Tin Can Travels

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.

14th Jan – 21st Jan 2022

Forty minutes drive from Corpus Christi brought us to Port Aransas, a fishing and vacation town on Mustang Island. The Island is one of the many, long, thin, low-lying barrier islands along the Gulf Coast with an endless white sandy beach on the ocean-side and marshland and shipping channels on the land-side. This whole coast is vunerable to the destructive power of hurricanes. The town took a direct hit from hurricane Harvey in August 2017 and suffered devastating damage due to 130mph winds and 6ft storm surges. Luckily the town’s 3400 residents had been evacuated so there were no deaths reported, but 100% of the town’s businesses and 85% of the homes reported damage. Now, four and a half years later it is mostly rebuilt. Only a few empty lots remain and many new developments have popped up too. All the new homes make the place feel very tidy and kempt and every property has a jolly, colourful, pastel paint job. Most homes are built atop stout stilts, acknowledging that flooding and storm surges are a fact of life here but if they insist on dragging oil out of the ground and burning it willy-nilly, they are going to need taller stilts…

We had booked a whole week on a small beachfront campsite here to include the celebration of Nick’s birthday. There was some good weather forecast and we were looking forward to doing some exploring, eating out, and having some beach time. In this town the beach golf buggy is the preferred method of transport and Nick had chosen a day’s rental of such a machine as his birthday present. The golf carts are permitted on all the roads except the main highway up to the limit of Port Aransas town, and that includes the beach which is also a designated roadway. Although we were staying a couple of miles from town there was an hourly shuttle bus that stopped at the entrance to the park and charged a massive 25c each per journey, and it was also an easy, safe cycle. The camp was quite small and compact but we had a nice end-of-row site with a view of the sea through the dunes. It seemed quite a friendly park with lots of long term snowbirds who all seemed to know each other. I think it would have been a more social for us here but we heard mid-week that Covid was rampaging through the residents, having been imported by some visiting grandchildren and then distributed via some jolly potluck lunches in the following days. We did have one conversation with our neighbour early in the week regarding the shuttle bus. We had sussed it out and taken our first trip within 24 hours of arriving in town. He had spent 6 months living at this camp and didn’t even know that it existed. No radar for public transport at all.

Port Aransas, or Port A as it is known locally, is quite an interesting little place. It has escaped much of the modern, corporate, blanket development that erodes much of the character of tourist destinations, thus removing the attractiveness of them as tourist destinations. There are obviously a large number of holiday homes and condos here, but it has mostly retained the feeling of a small coastal fishing town. It was quite sleepy during our stay here but it was far preferable to experience it in low season rather than during the madness of peak season. Given the number of golf carts parked outside rental outlets it must be absolute mayhem here when they are all rented out and being driven around after multiple marguaritas.

Things to love about Port A:

An epic beach. It is long, flat, wide, hard-packed and clean. Cars and golf carts can use it as a road but it is well demarkated with bollards, protecting huge swathes of it from the traffic. It is perfectly legal to park-up and camp on the beach, in RVs or tents and you can have a fire at any time of year as long as it is less than 3x3ft in diameter. There were beach showers every half mile, port-a-loos every quarter mile, bins everywhere and there were numbered markers every 200 metres to help navigate the locations of roads, homes and business behind the low dunes. We sat on it, walked it, cycled it and golf-carted it.

Seafood. Lots of it and very fresh and delicious. We had a couple of meals out in which shrimp and tuna featured heavily. For Nick’s birthday meal we walked to a nearby restaurant that was about half a mile away. It was located near the local airfield across the main highway and as we walked up to the door the hostess asked us if we had arrived by plane….because she had just seen one land….and that was, to her, a more logical explanation for us arriving at the restaurant on foot rather than just having walked from somewhere else. It will never cease to amaze me that in most of this country walking is considered a form of exercise, not a form transport.

Big ships. Port A sits at the northern tip of Mustang Island, beyond which is the shipping channel for the entrance to the port of Corpus Christi. There is a public park at the point and here one can sit and watch massive tankers and tug-powered barges cruise past. A great way to kill an hour or two. Enhanced entirely by the addition of frolicking dophins riding bow-waves and pelicans cruising around looking cool.

Sunsets at the marina when you arrive at the bar at exactly the right time to get the full benefit of the warm setting sun radiating into the open-sided, waterfront building so you can have a couple of pre-dinner beers in the sea breeze and pretend you might be closer to the tropics than you actually are.

Golf carts. Everywhere. And a great toy for a 51 year old birthday boy. Having picked the warmest day, done half an hour worth of paper work and paid the same money as we would have done to rent an SUV, we were the proud guardians of our own for 24 hours. It was slow but steady with its one whole cyclinder, cammoflaged, had neon down-lights as well as headlights and was bluetooth connectable to our music. We razzed around like hoons-sedately-all day, going here, there and everywhere. We did some food shopping, went to the local wetlands bird sanctuary, went to look at boats again, went to the breakwater at the end of the beach, ‘raced’ up the beach, explored back streets, did some nosing at houses, went out to dinner, drove back down the beach in the dark via a beach bar and got it back safely the next day having used $5 worth of fuel. What a marvellous birthday present!

The weather in January for half of the time. 50% of days here were T-shirt, shorts and flip-flop days. The other 50% were jeans, boots, jumpers and coats days. Can’t complain, most of the rest of the US seems to be dealing with winter storms, blizzards and sub-zero temperatures and the UK can’t reliably deliver T-shirt and shorts days 50% of the time in July.

We really enjoyed our week in Port A and were a bit sad to leave. It was great to have slowed down and not been moving so often. Now we have reached the Gulf we plan to travel more like this and spend longer in each place that we stay. Next stop- Palacios.

12th Jan- 14th Jan 2022

We left Marfa quite early (for us-9.30am) with the prospect of a long-ish drive of about 240 miles (thus breaking one of the Rules of Two). The day’s scenery served up mile upon mile of beautiful but desolate nothingness as we cruised down US-90, a road devoid of much traffic at all. We set off having no pre-planned destination for our stay that night, but the miracle of modern technology meant that I could book us a roost en route.

We were headed to Del Rio, another town kissing the Mexican border. Here the levels of illegal crossings has become so high that the National Guard had been draughted in to aid the control of the border. The town hit international news last year when 14,000 Haitians crossed here en masse and sheltered for days in blistering heat under a highway overpass in a makeshift camp with no access to adequate food and water. This would have been overwhelming even in a less conservative area of the country and now there has been a huge injection of manpower and machinery into Del Rio to stop it happening again. We saw whole RV parks commandeered to house National Guard troops in bunk house trailers and on the South-West side of town, nearest the Rio Grande and border there was a Humvee stationed with a couple of soldiers every mile or so along the roadside. Consequently this is one of the fastest growing cities in the country: Lots of people coming to live in Del Rio to stop the other people wanting to come to Del Rio. A difficult problem with a very expensive partial solution.

We had one night here. It was warm enough to sit outside out for sundowners in the evening sun,which was a real treat, and we had a good chat and mutual RV tours with our neighbours. They were here from California to visit their daughter and new grandchild. Their son-in-law’s job had brought the family to Del Rio. His profession? Border Patrol, of course! On our way along the road out of Del Rio we were stopped at one of the many immigration check points in the border areas. These are located away from the physical borders but along key roads that carries traffic that may have crossed into the USA illeagally or carrying contraband. Normally we are waved through these checkpoints but this time we were given the third degree. Unfortunately our passports were locked away in Tin Can and the Border Patrol officer wasn’t entirely reassured by our UK driving licences. Retrieval of our passports would have taken a good ten minutes and there was a queue building up behind us. He considered his options, obviously decided we were low risk for being illegal interlopers with a camper-full of bricks of cocaine, and waived us through with a brief lecture on how our passports should be close at hand when were are travelling close to the border. Suitably chastised we agreed wholeheartedly and continued on our way, completely forgetting his advice and never moving the passports as suggested.

Next stop along the way was a town called Cotulla. This is seemingly a scrap of a town in the middle of the desert flatlands of Southern Texas, but there is a disproportionate bustle about the place for its size. The town was founded in the late 1800s by a Prussian immigrant called Joseph Cotulla who started a ranching outfit here. On hearing that the railroad was planned to come through the area he rather brilliantly donated 120 acres of land to the railroad on which they established a depot, thus cementing the future of the town that bears his name. This town of only about 4,000 permenant residents thrives in current times as it is sits atop the Eagle Ford shale deposit and houses the largest sand fracking facility in North America, the area being the second largest producer of oil in the USA. The town has 16 hotels with a further 7 planned, all to accomodate workers and contractors. Everyone drives a massive truck, every second business is a petrol station. In this part of the world there are no concessions to climate change, no will to compromise Big Company wealth for a macro reduction in emissions, no infrastructure planning to change things in the future. Texas is oil.

Having thrashed down a very poor quality back road to get here, we finaly arrived, shaken-not-stirred in Cotulla. We had passed countless fracking sites, and (contaminated) water disposal sites along the way and those were just the ones visible from the road. Our camp here was large and mostly empty save for a few resident workers. It was visible from the main road but not easy to get to due to a side-road closure. We did several trips up and down the short stretch of highway that passed it, arguing with two forms of sat-nav and each other about how to get there. Eventually we worked it out and calm was restored. It was a beautiful afternoon and the camp had beautiful pool area. Swimwear was broken out again and suncream applied. This time, however, the pool was unheated so we just looked at it from our sun loungers. ‘Cold water swimming’ is very low down on my list of fun things to do.

The next morning we hit the road again and made our final push for what we felt was the true destination for this trip, the Gulf Coast. It was another lovely warm day and we were excited to be heading to the beach. We cruised on through the largish city of Corpus Christi, which was seeming one long strip mall, and crossed a bridge out to Mustang Island. This is one of many long thin barrier islands that run along this coast and home to our next stop: Port Aransas.

9th Jan – 12th Jan 2022

There are many small towns in the rural hinterlands of the USA that are long past their glory days and are being slowly but surely abandoned by the communities that once thrived in them. Industries fail, businesses close and unemployment drives people away. Farms become unproductive. Buildings and homes are abandoned, ancient shop fronts and gas stations are boarded up and the fabric of a place slowly disintergrates until there is nothing left to qualify it as civilisation.

Marfa is a place that could have been a victim of this inextricable decline but it has been saved by an unlikely medium. Modern art.

Marfa has been in existence since the 1880s because it became a ‘water stop town ‘ for the new railroad. This is a place where the steam engines could take on essential water but not important enough to warrant having a station. These towns were known as ‘jerk-towns’, a colloquialism coined by virtue of the fact that the flow of water from the swinging arms that connected to the water bowsers was started by the ‘jerk’ on a chain. The town quickly grew in the 1920s, hosted several thousand trainee pilots at the nearby Marfa Army Airfield during WW2 but started a gradual decline after this. It has provided gritty back drops for several movies, including the 1956 James Dean film Giant, and 2006’s No Country For Old Men.

The town’s rennaissance via art started in the 1970s when a New York minimalist artist, Donald Judd, relocated to the town and created some large art installations here. Art has attracted visitors and artists which has created a positive feedback loop of a slow snowballing of investment, renovation and reclamation of the town’s buildings and spaces. There are art events, theatre productions and an annual music festival every year. The people that come here are attacted to its retro vibe, adobe architecture and all the improvements seem to strive to preserve its authentic patina. To cater to the influx of visitor money there are some nice restaurants and shops (all seemingly selling the same sort of artisanal and achingly cool stock) and the town is littered with small galleries as well as there being the ongoing installations of the Chinati Foundation, the organisation that manages Judd’s legacy and works.

All these factors were why we had opted to come to Marfa for three nights. We had had a day trip here from the nearby Fort Davis in late 2018 and had agreed that it was a place in which we would love to spend some more time.

The road into Marfa throws some clues as to its arty credentials when about 30 miles from town one comes across ‘The Prada Shop’. This is a mock Prada store front that is a pop art exhibit. It is in the middle of nowhere and quite surreal. Further down the road we passed the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, a tethered blimp that gets raised to watch for border crosser activity. It was deployed as we drove by so my photo is less impressive than this stock photo that I found online.

Our park in Marfa was called the Tumble In and had the requisite levels of windswept dustiness. It was a bit of a self-serve affair with a tiny orange caravan as the unmanned office at the entrance and a camp host that spent most of his time at the local hostelry. It did however have one of the town’s art intallations on site which looked like nothing until darkness fell.

The Tumble In was an easy 1/4 mile stroll from Marfa’s centre, and as usual, we were the only ones walking the route. We spent our days wandering around the town, searching out the interesting buildings, old signage and street art. Unfortunately, this being the start-of-the-week, post-holiday-season, mid-winter almost nothing was open. All the galleries, a lot of the eateries and the Chinati Foundation sites were all closed. This was a bit depressing initially but we persevered and found a few little gems to keep us happy:

Marfa Burritos. The clue is in the name. Anthony Bourdain ate here on his travels whilst filming Parts Unknown and it seemed as good a reason as any to do the same. The building was very unprepossessing and covered with handwritten graffitti inside and outside. There were only 7 choices of burrito, all the size of a small forearm, and the two that we shared were muy delicioso! Nick added his words of appretiation and wisdom to the wall above our table in green marker pen. We could have made this a daily visit but wisdom prevailed.

A coffee shop called Sentinel with half decent coffee and a lovely sunny sheltered outside area populated by a few loud, youthful looking, ‘zooming’, work-from-anywherers, mostly sporting beards and plaid shirts. This earned itself a few visits and one day we passively learnt a quite a bit about the expansion of an icecream shop business.

A fantastic little independant food store called The Get Go Grocery in which we found some very acceptable French cheese and wine. In the Texas desert. Impressive.

The Marfa Wine Company. We discovered this ‘wine shop and patio’ during a mid-afternoon, directionless meander down a back street. It occupied a perfect sunny spot with a table and chairs on a deck and we felt it would be rude not to have a glass of rosé. Unfortunately the girl managing the shop informed us that she only sold wine by the glass at the weekends, but we were welcome to buy a bottle…need I say more?

Marfa is a very photogenic place and now I will bore you with some of our snaps.

Here are some less arty photos of me waiting for the train to pass through town and me with some actual tumbleweed that blew into me. Oh, and another sunset shot.

6th Jan – 9th Jan 2022

Some sections of our journey are about seeing a place. Some are about stopping and resting. Some are about just getting from A to B. This next bit for us, after leaving the ranch, was about putting some miles in. Hampson-style. A leisurely fashion it is then.

A wise RV’ing veteran once told us to stick to the “Rule of 2” for touring:

• Don’t travel more than 200 miles in a day
• Arrive at your destination by 2pm
• Stay at least 2 days.

We generally do stick to this mantra, but the next few days were an exception with a run of one-nighters. This isn’t really compatible with doing much sightseeing at our destinations but we get to see an awful lot of the world go by from the truck windows, which after all is what a roadtrip is all about.

Our drive after leaving the ranch involved a 45 mile back-track up the road away from the border, a brief stop to refuel at the petrol station/hardware store/grocery store/bottle shop at the junction, then hanging a right to continue our easterly journey. Tuscon was the nearest civilisation but, having spent time there in the past, we breezed on through and joined the main southerly East-West interstate highway, the I-10. Our next destination was a stop-off at a nice park in a town called Wilcox alongside this road. This stop was to restock (the food supplies), rest (the bodies and livers), refresh (everything that needed laundering) and rehydrate (our dry, desert, lizard-like skin in the pool). Yes! Finally the temperature had pushed into the mid-late 20s deg C and we, whilst waiting for our four loads of laundry, broke out the bikinis and lounged in & around the park’s very lovely heated swimming pool. Desert winters. Hot days, freezing nights. Just weird, man.

The evening delivered a magnificent sunset which coincided with a completely unexpected spectacle. There were thousands and thousands of large birds flying across the sky in V-formation after V-formation, as far as the eye could see. A quick internet search informed us that they were Sandhill Cranes and between 20,000 and 40, 000 of them migrate here each winter to the wildlife area at Wilcox. Each evening at sunset they return from their daytime feeding grounds ready to roost for the night. The town’s wildlife association even has an annual birding and nature festival centred around the cranes called Wings Over Wilcox. It was magical, but entirely impossible to capture on camera, so you’ll just have to use your imaginations!

Our I-10 journey continued the next day and we crossed into our next state, New Mexico. It bills itself as the Land of Enchantment and it does feel a bit different here. The terrain is much the same as Arizona: huge flat wide valleys covered in scrubland with distant mountain ranges, and this continues into West Texas. I don’t know why New Mexico feels a bit different, but remember, Roswell and Area 51 are here….cue Twilight Zone music… We also spent quite a lot of time here in 2018 so we were just passing through again. It was another lovely warm sunny day and we cruised through vast tracts of desert, empty except for the 4-lane highway. There were lots of signs warning that this area was subject to regular and heavy dust storms that could make driving very dangerous. Not today, thankfully. Our only stop in New Mexico was a night in Las Cruces at an RV park that we had stayed in last time. This is only the third RV park re-visit that we have made on our travels, the others being at the marina park in Duluth, Minnesota, close to the lift bridge that rang bells and sounded its hooter every time one of the many enormous cargo ships came into port, and a place under the flight path of the runway approach of Nellis Airforce base in Vegas. Both were considerably noisier.

At the gateway to the town stands a big sculpture of a roadrunner bird, made entirely of recycled materials. His underbelly is mainly white trainer tops and his plumage mostly cellphones. He was quite magnificent. Here our enthusiasm for a walk into town and dinner were low. We were still detoxing from the excesses of the Rancho and Nick was coming down with something…. A cold, or Omicron?? A rapid test was negative, but we were happy staying in and being lazy.

Our New Mexico passage was only a two day affair and the next day our travels took us into Texas which was going to be an altogether longer tarmac/tyre rubber relationship. The I-10 just continued on, and on, and on, through a flat dusty landscape, the road full of trucks and RVs. Everyone going somewhere, for some reason. Texas really is an enormous state. To put this into context: Texas is about 270,000 miles squared in area. The UK and NZ are about 95,000 and 105,000 miles squared respectively. Massive. We crossed the border from New Mexico and pretty quickly found ourselves charging along the urban hell highway through El Paso. This is a border town which is very ‘up close and personal’ with its close Mexican neighbour, Ciudad Juárez, which is just across the Rio Grande. The historically open and friendly relationship between the two cities has soured in recent times as gang and drug-related violence in Juárez has made it so dangerous that now there is very little traffic between the two cities.

Driving through on I-10 it was easy to see the border wall and the disparity of living standards. El Paso, although is in Texas, is in the Mountain Time Zone along with New Mexico and Arizona, and Central Time Zone didn’t begin until we were through the city and well out the other side. We stopped for fuel and sandwiches at a dubious and dusty petrol station with only one functioning pump and then pushed on.

This next section of road was quite remarkable in the story of this journey so far because…wait for it….I was allowed to drive! Nick does all the driving generally because a) he loves it, b) he is very good at it, c) he is a terrible passenger, d) we rarely travel far enough in one day to warrant me driving too. But I am very conscious that I need to be able to confidently drive Big D, especially if the situation might arise in times of stress, so every now and then I wrestle the driving seat away from his highness and refresh my skills. I am brilliant too.

Our first Texas stop was the third of three single-nighters in a place called Van Horn. It is a modest sized place named for a Lt. James Judson Van Horn who commanded a garrison here in 1859 (which was taken only two years later by Confederate forces.) Its future was cemented by the arrival of the railroad in 1881. It is now probably best known as the site of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism company, which is located on a 290,000 tract of land only 25 miles north of the city. Van Horn also provided the inspiration for the 2019 titular song by alternative rock band Saint Motel.

The next morning we parted company with the I-10 and headed off South-West on US 90 into the even more remote desert yonder towards a very unusual town called Marfa.