-gap. At this time of year, as the weather starts to improve, the state park camp grounds, like Fontainebleu where we had just come from, get fully booked up really early for the weekends. We had been far less organised than the weekending locals and found ourselves looking for space at short notice. The casino came up trumps and this had the added benefit of the prospect of an evening’s entertainment. I am partial to feeding $20 into the slot machines with the express purpose of taking more than $20 out. (It’s something learned at my mother’s knee – in my thirties) It is also one of my lesser used methods of accessing dopamine. There’s just something about the noises they make….. I have absolutely no interest in pulling up a chair to a green baize table.

The RV park was quite satisfactory and we picked a site away from the melée in a quite corner near the swampy waterway (which was much nicer than I realise than that sounds). There were no alligators to see but a large number of jumping fish which kept us amused. The nearby hotel and casino were concrete monstrosities in muddy yellow and there was a busy golf course. There were some very impressive rigs in the park and one of our near neighbours made us feel quite insignificant…

It was easy cyling around here and during the day on Saturday we had a great few hours cruising around the waterfront, admiring the houses. Now we were in hurricaine Katrina territory. The massive hurricaine that hit this coast in August 2oo5 caused immense damage to a wide swathe of Gulf coast, but most of the international news that reached our ears was focused around the unparalleled human toll that weighed on the heavily populated New Orleans when the levees broke and flooded the city. This area lost many, many buildings but luckily most people heeded the call to evacuate and the death toll was thankfully quite low considering the force of the beast.

We had Saturday evening in the casino. A cigarette smoke-filled, maskless place that stepped us back in time to 1999, let alone pre-Covid 2019. Its amazing how what once was normal has become so weird. We got a bit dressed up (although this is the land of casual attire so we stood out like a sore thumb by virtue of the fact that we weren’t wearing baseball caps and trainers) and I even put on some make up (well, a lick of mascara-if that counts). Our itinerary for the evening: Play the machines, have a few drinks, have a nice meal in the steak restaurant, listen to the live music, play the machines, home. Our gambling budget was $20 each. Somehow this translated into Nick losing $30 within about 9 minutes and me spending $10 over the course of the whole evening and winning $12. I am very satisfied to have extracted a whole $2 from the casino coffers. It is the principle of the matter. We ate fish in the steak restaurant, which was delicious and the band wasn’t bad either. This was a genuine ‘night out’, a rarity indeed.

Our onward journey from the casino was a mega 9 mile trek to the other side of town. The adjoining town to Bay St Louis is called Waveland. It was originally part of Bay St Louis but granted status as a seperate municipality in 1888. It was badly hit by hurricaine Camile in 1969 but in 2005 it had the misfortune of being ‘ground zero’ for the landfall of hurricaine Katrina. The 125mph winds and 30ft storm surge all but obliterated the town, leaving only a few brick builings partially standing. The rest was match wood. We visited the town’s museum – originally a school house and one of the aforementioned two brick buildings – which documented the destruction of the hurricaine. There were some amazing photos, videos and first person accounts of the destruction. It was very sobering. It is also amazing to realise that everything that we could see now was due to rebuild efforts, even if there are still many ‘ghost plots’ dotted around the place. This is the name that I gave to what was obviously the site of a previous home that had been destroyed, but with the foundation/driveway/gate posts remaining. These quiet spaces where homes once stood sometimes evoking more emotion than the photos of their destruction.

I don’t know why Waveland is called Waveland. This is the Gulf coast so there isn’t really any consistent surf. It was a lovely coastal community, however, and had a lovely beachfront bike/walking path all the way round to Bay St Louis. Waveland is apparently the only city on the gulf that has banned commercial contruction on the waterfront, and this gives it a very relaxed vibe. We were staying in Buccaneer State Park, a park on the site of a parcel of land once owned by Andrew Jackson, 7th US President. It was a big, busy park with lots of weekenders still in situ. Luckily our site was on an outside corner with a bit of space and privacy but lots of sites were cheek-by-jowl with RVs packed in like sardines. It was Sunday before Mardi Gras and people were in party mode. America celebrates a federal holiday called Presidents Day on the third Monday in February. In the Mardi Gras states they swap out this day off for the day of Mardi Gras. Sensible.

Like everything else in this area, the park was obliterated by Katrina and had been rebuilt with all the key buildings: office, laundry, shop being hoisted aloft on stilts. This was a real family orientated park with lots of playgrounds, a wading pool and a waterpark (both shut for the season), a frisbee golf course and the park roads were a general race track for kids marauding around on bikes. We thought that it would be the kids that irritated us here, but instead it was the adults. The music blaring, golf cart dependant, tobacco-chewing & spitting adults. There is definately a difference of attitude between the vacationners/weekenders and the long termers in the RV’ing world. It is mainly to do with the level of noise they create. There is much more ‘hooplah’ with those on holiday. The golfcarts are riduculous. Lot of people bring them purely to drive around the park instead of going for a walk. One chap was golfcart walking his dog. Plenty of people were taking their dogs for a ride. Freaking madness. As for the spitting. Please. No. Its. Gross. Don’t stand there talking to me whilst chewing tobacco then hoik brown disgustingness at my feet. Excuse me whilst I quietly retch.

The joy of our stay here was, suprise, suprise, the bike path . It ran alongside the white sandy beach from near the park entrance all the way round to Bay St Louis, a distance of about 6-7 miles. We did the journey multiple times and enhanced our exercise by seemingly hitting headwinds in both directions every time. How is that fair? On Mardi Gras day itself we found ourselves in downtown Bay St Louis to be confronted by the crowds awaiting the arrival of the parade. This was entirely unplanned and we were kicking ourselves for chosing this day to come for lunch. Surely it would be too busy to find somewhere nice to eat? We needn’t have worried. After we strolled about to soak up the buzz of the building crowds we stopped at a dacquiri shack and got a oversized alco-slushi each. We drank these too quickly whilst sitting on the kerbside, then stood up and realised that our legs didn’t really work. We staggered off to find a place for lunch just as the parade was starting, thus guaranteeing getting a table at a cool waterfront restaurant. We were just finishing up when the parade finished and as the bead festooned hungry hoards arrived, looking for a late lunch. Perfect accidental timing. Our cycle home was slow and steady as we battled the duel handicaps of the ever-present headwind and dacquiri-plus-beer legs. We got there eventually.

Our next weekend involved an EVENT. Not far from where we had been was a town called Kiln, called The Kill for some reason by all locals and those in the know. Whereas Bay St Louis was an important port for the bootleggers of imported illeagal booze during prohibition, The Kill, given its location on large waterways, was an important distribution hub to get this booze to cities such as New Oeleans and up to Chicago. This was also the location of ‘Swamp Pop Music Fest’. A three day extravaganza of who knew what!

I found out about it by pure internet browsing accident and before we knew it we had booked tickets for the whole three days including three nights RV camping on site, the local county fairgrounds. Information was very limited but the weather promised to be good and it was going to be a cultural experience in some shape or form!

The fairgrounds had a large area for RV parking with power and water hook-ups and hardstandings. When I booked I had paid a bit more for a site ‘on the fence’. There was a significant derth of online information and I had assumed that this was going to give us a perimeter spot with a bit of extra space away from the crowds and noise. What it actually meant was a site by the fence on front row of the RV park right next to the music stage. Exactly the opposite of what we wanted. We sucked up the extra cost of the mistake and hastily reorganised a quieter spot with Brandon, the man in charge. It transpired that there was plenty of availability as the festival had been organised far too close to Mardi Gras for it to be well attended. He was overly laid back about the whole thing which led to him accidentally reassigning us one of the few spoken-for sites. It was a particularly nice one with a shady tree, which was obviously why the stern, local lady who pitched up two hours after we were well and truely installed, had specifially requested it. She had arrived in a small convoy of a large motorhome and a truck towing a trailer carrying a golfcart *. She coughed and spluttered, flapped and harumphed, postured and paced. We sat serenely, unmoved by her irritation and immoveable from our camp chairs in the dappled sunshine under our disputed tree and sent her back to Brandon. His problem, not ours. She might be local, but we are British. Top trumps, lady, top trumps. Happily for us all, there was another similar site available with another (smaller) tree and she was mollified. There was not going to an uncomfortable trans-atlantic diplomatic incident after all.

Now true Swamp Pop is a music genre specific to the Arcadiana region of south Louisiana and an adjoining section of southwest Texas. Created in the 1950s by young Cajuns and Creoles, it combines New Orleans–style rhythmn country and western, and traditional French Louisiana musical influences. That was what we thought we were getting. What we actually got was a variety of bog-standard bands playing covers of mediocre country music with the headline act, Doug Stone – seller of 9 million albums- playing his own mediocre country music. It was a very small, very local affair with one small stage, one beer concession selling only three types of light beer, two food trucks, two small bouncy slides for the kids and four portaloos. Glastonbury twasn’t.

The joy of staying on-site was that we could easily wander backwards and forwards to the festival enclosure, using our own loo and opting in and out of procedings depending on how the music sounded. One evening it was too cold to stay more than 30 minutes, so we extracted. One evening we ordered fried catfish and crawfish with chips from one of the food carts and then took it home to eat then couldn’t be bothered to go out again. On the last day there was a Crawfish Boil -a competetive cook-off- and a teeny tiny car show during the day, and the underwhelming Doug Stone in the evening. We endured 45 mins of his durge, then extracted. We knew that this was not our natural environment or our preferred music genre but the locals seemed to enjoy it. Everyone seemed to know each other and every third or fourth number triggered an influx of folk to the front of the crowd (seated in a higgledy-piggledy collection of BYO camp-chairs) and a spontaneous outburst of line dancing. I think they learn it at school.

*Now back to the golfcarts. It was approximately 100m from the back of the RV area to the festival enclosure, so most people were camped closer than that to the gate. At least 1/3 of the 30-40 RVs had brought golfcarts with them to do the ‘journey’. Many of these were obviously people that had no problems with mobility because we saw them dancing. Stern Local Lady amongst them.