Category: Places

14th Mar – 18th Mar 2022

Alabama is our only previously unvisited state of this trip. We had not taken Big Dave and Tin Can to California or Florida before, but we have holidayed in these states in previous years. So, exciting times! Unfortunately our Alabama stay was going to be limited to its short coast, which we knew was not going to give us a typical Alabaman experience. The state is fairly rectangular and nearly land-locked save for a small forked tongue of territory that juts south between Mississippi and the Florida panhandle to reach the coast. This gives it a shipping port, Mobile, the large protected Mobile Bay and a small slice of quite beautiful gulf coast with white sandy beaches and gulf barrier islands. Our selected stop was a place called Gulf Shores and given the timing of our visit we were going to see it at its zenith, Spring Break.

Spring Break is a quintesentially American phenomenon. It is a week-long holiday from school or college that happens on various weeks in March and which has eveolved into a mass exodus of holiday makers from the cooler Northern states to the warmer climes of the Southern beaches. Often this involves car journeys of epic proportions of which ‘ Peking-to-Paris Rally’ competitors would be proud. Some places have become hot-spots for the mass gathering of swimwear-clad, hormone-ravaged, partying college students and thus has become an important calendar date in the academic year. Gulf Shores is one of those hotspots. Spending time here was like going on safari. We wanted to see this spectacle of the great migration for ourselves. *

*Longterm friends, family and any passing aquaintances of my husband may possibly be aware that he spent his gap year on a scholarship exchange to a US private school in Massachusetts. During that time he too, with a friend called Bruce, made the unfathomable automobile pilgramage to the southern shores during a Spring Break week. You may have even heard the tales of driving endurance, brushes with the law, illegal camping, washing at beach showers, gluttony at all-you-can-eat-buffets, schemes to get into nightclubs with fake IDs and of course the alchohol that washed it all down. Even though his destination had been Daytona Beach in Florida, not Gulf Shores in Alabama, it meant that there was a large degree of nostalgia to this part of our journey.

We arrived into Gulf Shores very,very slowly. The traffic was heavy and it seemed that we had been caught in the (sedate) stampede to the sun. The town is a temple to vacations and has a huge number of hotels, holiday apartments, restaurants and bars. It also has the Gulf Shores State Park with a 600 space campsite. This would have been our preferred location to stay but was fully booked until kingdom come. In fact we were very lucky to find any space at all and we had happily secured four nights at a private RV park a couple of miles from the town and beach. We stopped for provisions at Walmart and spotted multiple small herds of the newly arrived party pilgrims doing the same. They were easily identifiable in their small single-sex groups of four or five individuals (a car-load), dressed in beachwear despite it being a little too cool for it and pale-skinned having come from the wintery nothern climes. The groups of girls were busily filling trollies with a variety of foodstuffs, the groups of boys seemed to have no idea what they were doing.

We had three full days here. Unfortunately we lost one day to crappy weather and another to me having an attack of vertigo. The fact that the two things didn’t happen on the same day is quite unfair. Anyway, our last full day here was beautiful and we broke out the bikes to do three days worth of exploring in one day. This also happened to be St Patricks Day. Wearing nothing green, unlike the majority of everyone else out and about that day, we set off. Our campsite was linked to town by a splendid cycle route which carried on to the state park. We cruised around the beautiful park on miles and miles of lovely paved trails and it was great to see so many people out of their cars doing the same thing. There were even communal bikes at various stations around the park that you could just borrow for free. Our rollings took us on a very circuitous route down to the beach where most of the seafront is given over to the concrete sprawl of hotels and condos. The beach itself is quite splendid and I can completely understand why this place became a popular holiday destination to those that live in the chilly North.

Once on the beach we started to see the first signs of drunken merriment, and it wasn’t amongst the youthful Spring Breakers, oh no. There was a very large contingent of ‘Irish-for-a day’, green-clad, silly headgear-wearing gangs of middle aged people – mainly women – who were already wasted and staggering around at 3pm. We sat outside a bar which was subtley decorated in a pink hue (!) and had a couple of re-hydratory cans of beer whilst watching the spectacle of some ‘sober’ ladies trying to pick up their ‘less sober’ friends from the floor. There was much shrieking and giggling and it was quite an amusing show. By now it was reasonably hot and there were quite a few people sunning themselves on the beach but almost no-one in the water. We strolled down to the shore with our beers in hand to check out the sea temperature and discovered why – it was still brass monkeys. Thankfully the beach patrol police officer that we casually sauntered past didn’t clock that we were (quite innocently) violating the NO ALCOHOL ON THE BEACH law, so we escaped getting into trouble. A travel adventure that we could live without.

We continued our prommenade down the beach and soon discovered where all the young folk were hanging out, and it didn’t involve any alcohol. It transpired that Gulf Shores was hosting the Intercollegiate Womens’ Beach Volleyball tournament, and guess where all the boys were?? Very sporting of them to support the (bikini clad) female athletes…. Nick resisted taking any photos. It was for the best.

After a while we decided that we had seen enough of the outside world and headed back to base before the real madness of St Patrick’s Day kicked off. That was also for the best. We had clocked up a respectable 20 miles in the saddle.

On the morning of our leaving day I woke up feeling rotten again. There was a very dicey weather forecast for lots of rain, damaging hail, high winds and a possibility of tornadoes. Our gut reaction was to stay put and see if we could get another night where we were. Better to be stationary in both a storm and an attack of vertigo. This was not an option however. No room at the inn. So we hastily packed up and set off. The weather was on its way and headed in the same direction as we were for about 100 miles until our paths were going to diverge -according to the forecasts. We were about an hour ahead of the front so as long as we kept moving we hopefully would escape the worst of it. We had the radio on and the programs were intermittantly interupted by a frantic sounding warning sirens followed by storm warning alerts. It was a bit unnerving. Very happily, though, we arrived at our next destination without even seeing a speck of rain. We were now in Florida, in the Eastern time zone and my dizziness, for now, had gone. Our next camp was a rough diamond in a gorgeous location. Indian Pass.

6th Mar – 14th Mar 2022

Our next day on the Hampson Gulf Coast Slow Tour took us a whole one hour’s drive eastwards into Mississippi. We were long overdue a laundry day, with no machines at our next place, so we factored in a laundrette stop en route. There is something deeply satisfying about doing all ones washing in one foul swoop and, despite the obvious evils of tumble driers, that includes leaving a laundry with a big folded pile of hot, dry, clean clothes, sheets and towels. Another cheap dopamine fix for me.

Our next stop was a small, genteel town called Ocean Springs, a short bridge-based journey from its better known neighbour, Biloxi. Biloxi’s skyline is moderately blighted by large hotels and monstrous casino buildings but Ocean Springs is still, with the exception of an isolated town-centre brutalist block, a charming collection of late 19th C and early 20th C homes and buildings. It even had an actual old town centre. Marvellous! Add to that a beautiful white sandy beach fronted with many handsome homes, plenty of safe cycle routes, lots of magnificent old oak trees lining many of the roads, a plethora of hostelries and a definate artsy vibe and this was another of our favourite types of place.

Only 3 miles from town is another great park called Davis Bayou Campground which is located within the Gulf Islands National Seashore. This National Park extends along the coast from Mississippi, through Alabama, to the Florida panhandle and includes many of the gulf barrier islands. We had booked eight nights here thus starting the phase of our trip with extended stays in each camp. The weather was improving and it was time to stop dashing about as much. As I write this I realise that my describing our existence as involving anything remotely close to ‘dashing’ is a bit of a stretch, but even we have scope for slowing down. We also are starting to visualise the end of this trip and are now back-planning our stops and journeys to get to our end-point at the right time. We have time to kill.

As the name might suggest, the park was situated on a bayou. Happily the mosquitos weren’t too bad and there were some very sweet little bats that came out at dusk to help with bug control. We saw the first fireflies of our trip and the first moderately sized alligator ‘at large’. It was only about 15m away but we unfortunately have no phographic evidence. Oh, and there was one worryingly confident racoon. This was out in the broad daylight and had absolutely no fear of anything. I had to fend it off with my camp chair. It might have just been used to humans, but there is rabies here and although it was not foaming at the mouth it did look a bit dishevelled. We reported it to the resident ranger. She was going to get maintenance to ‘deal with it’. Sorry dude. You were just a bit too freaky. The most annoying wildlife was the dreaded ‘No-See-Um’. A tiny biting gnat that was small enough to squeeze through our bug screens. There was no escape. They were everywhere. Kept at bay only by a smokey fire, a brisk breeze and 40%, skin-melting DEET spray. They are evil.

We cruised in and out of town several times during our stay here. The weather was mostly lovely and we found a few good places to have lunch. One of the bar/restaurants was owned by a very interesting chap called Ken who had many amusing anecdotes of his work and travels in the Middle East. He managed to match the garulous chit-chat of my beloved and we spent several pleasant hours chewing the fat with him over a pint or two of his own brews. The town’s art credentials are grown on the back of its most famous son, the nationally acclaimed artist Walter Anderson. In his later life he was a recluse and spent much time by himself out on Horn Island, rowing out the 12 miles in his little wooden boat. He would draw and paint the wildlife and landscapes in bright watercolours. The town has a great gallery museum of his life and work, including his old boat and a relocated little studio cottage, the interior of which he entirely decorated with murals. No-one had seen this during his lifetime. The museum is also connected to the original community centre of the town that he also completely decorated internally with murals. He had offered to do this for the town but they weren’t that keen for some reason. He wasn’t that well known then. Eventually they relented and paid him $1 for the commission. He didn’t quite finish the work before his death from lung cancer at the age of 62 in 1965. Now he is famous and the town is pleased as punch with their masterpiece. Suprise, suprise. His work wasn’t really to my taste.

There were a few nice shops in the town but we resisted the urge to buy anything. After four trips we are really maxed out on storage space. We have all that we need and no space to store anything new. Our extra stuff is slowly taking over the back seat of Big Dave and its a ‘one-in-one-out’ situation now with clothes and things. If it ain’t consumable by us (food & drink) or by Big Dave (petrol) then generally we don’t buy it!

This was a week with many strolls and bike rides, many camp fires and meals cooked over the hot coals, many games of cards,one thunderstorm and one dump-station drama. (Nothing that a brisk hose-down couldn’t solve but was a trifle embarrassing). We had a whole day of doing absolutely nothing and one day we had to move campsites. I even managed to get the height-shy Hampson to cycle to the mid-point of the Biloxi Bay bridge. He is very brave.

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.

21st Feb – 25th Feb 2022

Our last morning in Houma was blissfully quiet as the partying, for now, was over. Until next weekend. When they do it all again. But bigger. Busy times for party bus drivers and street cleaners. Our leisurely extraction from the Civic Centre carpark was punctuated, but luckily not obstructed, by a little bit of drama. A chap in a large truck towing a good sized 5th wheel trailer was leaving the carpark at an excessive speed that got our attention. Ten seconds after he passed us there was a crash. The trailer had fallen out of the hitch, smashed the tailgate of the truck and crashed to the tarmac. Whether this was due to ‘user error’ or due to the hitch failing as he claimed, it made for a very bad start to the day for Mr Speedy Gonzales who had been in such a hurry. He had sustained quite a bit of damage that was going to take a lot of time to sort out. Our emotions were equal parts pity and schadenfreude.

Our journey for the day was not that long, but promised to be one of our more interesting ones. New Orleans was on the way, but we had decided many weeks ago that we were not stopping here this time. The city sits on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain, a shallow 630 square mile lake. There are highways that circle the lake on both sides, but 1956 saw the opening of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. This is an epic feat of civil engineering that saw a low slung bridge carrying two lanes of road built right across the middle of the lake from New Orleans to Mandeville, a small north shore town, a distance of 23.8 miles. In 1969 a second parallel bridge was opened, increasing the road to two lanes each way. In the same year it was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s longest bridge over water. In 2011, after the opening of the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in China, Guinness split this catagory into ‘continuous bridge’ and aggregate bridge’, thus allowing the Louisianna behemoth to retain the title of ‘longest continuous bridge over water’. It is quite a weird senasation to drive over it. There is a point midway when land nearly completely disappears from view. Quite amazing. It is a toll bridge, but to ease congestion on the city-side, and on the bridge itself, only to south-bound traffic. Winner, winner for us as we were only taking a one way northbound trip.

Mandeville is another classically arranged American town. It has a historic district with some nice old buildings and boutique business but the majority of the action is located in strip malls and roadside businesses that line the highway that run through the more newly developed areas. We navigated some unusual road layouts involving some counterintuitive traffic flow at junctions and some bizarre, compulsory U-turns and having stocked up on food and firewood we headed to camp. This was at the exotically named Fontainebleu State Park, about 3 miles east of town. Named for the forest of the same name outside Paris it was on the site of a historic sugarcane plantation owned by Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville, founder of the nearby town. There were some crumbling brick ruins of the old sugar mill and lots of the informative signs around the park detailed the lives and struggles of the slaves who had been instrumental in him garnering great wealth from his endeavours. The park had some nice walking trails, and most importantly was located on the Tammany Trace Cycle Trail. This is a 30+ mile. ex-railroad, paved trail that links all the north shore towns which gave us a delightful and easy route to get into town from the park. I just love cycle trails, but you all know that by now.

The camping area of the park was a bit stark and open having lost a lot of trees in the recent hurricaine Ida but happily many of the gorgeous and ancient oak trees in other areas had survived. The well oiled machine of Hampson Camp Set Up was put into action and we were soon installed. Very soon after that we got chatting to our neighbour, Jeff, and instead of having a mid afternoon cup of tea we found ourselves sampling moonshine with him from the tailgate of his truck. This is how we were discovered by his wife, Monica, who arrived back from town in their other car half an hour later. She rolled her eyes and lamented that she couldn’t leave him for 5 minutes without him making friends and getting into deep philosophical discussions about the American Civil War. I can sympathise with her. Jeff and Nick are brothers from a different continent. Jeff’s moustashe is better though.

Monica, Jeff, daughter Ivy and Zeke, the late middle aged German Shepherd who would like to murder all other dogs and all the squirrels if only he could be bothered to move fast enough to catch them, are another family of ‘full timers’. With another daughter now at college they sold up 18 months ago and now call their big 5th wheel home. Ivy, 16, self home schools and joins local swim teams for training wherever they are, Jeff is an sales agent for tools and shower doors and plies his goods nationwide, chatting and charming his way into many business he has contacts with and many that he doesn’t, and Monica picks up the occasional part time job if they are stopped anywhere for long enough, plays tennis as much as she can, and practices her English accent frequently!. They also have a regular gig as ‘camp hosts’ at a camp in Georgia. This is where you can get a free site in exchange for helping manage a camp for a block of time. We clicked with them instantly and spent many hours of the four days that we were here in their company, laughing a lot. Along with sharing a couple of early evening sundowners around our camp fire they also joined us in town for our first crawfish experience.

Chowing down like a hungry labradors on a pile of spicy, flame-red, boiled crawfish, served on a tray with a pile of potatoes and chunks of corn-on-the-cob, with juice and (crawfish) brains smeared around your face and up your arms to your elbows, whilst sat outside at a waterfront restaurant in a light breeze on a hot and humid day, throwing the husks through a hole in the table directly back into the water was the perfect Southern eating experience that we had been hanging out for. It was becoming apparent that that might not exist so we decided that the time was now and settled for the more civilised version in the Mandeville Seafood Market, a casual restaurant on the north side of town.

That morning we cycled into town along the Tammany Trace. It was lovely and warm and we parked up the bikes and wandered around the old part of town and down to the lakefront in the beautiful sunshine. From there we could see the causeway head out across the lake and disappear into the far distance over the horizon. We had arranged to meet Monica and Jeff at the restaurant at 1pm so we got back on the bikes and followed The Trace as it wound its way up to this area of town. Unfortunately we were forced us to take a very long way round due to the lack of a bridge over a swampy ditch and then only way to get to the restaurant involved half a mile on the busy main highway with no shoulder. We arrived on time, but very hot and bothered and glad to be alive!

With sweaty, pink faces we joined our new friends at our table and planned our food attack with help from our next door table neighbours, who seemed to have the lay of the land. A massive serving of ‘mud-bugs’ as they are also known, was procured along with a round of thirst quenching bottles of the local brew and we dug in. Jeez! They are messy, spicy, fiddly and very delicious. We were coached on how to pull off the heads before sucking out the brain juice then pinching out the tail meat, which was mostly quite slim pickings. Despite the massive pile of detritis indicating that we had eaten many, many, many crawfish each, plus the added potatoes, mushrooms and corn that accompanied them, we were all still hungry by the time it was all finished. Nothing that a couple of shared po’boys, cajun fries and the most spectacular portion of onion rings couldn’t fix though. With by now very full tummies we were saved from the prospect of the return cycle journey by loading the bikes into the back of Monica and Jeff’s truck and getting a lift home. It was for the best.

The rest of our time here was filled with walking, another cycle along the Trace, joining the campsite pilgramage to watch sunset over the lake, an explore of the town’s sports complex – an enormous acreage of sports pitches, courts, and indoor gym facilities – and genearal loafing.

We were sad to say our goodbyes to Monica and Jeff but we will find each other again in this large and bonkers land – some day around some campfire, with some sort of drink in hand on some campsite somewhere. And that’s a promise!

18th Feb – 21st Feb 2022

We find ourselves in the heart of Mardi Gras country in peak Mardi Gras season. The purple, green and gold colours, baubles and banners have been increasingly festooning homes, RVs, fences, lamp posts and people as January ended and February has progressed and there is a definite building of the party–time vibe.

Christmas has barely been over a month before Mardi Gras gets going, and before that the halloween decorations are only begrudgingly taken down as Christmas trees and inflatable festive lawn ornaments are seemlessly erected. This country loves a themed party, but in this part of America it loves Mardi Gras best of all. They definitely ‘Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler’.

The town parades that characterise Mardi Gras start on mid-february weekends and build to a crescendo on Mardi Gras day itself. ‘Fat Tuesday’ fell on the 1st of March this year and seems a decidedly more fun way to celebrate the last day before the start of Lent than whipping up a few pancakes, à la Shrove Tuesday.

Most towns will have some sort of parade season and they are of various sizes, themes and levels of professionalism. A lot of the more historic parades are run by Krewes which are Mardi Gras specific members-only clubs that organise and man the floats for each parade. It can be quite ‘closed door’. Like the Masons, but with beads.

We wanted to experience Mardi Gras but had no desire to go anywhere near New Orleans to do it. We hunted for a smaller town that was vaguely on our route that had a weekend of parades where we could easily camp close to the action whilst staying safe. How hard could that be?? Actually, not very hard at all as it worked out. Houma was the place.

Houma, pronounced Homer, strapline ‘Home, Sweet Houma, is only about 35 miles from Morgan City and had exactly what we were looking for. It’s a city of about 33,000 people and still heavily steeped in its Cajun culture, the surrounding swamps and bayous isolating the area from outside influence for much of its history. The Mardi Gras celebrations here are some of the oldest and biggest outside New Orleans, with a much more family friendly, relaxed vibe. The icing on the cake was our discovery that the Houma Civic Centre, a mere 1 mile from the parade route, had RV hook-ups on its massive carpark and so we could stay within walking distance of the action. Perfect!

Our farewells to Trevor and Krista in Morgan City were made easy given the promise that they were going to come to Houma to find us for one of the parades over the weekend. We headed off and cruised to our next stop. Every town has a fairly recent hurricaine story and Houma is no different. Its is very recent, having taken a direct from huricaine Ida last August. It did not pack the punch of Katrina but in some areas many of the roofs of homes are still sporting the waterproof blue temporary fixing as the roofing companies are inundated doing the repairs. Many older, more fragile buildings did not survive and there were many piles of rumble where they once stood. Rebuilding is part of life here.

We found our allocated parking area at the civic centre centre and joined our place amongst numerous fellow RV dwelling Mardi Gras revellers. The organisation of the space allocations seemed very haphazard, bearing no relation to the lines painted on the ground and there were all shapes and sizes of rig parked in a happy jumble of angles and overlaps. Most people had a seperate vehicle and a few visitors vehicles too, giving the place definite drunken Jenga vibe. As long as no one wanted to leave in a hurry it was going to be fine. Our spot was a bit out of the fray but we had no plans to move either.

It turned out that the Civic Centre was the staging area for a lot of parade floats and was also a hub for the ubiquitous party buses. It seems that the standard operating procedure on parade days is that the members of the Krewes for that parade spend ALL DAY, from DAWN until the parade, being driven around the city in converted and decorated decomissioned school buses with the roofs cut out, DRINKING HEAVILY and having a jolly old time to the backdrop of INCREDIBLY LOUD MUSIC. Their route was repeated laps around noteable destinations of the city that featured the Civic Centre front and centre. There was no mercy for campers trying to sleep.

We arrived on Friday afternoon and there were four parades planned for the weekend: Fri and Sat evenings and two on Sun afternoon. We decided that we would go to the Friday eve one and this was our (hideously poorly calculated) plan:

The parade started at the top of town at 6pm, so we estimated that it would get to our part of town at about 7.30pm based on the time it takes to walk the distance. We had a cup of tea and a piece of king cake* at 4.30pm – very sensible pre-hydration and carbs to see us through to our street food dinner later. We set off slowly walking through a moderately tatty, semi-industrialised part of town at 5.15pm, arriving at the fairly deserted parade route by 6pm. There were only a few people around and we were surprised to secure great seats with good parade route views in an, also oddly deserted, Irish bar. We settled in for an hour or two of beers whilst waiting for the parade to arrive. A hour and a half later, nothing had happened. Still not many people had gathered. Was this to be a very poorly attended parade or had we made a naive misjudgement…?

Well it seemed the latter was true. We sat at those seats like Lord and Lady Muck for FOUR HOURS before the parade finally arrived. By that time the place was packed, many beers had been drunk (mostly by my companion), no food had been eaten and many friends had been made. Our English accents cut through the ever increasing chatter of the amassing revellers, marking us out as curious imposters that needed investigating. We met ‘Pork Chop’ (a 25 year old who was fortifying himself with the industrial quantities of vodka redbull that only a heart under the age of thirty can withstand), Gerald (a local who had driven TWO BLOCKS to the bar-I berated him for his laziness), Raymond, apparently known as ‘Brother’ to all (including his mother, apparently. Which is odd…your mother calling you Brother…isn’t it?) There was a girl who let me try on her deely boppers (look it up) and another who had badly twisted her ankle on her first evening out since having a baby 4 months ago to whom I gave up my valuable barstool. It was noisy and crowded. There was not a mask in sight. It was the first time I had felt a strangers breath on my face for nearly 2 years. Somehow it didn’t really matter.

Finally, at about 10pm, the parade arrived. Then stopped. This is normal. This is why it takes so blinking long. We headed outside to soak up the Mardi Gras Energy and score some beads. One float inched by and then I suddenly realised Nick had peaked. I bought him a burger and we weaved our way home. We had had a lot of fun, but the parade had been the least of it. We were denied a sleep-in by the next fleet of music blaring party buses that started their laps at an ungodly time on Saturday morning. Lather, rinse, repeat for the Krewes.

We opted out of Saturday. Completely.

Sunday was another day, by which time we were ready for Mardi Gras again! Perhaps we were not ready at 7am which was when the Krewes collected today’s floats that were parked up at the civic centre accompanied by more VERY LOUD MUSIC. Still no mercy for sleeping campers. There were two back to back parades today with the first one setting off at midday. Trevor and Krista collected us at about 1pm and the four of us headed back to the same area where the Irish pub was and set up camp chairs on the parade route in a small park. We spent a very pleasant three hours sitting in the sun, chatting, eating junk food and drinking the odd daiquari whilst waiting for the equally slow parade to get to us. Eventually it arrived and it was two hours of pure joy!

It is many decades since have I reaped so much dopamine from the acquisition of such piles of plastic junk. They weren’t just throwing beads, they were throwing whole bags of beads. Big beads, small beads, novelty beads. There were soft toys, hats, frisbees, hula hoops, snacks. Krista got a whole pickle in a bag. Nick got some Elton Johns. I even got a pair of boxer shorts. It was loud, it was messy, it was fun. Considering the parade had been going for up to six hours hours by the time it got to us, the Krewes on the floats were still amazingly enthusiastic and nowhere near running out of paraphanalia to lob into the crowd. I possibly can’t say the same for the members of the four or five school marching bands in the parade who were looking decidedly over it by the time they got to us. There were some pink faces and fixed smiles.

At the end of the day we had to make some serious decisions about how much of our haul to keep, what to gift to the (actual) children around us, and what to leave on the roadside (Spoiler alert : the undercrackers didn’t make the cut) The tail-end-charlie float of the parade was a ‘bead recyling’ trailer and there was a mad rush to collect up the excess bags of beads and hurl as many as one could into it. Great idea.

Trevor and Krista dropped us home and we said our goodbyes. Who knows when and where our paths may cross again in the future, but I would love to think that they will. We had had a great Mardi Gras experience and Les Bons Temps had definately Rouler’d.

*King Cake.

This purple, green and gold glitter covered confectionary is an absolute fixed feature of Mardi Gras. They are mostly massive, sold everywhere and appear to be a sort of spiced cake filled with a variety of flavours of sickly sweet goo. There is a plastic baby. The name comes from something to do with the Three Kings and the baby is to signify baby Jesus, I think. Historically the baby was hidden inside the cake and whoever got the baby in their slice was meant to have good luck. In litigation-rife USA the baby is now placed atop the cake and looks disturbingly like it is drowning in a sea of glittery icing. We managed to find a smaller version that was heavier than a neutrino star. We only managed to eat half the cake. The baby is displayed on our pinboard of treasures, for good luck.

11th Feb – 18th Feb 2022

Our next stop was Morgan City and despite its grandiose title it was only a modest sized town of about 12,000 people. Our camp was a town-owned park on the shores of a fairly large lake, Lake Palourde. We were here for a whole week.

This place had all the ingredients for our favourite sort of destination:

A lovely waterfront pitch in a nice park.

It had great views, a small beach, a marina, firepits, lots of mature trees draped in very photogenic Spanish moss, a perimeter walking path and a bazillion squirrels that, due to the locals’ habit of regularly feeding them, were exessively tame. Some of the squirrels were an unusual jet black and were particularly bold. Being approached by a beady eyed ninja squirrel was quite unnerving.

All the above, yet cheap.

We have paid a variety of prices for a variety of campsites, but this one was great value for money, which makes everything rosier!

All of the above, cheap, plus some friendly neighbours.

It’s always great to make meet our fellow campers but these encounters are often fleeting and reasonably superficial. Every now and then we are lucky enough to make a connection with camping neighbours that evolves into a friendship. Here we met a young couple called Trevor and Krista who were newly married and living the full-time RV life with a cat and a very cute dog in tow. They both work remotely from a trailer (caravan) and have embraced the post-covid ideal of a simpler, lighter life. They were very good company. It is also very refreshing to spend time with some youthful people. Usually, with this lifestlye, we are the young’uns, which is saying something!

Our park was an easy and safe 2-3 mile cycle to town.

It is always such a pleasure to be able to get around by bike without having to battle with traffic and I love spending time in places that have invested in cycle and walking trails.

The town was the perfect mix of old, interesting. Small enough to be easily explored, yet big enough to have plenty of amenities.

It was haircut time again and we randomly selected a salon in the picturesque historic part of town. The building had a tiny shopfront and then opened out into an enormous room with a definite ‘industial chic’ vibe. (Apparently properties used to be taxed on the basis of linear footage of street front, hence the ‘Tardis’ design.) Our shearer, Amber, was a font of all knowledge for everything Morgan City, especially the locations of all the best drive thru’ dacquiri shacks. Her answer to the question “What is there to do in Morgan City?” was “Drink”. She didn’t really understand why we were visiting here. After acquiring our more than satisfactory new hair-dos (Compare and contrast our Port Aransas experience where I had to coach the girl through my haircut and still came out unhappy) we headed to lunch. Our destination was a very old, local cajun food joint called Rita Mae’s. It looked like a little house from the outside, and felt like a little house on the inside too. It’s very modest appearance was at odds with its overwhelming good food & reviews and we happily tucked into a delicious lunch of a shrimp and oyster po’boy and a crab pattie with jambalya and buttered sweetcorn. MMMMMmmmm! We also found a brilliant family owned hardware store on a back road which we ended up visiting a couple of times. Fellow lovers of these establishments will know that one rarely needs a reason to enter and browse their hallowed aisles, but one will always find something essential to buy. We had a few minor repairs to do on TinCan that involved a tiny amount of sealant but having opened the tube it made sense to finish it up as it wasn’t going to keep. For this reason I found myself on the roof for two hours on a hot, windy afternoon, refreshing all the seals that I could see. This was much to the entertainment of our fellow campers, especially the ladies of a certain age, who definately saw this as a ‘blue job’. Unfortunately our ‘blue job’ operative is scared of heights so I left him doing ‘pink jobs’ inside. Besides, I am the Caulking Queen – Cue Abba earworm……..

There were a few specifically unusual things (accessible by bike or feet) in the environs to entertain us as tourists geeks.

A modest 1.5 mile stroll through the campsite and then along the grass verge of the main road (no pavements obviously) was Brownell Memorial Park. It was 9.5 acres of swampy land that was gifted to the city by the Brownell family and is the site of the family vanity project: a 106ft tall, 61 belled carillion tower The bells used to be rung manually but now an automated system chimes the quarter hours and plays a variety of tunes. It was quite lovely and we were the only visitors. There was a small welcome centre manned by an elderly, fairly deaf lady who had absolutely no idea what we were saying. The centre was a one-roomed cottage that was set out like it was the lounge of her house with a small dusty TV in the corner playing gameshows and she seemingly filled her time by feeding the birds. She was convinced that the place was occupied by spirits of long dead native americans. We bade our farewells and left her to Wheel Of Fortune.

Morgan City is in an enormous wetland area called the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland swamp area in the USA (bigger than its more famous Florida Everglades cousin). For this reason it is extremely vunerable to flooding so the town is protected by an impressive levee and flood barrier wall that winds around the waterfront. It has big solid gateways that allow access to the river and all the business that operate on the water side of the levee, and these obviously are clanged shut when the water level starts to rise. I was glad to see that there were fixed ladders at regular intervals to allow any stragglers to escape to safety once the gates had been deployed. They do spoil the water views somewhat.

One of Morgan City’s claim to fame that it was the origin of the world’s first submersible oil drilling barge, Mr Charlie. Launched in 1954, this was pioneering technology at the time and allowed the drilling of wells in water up to 40ft depth, which was considered very deep in the 50s. It also could be moved around and re-deployed at multiple drill sites which was also a novelty of the time. It was in active service until the late 1980s when it was retired back to the river bank of Morgan City where it is now a training facility for oil rig crews, a sometime movie set location and a living museum offering guided tours. We cycled up to it, having blithered around looking for the entrance for a while. It was completely unsignposted and we were working with a dot on a google map coupled with it being plainly visible on the otherside of the levee wall set back from a down-at-heel residential area. Even when we arrived at the right place, there was little evidence of the fact. A grizzled man sauntered out of a delapidated port-a-cabin and confirmed that this was the place and after a short chat we were escorted to join the current tour (of two other people). It was a very interesting couple of hours. Our guide was a garrulous ex-oil rig worker called Virgil who kept us talking much longer than our empty stomachs and full bladders were comfortable. We eventually extracted ourselved with fond goodbyes and a promise that we would call him if we needed anything or if we wanted to drop in to his house for a coffee. Louisianans sure are friendly.

Our time in Morgan City was a delight. It was great to be in one place for a whole week, to have some good weather and to meet some good people. But, to coin a phrase ‘the show must go on’, and so we headed off to our next destination, Houma, a massive 35 miles away.

1st Feb – 10th Feb 2022

A moderately long drive brought us to Lafayette, the 3rd largest city in Louisiana after New Orleans and its capital, Baton Rouge. Named in 2014 as America’s happiest city, its agricultural roots were superceded by the discovery of oil in the gulf in the 1940s leading to its growth and now it is a hub for tech, medical and financial business.

We knew that our next park would not disappoint us. As a KOA (Kampgrounds of America) campground, liveried in jaunty yellow branding, it was one of a large chain of parks which are all of a great standard with amazing facilities. This one was no exception. It was located just outside Lafayette city in a place called Scott, and if we ignored a bit of road noise from the nearby I-10, it was like an oasis compared to Crystal Beach. Good showers, an enormous laundry, firepits, a boating lake, swimming pool (unfortunately closed), and, wait for it….MINI GOLF! We thought that that would be enough for us, but it got better…we had accidentally arrived in the Boudin Capital Of The World and there was one of the best makers of said foodstuff, Billy’s, a mere 100 metres from our spot.

A boudin is a sausage-like creation, filled with a seasoned mixture of pork and rice and is quite delicious. Mostly eaten by squeezing the filling out of the caseing, it was like the lovechild of a sausage and a haggis although nobody has even heard of a haggis in Louisianna so that comparisson falls flat here. Our walk to Billy’s felt like a sort of pilgramage. To give the establishment it’s full title would be to call it Billy’s Boudin and Cracklins, which brings me to the second pork-derived product worthy of worship. Cracklins:deep fried, seasoned pork rind served warm and by weight. We approached the shop-front of the large shed with awe as if it was a shrine. Amusingly there was a drive-thru which was even busier than the shop. Only in America…! We spent a long time selecting our boudin varietals and were very restrained in only ordering a quarter pound of cracklins. We scurried home and had cracklins for our lunch. Delicious AND nutritious!!

One day we walked into the centre of Scott. This was about a mile and a half away and the experience was unremarkable for two common reasons. 1) There were almost zero pavements. No-one walks so no need for them. We muddle along verges and roadsides and luckily drivers are usually so surprised to see us that they give us wide berths and generally we feel quite safe. 2) There was no ‘town centre’ as we’d expect in the UK. This keeps catching us out in the USA as we forget that most towns and cities here have evolved with plenty of available space and since the invention of the motor car so their CBDs are disseminated and unfocused. We walked until we got to the vague central area of Scott but there was nothing really to see so we had a cold drink in a nice cafe and walked home, calling in at the interestingly named ‘NuNu’s Cajun Supermarket’. It sold some quintessential Cajun products…

Finally had some lovely warm weather here. We wore shorts, we broke out the BBQ, we had a few evenings sat out around the campfire, we played mini-golf (Nick won by one stroke after us being neck and neck for 21 holes), Tin Can and Big Dave got a long overdue wash, we walked laps of the park and its small lake.

Lafayette itself was about 8 miles away so one day we took an Uber into town to check it out. A cold front had arrived and it was chilly again so we bundled up and headed out early afternoon. Our plan was to get dropped off just north of ‘downtown’, explore, do some bits of shopping and then stroll slowly a couple of miles south to a bar/restaurant that had live music and looked a good spot for an early dinner. It was a good plan but again scuppered somewhat by the derth of civilisation/shops/anything to see or do in downtown. When will we learn?! We wandered around, cold and bemused, until we found where everyone was – a cool coffee shop in a re-purposed autoparts store. It was full of Gen Zs and Millenials. We felt quite old. We had cake. It helped. We started our walk towards the restaurant about 2 hours earlier than our informal schedule. It might be a very early dinner! Our route took us through the campus of the University of Louisiana. This was beautifully kept, had some lovely redbrick buildings, some magestic old oak trees and not a student in sight. It was a term-time week day. Where was everybody? Drinking coffee in downtown, perhaps? A couple of chilly laps around a small park filled another hour. Another hot coffee in a very cool retro diner warmed us up and killed thirty minutes. We’d made it to 5pm and headed to the restaurant.

We arrived at the appropriately named ‘Bontemps Grill’ after an exciting dash across a four lane road with no crossings or verges and discovered a full carpark – a good sign. Despite the early hour the place was buzzing and we had a welcome twenty minute wait for a table which we spent having a drink at the bar. This place served Cajun fayre and we ended up eating spicy deep fried Alligator bites, Fried Catfish with crawfish ettouffé (a spicy cajun gravy) and grilled chilli butter shrimp with sweet potato and sage mash. We very quickly decided that we love Lousiana and its food and we might stay forever. After dinner we moved ourselves back to the bar for some digestifs. The band was good but very, very loud. They were playing at about 4000000000 dB, making our conversation with a new friend very difficult. I think she was a lawyer called Lauren who was in town for a family funeral, But she might have been a librarian called Lyndsey who was in town for fun and frolics. Either way, she was very nice.

From Lafayette/Scott we headed south across the flat and wet lands of rural Southern Louisiana, travelling deeper into the bayou. We were going to Abbeville, a small but well serviced town that we had visited before. Stalwart TinCan Travels fans may remember our stay here in early November 2018 for the Great Omlette Festival where the town has a parade of eggs and chefs then cooks up the ‘world’s largest omlette’ made from approx 5000 eggs. This visit was less eggy, although we did stop at a cute Mom’n’Pop restaurant for breakfast where eggs were involved and then we stocked up on provisions for our next stop, a state park about 12 miles south.

Palmetto Island State Park – named for the Palmetto, a trunckless palm tree – was a delight. The park itself was quite small but the campsites were huge and well kept and we discovered to our suprise had both laundry and wifi. Both of these are apparently normal in Louisiana but we had seen neither at any other state parks in the rest of the country. Here we went the full banana on our camping experience. All the toys were liberated, the fairy lights were deployed and we sat around the campfire every one of our five nights here. There were some walking trails, some small fishing/boating lakes and there were enough paved roads through the park to make a bike ride of about 10 miles.

In this area was another eatery that Anthony Bourdain had visitied for his show, Suire’s Restaurant and Grocery. We decided that it was worth offloading Tin Can for the day to go and visit for lunch and to take the opportunity to explore the area a bit further. Firstly we headed south to the coast to an intriguingly named conurbation called Intracoastal City. This is not really any sort of civilisation at all, more a collection of shrimp boat docks, boat yards and businesses servicing the offshore and inshore oil industry. It has a shop but only a small number of homes. Calling it a city was using some creative licence, but I don’t think that the Louisianans care.

Further along, at the end of the road are some large locks, allowing the large barges carrying oil to navigate up the intracostal canal to and from Texas. The internet informed us that although the locks were gated, all one had to do was ring the buzzer on the gate and one would be granted access. We pulled up and saw the gate and buzzer and a sign saying that the locks were operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. I rang the buzzer.

Me: ‘Hello, can we come in and watch the boats come through the locks?’

Intercom lady: ‘Urm…What’s your affiliation?’

Me: ‘Affiliation? We are just tourists exploring the area and were advised we could come in if we rang the buzzer’

Intercom lady: ‘Urm…hold on a second, I’ll check for you’

Pause.

Intercom lady: ‘Urm, Mam, this is a Army Corps of Engineers facility. We do not allow civilians to come in and wander around.’

So we failed to gain access to a US military site by ringing the doorbell. Who’d have thought?? Just goes to show, the internet can be wrong…

Never mind, by now it was lunchtime so we drove up to Suire’s. It is part of the fabric of this area having been family run from this site for 92 years. Part grocery store, part take away restaurant with seating, it was a shabby looking place, but appearances were very deceptive. The walls were covered with art, memorabilia, photos and print articles. Anthony Bourdain’s visit was only one small part of this local gem’s history. Apparently the fried chicken on special was amazing, but the group of burly crawfish farmers who arrived just ahead of us cleared the kitchen out of that. Rats. Instead we shared ‘turtle in sauce piquant’- slow cooked turtle in a spicy red sauce, served with fried catfish and a carbohydrate fiesta of rice, cornbread, potato salad and a piece of cake – and an deep fried shrimp po’boy (a long soft roll) with Cajun fries. Whilst waiting for our food to be prepared we got chatting to a very friendly local rancher called Tommy who imparted his life story to us with chapters being delivered like automatic gunfire. He, like many in this area called Acadiana, spoke a form of Cajun French and peppered his conversation with random French terms and phrases. He was very entertaining and interesting but it was a surreal ten minutes. The food was amazing and we reafirmed our new love for Cajun cuisine. By the time we finished our meal we had the place to ourselves and spent some time chatting to the owner and reading the walls.

Our time at Palmetto Island State Park passed in a blur of camp fires, walks, bike rides and the odd game of Weasel Bag (My name for our small, plastic, travel version of Corn Hole – if you don’t know what that is, google does.) We didn’t really want to leave, but this charabanc keeps on rolling and after six nights we moved on.

28th Jan – 1st Feb 2022

A twenty minute ferry ride across the Texas City channel took us from Galveston to the Bolivar Pennisula, another thin, sandy spit that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Texan mainland. It has one arterial route running up its spine, another long sandy beach that doubles as a back road and countless stilted vacation homes standing tall and mostly empty. We travelled an enormous 17 miles to get to our next stop: Crystal Beach.

This is not so much a town as a ‘holiday place’ -a five mile stretch of un-centred, beach focused civilisation that for ten months a year has lovely warm (or searingly hot and humid) weather, teems with people and where all the businesses are open. January and February are different. We had hit the short ‘off season’ and here, more than anywhere else we had stopped en route so far this trip, this was truly evident.

Despite a low grade inhabitation of Crystal Beach it generally felt deserted and desolate. There were definately some RV parks hosting ‘Winter Texans’ – the northern escapees – but I am not sure where they were or what they do here at this time of year.

We stopped at the approproately ‘Big Store’ to stock up on provisions. This was a retail establishment that seemed to sell absolutely everything bar three piece suites or suits (although there was one aisle that we missed – so perhaps they did). Our camp was quite large, centred around a small lake, and nearly empty. The bathroom block was an aged portacabin and out of action. All the machines in the simarly housed laundry were broken and awaiting repair. It wasn’t our finest camp selection, but it was a base for a few days and yer gotta be somewhere. On the up-side it was quiet, we had an enormous, grassy, lake side site with no near neighbours, it had some amusing ducks and the sunsets were spectaular.

Our time here, four nights, was a couple of nights too many in retrospect but we are very adept filling our days doing very little. We went for a long walk down the beach one day. Our route took us past many of the ubiquitous stilt homes. Building atop 20ft stout stilts is very impressive and absolutely necessary here. There are no ground level buildings except a few large industrial ones and there is a reason for that. Everything that wasn’t on stilts has been destroyed in one of the many destructive hurricaines and when the rebuilds happen, its on stilts. It’s Darwinism for real estate.

The highlight of our time here was an aftenoon in one of the few bars that was open and we went to watch some ‘football’. Of course I mean American football. The game where the ball very rarely touches any feet so really should be called something else. Like ThrowCatchRunBall. Or StopStartAnd Cut To AdvertsBall (A one hour game usually last three hours with only about ten to fifteen minutes of active play). I’m going to suggest it to the powers that be. Anyway – I digress – We cycled the 1.5 miles along the main road to the bar, locked the bikes to a handy stilt and watched the last semi-final of the Super Bowl competion with a small group of Crystal Beach locals. We ate suprisingly good pub food and had a jolly afternoon. There was even a ‘lock-in’ as the game finished an hour after usual closing time and we made it home before dark without incident.

Our original plan for this part of the trip had been to stay on the coast, but we realised that there isn’t enough to do and the weather isn’t good enough to make the most of the beach. Another rainy day here reinforced our decision to ditch the coast and head inland to find some civilisation and a better camp that had some functioning facilities. Next stop Louisiana and a final farewell to the huge slab of this planet that calls itself Texas.

24th Jan – 28th Jan 202

Galveston. Civilisation!

I am sure that the majority of Texans would disagree with that statement, but this was the largest place that we had stayed in quite a while and we had some stuff to get done. It had come to our attention that our four rear tyres were looking fairly low on tread. In fact, I am not sure that a Formula 1 pit crew would have selected them in a light drizzle. Another issue was our bikes. They were in serious need of a service and somehow my front forks had broken and needed replacing. Finally, our water pump was non-functioning. Not sure what had happened there but since day 1 of this trip, suspiciously after we had called into the RV service centre to get our small leak fixed right at the beginning of the trip, it had not pumped. For 99% of the time we don’t need it as we plug into mains water in the camps we stay at but it does restrict our ability to free-camp (by choice or due to unforsean circumstances). Another useful time for it to be functioning is when the temperature falls below 0 deg C overnight, potentially freezing the water in our connection pipe. This involves unplugging, emptying the hose and relying on tank water and the pump. We had been making do with jugs and bottles of water. It was time to get it fixed. So Big Dave was booked into Firestone, I arranged to drop the bikes of at a local bike shop on our way into town and we booked a mobile RV mechanic to come and replace the pump. Sorted.

The seeming endlessness of the Texan roads continued as we travelled on from Palacios to Galveston which is also situated at the Eastern end of Galveston Island, another long, thin, flat barrier island which is essentially a sand spit. It is only 45 miles from Houston and the run up to the city itself was past countless, colourful, stilted vacation homes – some tasteful, some where the dominant adjective used to describe them would definately be large rather than classy. This is where the city folk come to the beach. Galveston was another re-visit for us although we opted to stay closer to town than we did last time. During our last visit, in early Nov 2018, we had stayed a few miles down the beach and it had been amazingly hot and sunny. We had had to sleep with the aircon running and two rounds of mini-golf had turned into an exercise in extreme heat survival. It was a little different this time.

We cruised into town and up the aptly named ‘Seawall Boulevard’ until we arrived at the bike shop, dropped off the bikes then found our camp. Unfortunately the weather turned to custard at exactly the moment we started setting up but as now we are super slick at the process we managed to get situated and installed without getting too drenched.

Happily the next day it was dry for our other activities: Steve the RV mechanic arrived at 9am (from his own RV on the same park) to fit the new water pump. In retrospect we probably could have managed it ourselves but sometimes its just worth paying the money for peace of mind and marital harmony. He was very chatty and interesting and admitted that it was a very easy job for him. He had been in IT for 30 years until 2 years ago when he had done a 400 hr/10 week RV mechanics course. Now he only works 10-15 hrs per week which is plenty to live on and he was happy as the proverbial pig.

The next task was to offload Tin Can from Big Dave -the first time we’d done this since leaving Wenatchee-and head to Firestone for the new tyres. Whilst this was being done we walked up to the Seawall Boulevard, looked at the sea, wandered up and down a bit then headed back to the tyre shop via lunch at Whataburger, another burger chain with a cult following here. It had a massive queue for the drive-thru and was busy inside which is always a good sign. Despite that, it was clean and tidy and the food was pretty good too. Big Dave was just getting finished with his new booties by the time we got back and then he was roadworthy again. We headed back to the ranch, Tin Can was reloaded with a bit of kerfuffle and we rested from all the excitement and money spending.

The next day we went to town. An Uber was summoned and we headed to the historic district. In the latter part of the 19th century Galveston had grown quickly and thrived as a busy port town and centre of commerce. There was a lot of money made here and the grand old buildings are testament to that. The day started with a tour of a historic house, The Moody Mansion. Home to three generations of the Moody family it was essentially a nice big town house that saw lots of parties and the amassing of more Moody wealth. It was actually quite modest given their fortune and, built in 1895, 85 years younger than our cottage at home. Nevertheless it is an important building here and on the National Historic Landmark Register. The Moodys bought it for a bargain price after the huge storm that hit Galveston in 1900 despite the fact it was one of the few residences to survive. This hurricaine wreaked massive damage on the city, killing 6000-8000 people and it still holds the dubious record of being the USA’s worst natural disaster. It was the prompt to build the 10 mile long seawall to try and protect the city from future devastation. Galveston never really recovered it’s pre-1900 levels of prosperity. The building of the Houston ship canal brought the port of Houston into direct competition with Galveston’s natural port and the seawall changed the errosion patterns of the sand on the beach, reducing its width by 100 yards, thus removing the large natural playground that was used for motor racing events and other jolly pursuits.

After our house tour we walked up to the historic downtown district and braced ourselves for the hustle and bustle of the ‘civilisation’ that we had been missing for a while. There was no sign of it. There were certainly lots of lovely old buildings, restaurants, bars and a few tourist tat shops, but a complete lack of people. There was even a cruise ship at the terminal. Where was everyone? Never did find them. It was a lovely afternoon so we found a sunny spot on the deck at a waterfront restaurant and had an ‘afternoon tea’ of a couple of beers and a plate of ‘shrimp kisses’ to share. (A shrimp kiss: a large, butterflied shrimp stuffed with jalepeño cheese, wrapped in bacon and deep fried in a light batter… We like shrimp kisses….) The deck had a great view of Galveston harbour with boats, tugs and a couple of oil rigs under construction. The plan was to stay in town for dinner so seeing as it was only 3.30pm, we had some time to kill. We found an oil rig museum which was located in a small decommissioned oil rig on the harbour-side. We arrived at 4.02pm but it had stopped admissions at 4.00pm. The girl on the desk was immune to Nick’s British charm (usually a force to which American ladies are powerless to resist*) and she wouldn’t let us in. Our promise to do the tour at slow jog to finish well within the hour before closing at 5.00pm also fell on deaf ears. We managed to while away another half hour by walking up to the cruise ship terminal to get a look at the boat close up. It was just loaded up and ready to depart. We looked up at the happy passengers stood on the balconies and decks, waving at invisible people on the shore as the ship left the dock (backwards-rather impressively) and set off. We both agreed that we had no desire to take a cruise any time soon and that in Covid-times, it was utter madness. Good luck to you all smooshed into your expensive, floating, petri dish, quarantine detension camp…..

So we started our evening at 4.30pm with a couple of beers outside a brewhouse in town, and in true American-style, were having dinner by 5.30pm back at the waterfront restaurant that we had started at and then we got another Uber home.

(* Earlier in the day we had found a small jewelry shop and called in to see if I could get a new battery in my watch. The nice lady fitted it for free. Case in point. Powerless…..)

Our last day here was a big one. We had mini-golf on our minds, time to kill, another beautiful sunny day and we/I (!) felt like a good walk. It was three and a half miles down the seafront to the course and we headed there on foot for the latest Hampson vs Hampson: Battle of the Balls, Clash of the Clubs, Pugilism of the Putters, etc, etc. To say that there is a competitive edge to our mini-golf endeavours would be a slight understatement. There are two 18-hole courses at this facility, so it was inevitable that we would be playing 36 holes. It was very nice to be able to enjoy the experience without the serious risk of developing heat stroke which had been a very real possibility on our last visit in 2018. I won the first 18 holes by 5 strokes, Nick won the second 18 holes by…5 strokes. It was neck and neck….The owner of the facility could sense the tension and the enormity of the occasion….and gave us a free third round to settle the contest. So after 56 holes of mini-golf, two holes-in-one for me and only one for Nick, much fun and frivolity and a seven mile round trip walk to achieve it, Nick won the third round by 5 strokes. We had a sandwich on the beach on the way home and agreed that we were both winners…no wait…that was just me…Nick was vehemently certain that he was the only winner. Paff.

We headed out the next day via brunch at a popular neighbourhood eatery called Mosquito Cafe. The food was great, albeit a bit lukewarm, and they had a ‘flood-water-level-mark’ on the wall at about the 6ft mark which was the result of 2008’s hurricaine Ike – To live here you have to make your peace with the possibility of your life/livelihood being destroyed by weather – We remembered to collect the bikes which were now all fixed and clean and then jumped on another free ferry out of Galveston to continue our journey.

21st Jan – 24th Jan 2022

We left Port Aransas and Mustang Island by taking a short (and free) ferry ride to the nearby Harbor Island and the road re-joined the mainland by way of another small island, a causeway and a bridge. The road continued to cross the flatlands of this coastal area, crossing numerous wide inlets by long, tall bridges, which for some reason completely freak Nick out. Most of the land that we passsed through was arable- producing rice, cotton, pecans, peanuts and watermelons in the growing season. After a stop at Walmart to provision-up and get a Subway for lunch we headed to our next stop, Palacios.

Local lore has it that the town is was originally named Tres Palacios by some sea-weary and hallucinating Spanish sailors who could have sworn they saw ‘three palaces’ on the shore near where they were shipwrecked. More likely it was named for José Félix Trespalacios, an early Mexican govenor of Texas. The name was shortened to Palacios so as not to confuse it with a nearby Post Office and the local pronounciation of the name is ‘Palay-shoss’ rather than the more Spanish sounding ‘Palay-ci-oss’.

There are a few big industries near the town to provide employment. Firstly the town is home to a fleet of about 400 shrimp boats which reside in its rather impressive harbour, a few miles down the road to the West is one of the largest plastics factories in the world and to the East lies one of Texas’ two nuclear power stations which producing 2700mW of carbon-free power, enough to power 2 million homes.

In the 1970s there was a rash of UFO sightings in the area and the town’s mayor, Bill Jackson, declared 24th October 1973 to be Palacios’ First Annual UFO Fly-In Day and called on President Nixon to declare the town the Interplanatary Centre Of The Universe. I don’t think that he did. After all, this is Texas, not New Mexico.

There were two hooks to us deciding to stay in Palacios. The first was the shrimping fleet. It is the third largest in Texas, but the town still declares itself the ‘Shrimp Capital Of Texas’. We love watching big boats and fossicking around working harbours. Although it is low season currently there was still plenty of vessels coming and going and the harbour was so massive we had to tour it on bicycles. At the far end of the harbour there was a large fishermans memorial statue which was pretty impressive and obviously a bit sobering.

Our second reason for stopping here was courtesy of another episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. This area is home to a fairly large population of Vietnamese immigrants and because of this there are several Vietnamese restaurants in town. One of these is called The Point and was featured on the show when Bourdain visitied here. The Point is an ecclectic place. It is part grocery store, part bait and tackle shop, part bottle shop and lottery outlet and serves Mexican and Vietnamese food ‘to-go’, that you can eat inside at a long table. With Pho and bao buns-white silken orbs of deliciousness- on our minds we called in there during the day as part of a general mauranding about on bicycle. We wanted to check out its location and our route there in preparation for a visit later for dinner. Tragically we discovered that the kitchen was closed until 1st February. Well perhaps tragedy is a bit of an overstatement, but we were very disappointed. We were grumpy and by now very thirsty -because we had had bacon and egg butties for breakfast and not brought any water on our bike ride – and then we had a full blown argument about our difffering techniques for having an argument. I ‘stormed off’ by cycling a bit ahead of Nick but then he caught up and we bought a bottle of water at a shop. It wasn’t really worth perpetuating the sulking and we went back, sat out with a beer to watch the sunset and had a very nice home-made special fried rice for dinner instead. Anthony would have enjoyed it just as much as any offering from The Point I am sure.

This was another town along our southern journey that has clearly had it’s hey day. Long gone are the early 20th C days when, having been marketed as ‘The City By The Sea’, it had a hundred business, numerous hotels and churches, a waterfront entertainment pavilion and the establishment of the Texas Bapstist Encampment. While the main street is now very quiet, the town is slowly regenerating its waterfront with a promenade and a cute little town beach and the old party pavilion has recently been rebuilt. The Texas Baptist Encampment although all closed up currently, seems to be going strong and, according to the internet, is still providing a location for summer camps and retreats year-round. I think this would be a delightful place to hang out in the summer, but our visit was in the middle of winter. Time to move on.