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.