Feeling Like Home

After three and a half months on the road it feels really good to do 'normal' things. We have now been set up at Shorty's RV park for four days. We have left-over turkey, sunshine and warm temperatures. Bob headed out this morning to do chores and shopping and I opted to stay home and enjoy doing home stuff. I had one of my favourite blues cd's from our trip, Robert Johnson's Best playing as I did laundry, vacuumed and generally put things in order. By the time Bob came back it was lunch time. He is watching college football and I am enjoying the opportunity to resume my painting.
We are feeling very comfortable here. Temperatures are perfect, whether cooler or warmer. Anywhere from mid 50's to mid 80's for the winter months. We are surrounded by water and all kinds of seafood, on the flyways for bird migration and lots of interesting communities in every direction. We are going to explore in small expanding circles. We are excited to get to know this area as we did Arizona over the years.
Today my journal picture is my interpretation of a photo I took of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. My blogging abilities are improving and I was able to add it to the blog for our day in ' Nawlins...

I am so happy to have sister Sherry as my painting partner. It is wonderful to have someone to share the enjoyment of journaling, and painting. We are a mutual admiration club of two, boosting each other's insecurities and applauding each other's work. Here is an example of her work that I find incredible for someone who had never painted until less than a year ago. Paint on!!

Not as much to report regarding our travels but definitely more time to paint:)

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Turkey day

We are awake early as usual. I have the stuffing made and the bird ready for our new $20 electric roaster by 9:30. Bob is set up to cook in his 'little shop'. It's the first time I've ever cooked a turkey in anything other than a traditional oven so I am very pleased to see it all going well. We are still the only ones here today...even our 'landlords' are gone to see family in Houston.
Our efficient little roaster has our 14lb bird cooked by 1:30 so it's an early dinner for us. Dishes are all done and I have a couple of hours to work on my journal before dark. Then the best part of all, turkey sandwiches for dinner.

It's a day devoted to turkey and relaxing......we are Thankful in America, and also full....not much else to report.

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Our first day "on" the grid ....

We had a quiet day, Thanksgiving here in the US, but more like a Sunday for us. We watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and some football. Bob did some chores outside and I did a couple loads of laundry, and tried to start to catch up with my journal.The day quickly disappeared. We had showers and prepared for a BBQ dinner. We are alone in the park today, very peaceful. Our first full day in this RV Park life. So far so good. Black Friday tomorrow. We will stay in camp and cook our turkey.

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Rockport, Texas

Overnighted in Lowes Parking lot in Lake Jackson......it has been windy, rainy and cold. We are definitely in Texas. Back to BBq and grills, no more levees, bayous, ya baby's, Cajun food and wonderful accents. The big state awaits us.
We arrive in Rockport before noon and spend the afternoon looking at RV parks. We are so disappointed and ready to get back on the road and head for Arizona. The parks we looked at were big and crowded. We just couldn't see ourselves being happy in any of these places. We even checked the state park to maybe stay a couple of nights to enable us to have a better look around. The last place we called sounded not bad. It has just opened this month, has only 8 sites, of which only two are occupied. We haven't eaten since breakfast, it's cold and rainy so we just head to Walmart to sit for the night and regroup. The lady from the RV park called, wondering where we were. I explained how we were feeling and said we would come and look in the morning. She said "that's good baby, we'll see you in the morning". I knew right away that I liked her. It is such a southern way of speaking.
It is our last hope.
We had a pretty quiet night in Walmart and headed over to "Shorty's RV Park" first thing in the morning. We are home:). The sights are big enough for us, they are pristine. We pick our spot in one of the last two corner spaces. Each unit has it's own storage shed, a good sized slab and grassy area. There is a small laundry room with two each of washers and dryers right beside our shed. Owners, Wanda, aka, Shorty and Tom Walker are very pleasant and easy going. They retired here from Houston. They have good senses of humor and we sign up til the end of December with the option to stay for January too.

See the tower in the picture, that means I have 4g coverage .....a must have!!!

The cold and wind are over today and by Saturday normal temperatures of 65/75 degrees will be back. We bought an electric roaster and a turkey to cook outside on Friday. At this time our only two neighbors in the park have gone 'home' for Thanksgiving tomorrow.
We are happy. We are officially "Winter Texans". Lol, We have traveled 8000 miles to get here. It is an interesting town with lots of potential exploring for us to do. Corpus Christie is only 30 miles away and Austin and San Antonio are also within our travel reach. Alls good, and we are where we hoped to be.

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We leave the "South"

After leaving Grand Isle we are headed west and it doesn't take long to realize we will be moving through the last of Acadia and the Cajun communities. Sunday morning we leave Abbeville and take a back road following the bayous, paralleling the Gulf. It is like traveling through an episode of Duck Dynasty, pick-up trucks, camouflaged flat boats, bearded men; women and children in camo. The reeds are so high on the sides of the roads that you can't really see where people go in. Just a line of trucks parked on the side of the road. When we stopped at a little store called Booths they said it's "hunting season" duh!!

They had a slow cooker going with Boudin and a hot sausage. $2.00 for either with a bun and condiments. It's only 10:00am but we had an early start and this is a delicious early lunch.

At this point I have to recap our last three states for music, wine and food. Arkansas; Ozark country music, the Trail of Tears, our first taste of the Missipi blues, with Sunshine Sonny Payne, wine in stand alone liquor stores, good sausage and my first funnel cake. Missipi, the blues trail, the Civil War trail, and Charlie Musselwhite, state controlled liquor in "package stores", expensive; deep fried everything, good fish. Louisiana, wide open liquor, cheap wine, drive thru daqueri shops, the Creole trail, and the food, oh my god, the food, cat fish, oysters, crab, boudin, andouille, gulf prawns, the spices and sauces. We have had so many good meals, out, as well as at home. My only disappointment is I didn't get a genuine 'po boy'.

I am also very sad to leave Louisiana. It's like when I had to leave the Yukon. A feeling like I may never be back here again and there is still so much we didn't get to see and do.

As we drive along the Gulf getting closer to Texas we are seeing a part of the coast that was pretty much destroyed by Hurricane Rita, which happen less than a month after Katrina. We traveled along this part 15 years ago on our way back from Florida in our newly purchased Award. The tourist town of Holly Beach was flattened and now there are only a few new vacation homes for those that could afford to rebuild. Those that can't, have an RV beside the rubble and cement slab that used to be their home.

Rebuilding the local high school, like everything built on cement stilts.

There is so much water and waterways that we seem to be always crossing a raised highway, some tolled, or on a ferry. BC take note, it cost us a dollar on one and the other one was free. Considered part of the highway system

Into Texas and the oil rig center of Port Arthur, situated on Sabine Pass and another intracoastal canal. Ugliness everywhere. We take a moment to regroup with the help of a security guard as we had pulled into an oil company lot. Soooo, which way should we go, lol.

O

We are on our way to Rockport. This has been our destination to hopefully spend a couple of the winter months. We have to travel through Galveston, which is like a Disneyworld in Texas, not RV friendly unless you are in an expensive RV site. Lots of beautiful, old homes but we are driving through.

We are in Texas, the Lone Star State. I am seeing cowboy hats, brahmas bulls, longhorns and the famous Smoke BBQ restaurants. We are traveling along Hwy 35, the Texas Independence Highway.

 

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Tabasco and salt

Our destination today is Avery Island. The original and continuing home of Tabasco sauce.

In the mid 1800's Edmund Mciilhenny married into the Avery family and moved onto Avery Island off the south coast of Louisiana. From pepper plants obtained shortly after the civil war he cultivated a crop, invented a product and founded a company. The capsicum pepper plants and their recipe, first grown on Avery Island after the civil war, was so unique it was granted a patent.

 

The peppers are mashed and fermented for a minimum of three years in white oak barrels that they obtain from the Jack Daniels company. Because Jack Daniels can only use their barrels once as they advertise "aged whiskey in one time used barrels". So Tabasco buys these barrels and uses them until they deteriorate. The company then chops them up and sells them as BBQ smoking chips. It is an interesting history of a sauce that is familiar to everyone. It is sold in over 160 countries. It has growing fields in south and Central America but all production is done at the plant on Avery Island.

As it is Saturday we don't see the plant assembly line in motion.... we see a video, a small museum and their general store where you can, of course, buy anything Tabasco related.

The other interesting aspect of this is the salt mining in the area. From what we can tell it is the basis for Morton Salt. The island is basically a salt dome, some say as deep as Mount Everest is high, surrounded by bayous, which are slow moving, muddy rivers.

It is such a unique and interesting area, this southern part of Louisiana. After Tabasco land we see a Cajun meat shop and make a quick stop. We come out with more sausage.....more boudin, syrup sausage, which is new to us and a couple more hot sausages for the freezer.

I'm still looking for "the" place for a po' boy and hopefully some jambalaya before we leave Louisiana. Have found a connection for a state park just inside Texas, 20 miles south of Port Arthur. The weather and the availability of camp sites will dictate how fast and how far we travel each day from now on. The next two weeks are looking like a mixed bag of weather and temperatures. It would be nice to settle down and stay off the highways for the Thanksgiving weekend.

A dinner of leftover rice.....adding boudin sausage, chicken, mushrooms and peppers, some Tabasco chipotle sauce and Creole spices. Mouth on fire, but capsicum peppers are good for you:)

We take it one day at a time.

 

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Paradise back to parking lot

We left Grand Isle in a humid and warm morning. It is so hard to be productive when your energy is sapped despite a shower. We are slowly? heading west. We are traveling along the InterCoastal Waterway through bayous and small towns. The weather forecast is for possible thunderstorms this afternoon. They are a reality as we travel along the Black Bayou on our way to Morgan City. Rain and wind harder that anything we have experienced since Tumbler Ridge on our Yukon Trip. We are grateful we are on back roads and the traffic is minimal so slowing down doesn't present a problem. This is just before the deluge started, still just ominous dark sky and the beginning of the wind.

We have had to stop for a raised bridge. Not an inconvenience but a photo opportunity to watch the barges moving up and down the bayous.

This barge is being pulled and pushed.

I'm having a hard time trying to describe today. There is beauty along this route but primarily it is oil rig industry. I have never seen so many 'oversized' trucks and semis on the road. There are bayou canals with boat building marinas, oil rig platforms and every kind of service industry required to support this industry. I haven't been to Fort McMurray, but I think it must be similar. We are sitting in a Walmart lot, which a local sherriff said was probably the best place for us to spend the night. It is busier than anything we have seen yet on our trip. We have cooked prawns, garlic toast in the middle of traffic bedlam, lol. Sometimes it is really the only way to experience a community. Some places we stay in are peaceful and quiet, others are a representation of industry at its best and worst. Nobody seems to take much notice of us other than a passing interest and a checking out of our licence plates. Other than that it's just Friday night shopping at Walmart, the same as anywhere, even Courtenay. The temperature is still warm but the humidity has reduced to a comfortable level.

 

Two old friends flip over a cart to sit on to rest while they wait for a bus. They share the cart while talking quietly, flip it back up and get on the bus, to where? We can only guess.....maybe a casino for the evening. There are several along this stretch of highway, mostly associated with truck stops.

 

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A Church on Stilts

Missing from my previous post, but a building I loved to look at. Had to add it but couldn't figure out how I lost it...

 

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Last Day in Grand Isle

At least twice a day we talk about whether we should stay or should we move on. Today the decision is made. We will be back on the highway tomorrow. This whole trip we have been motivated by places we have had on our must see list and what the weather ahead holds for us. Grand Isle is a beautiful isolated strip of land and the people are as wonderful and friendly as we had been told.
As many times as we drive down the main road, which is also Hwy 1, I so enjoy looking at all the houses, summer homes, cabins and even the commercial buildings all up on stilts and everyplace has a name.

The Post Office

The local church

Summer home and guest cottage

This is a community that is a paradox of affluent vacation residences and working class homes. Either one can be on a canal with a pleasure boat or working boat sitting in their 'front yard'.
I needed to do some email printing and the library was closed. We went to the Port Commission/tourist office and they had wifi and a printer which we were welcome to use. It's like visiting with friends....everyone has time to visit, share information and generally just have a chin wag. The Police Chief came in, why I'm not sure, but we ended up having an exchange of cooking recipes from our homemade clam chowder to his gumbo and jambalaya ingredients. It's times like this that I don't want to move on. I just want to stay and get to know these people but if that was the way we traveled we'd still be in Saskatchewan. Even going to the post office to mail my Italy Walk
forms is a social event. Everybody loves to talk and visit. Island time Mon....

I'm still not really sure of my history of this area except that they, the Cajuns, are originally from our Maritime area, known as Acadians. We stop at the Shrimp Shed to buy more more prawns to fill the freezer before leaving.
The conflicting thoughts of going or staying are decided this afternoon as the humidity saps our energy. Everything feels damp and the only way to combat the dampness is to run the air conditioner. We have a short walk on the empty beach to get rid of our prawn heads, return to cook dinner and finish our organizing for tomorrow's departure.

A quiet evening sipping Pennsylvania Dutch egg nog listening to Charlie Musselwhite. Another beautiful spot along this wonderful journey we are traveling.

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Oil Rigs and Shrimp Fishers

After a clean up day we are ready to go exploring. Our first stop is at a marina close to the state park. It is such an interesting area, so many waterways and canals. There is more water than land. A crew of Air Boats comes roaring into the dock. They work for BP? British Petrolium, or the Louisiana Government. Not sure, but a quick conversation with one of the operators tells us they are working transporting BP workers out to the oil rigs. Apparently there was a hurricane a couple of months ago that did more damage in the Gulf and they are still doing repairs. It is a well orchestrated manouver as they bring three boats ashore and put three new ones into the water. We watch and listen and hear that the water is 'rough out there'. Some of the 600 oil rigs are as much as 150 miles out into the Gulf.

Each boat is manned by one person, but they travel in threes from dock to rig across open water that is probably dangerous on any given day. We never know what we will find when we turn down a road.

Through the town of Grand Isle on our way to Port Fourchon, the Center of the oil industry and the southern most point of Louisiana. We stop at Bridgeside Marina in search of a 'PO Boy' recommended as the best. Unfortunately for us they have closed down their food section for the season. There is an interesting looking thing on the counter ...I ask what it is and the young woman tells me it is from her 'Honeybee Party'...a wedding shower that her granny in law made for the party.

I wasn't sure what it was...turns out it is a rice crispy cake made in the shape of a fish. Her fiancé didn't want to cut it up cos it was sooo pretty. Someone took the head off it and she brought the remainder to the store. We are now the proud owners of the tail portion. From the Yukon to Louisiana I always seem to be the recipient of someones birthday, anniversary and now wedding shower cake. Back to the truck.

There is a fishing pier that we walk onto. I am always eager to converse with people, asking what's happening. This is the first time I felt we were speaking a different language. Apparently they are fishing for fish, lol..go figure...a small fish is sitting on the dock called a croaker, no more that 6 inches long. It's not long on conversation either.

Port Fourchon is hard to describe. It appears to be the hub of the oil rig jump off site. There is so much to try to describe, huge deep sea rig ships, crew boats for the oil rigs, helicopter pads, every kind of supply company needed for this huge industry. Names like Haliburton, Chevron, British Petroleum.

We stopped to take pictures of a huge "rig ship". Everything is fenced off, gated and no trespassing. Again I am always willing to risk our safety based on being innocent tourists. As we took this picture I went to the gate to ask if there was any way we might get a tour, Bahahaaa ...the young woman at the gate politely told me they will watch us for maybe 2/3 minutes then a security person will approach us and remove us. She was very personable and gave me some good information about touring in the area after we left this particular place. A highly protected and probably very political area.

Right in the middle of all this is a commercial fishing harbour. I remember when the BP spill happened in the Gulf in April 2010 where 11 people died and a horrendous spill compromised the environmental health of the Gulf and it's fishing industry. Interesting to see it all. How does everyone justify their existence and how do the active fishers feel today about their lively hood.

These are things we read about and watch on the news but it is discomfiting to see it in reality. Everywhere we have traveled people have been very forthcoming and friendly. Today I felt a somewhat negative atmosphere. Can you blame them. Their fishing livelihood doesn't seem to be able to compete with the global need for oil.

On a brighter side, on our way back to camp along the bayous we spot flashes of pink birds. We are able to pull over on the side of the road that takes us back to Grand Isle. They are Roseate Spoonbills, from the Ibis family, feeding in the grasses. There are Curlews, egrets and pelicans. It is a wonderful moment to see them feeding and somewhat oblivious to us watching them. These pictures are from my iPad. Bobs pictures from his camera are much clearer but I can't attach them to my blog. A

Back to camp and BBQ and a sweet sunset.

An interesting day on the Gulf.

 

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Bath time for Bertha and her "toad"

An overcast windy day and cooler temperatures. I walked the campsite road in the morning to get some fresh air and a little exercise in case the rains came back.
Still undecided as to how long we will stay here, we took advantage of the cool day to do a wholesale cleaning. Inside vacuuming and floor wash, scouring the kitchen and the bathroom...just like at home only on a smaller scale. The big job was the RV and the truck. More than 7000 miles of road grime and assorted bugs have now been washed into the Gulf of Mexico.
I think all our hard work before we left, waxing and polishing has paid off because the whole rig looks pretty shiny now that the dirt is gone.

Everyday can't be exciting. Some days are just satisfying and now if the rain will hold off we will reward ourselves with a rib-eye steak, some mushrooms, Gulf prawns and a coleslaw.

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Marine environment of the Southern kind

I woke up to bright flashes of lightening but no thunder....strange...how far away does that mean the storm is? How far out in the Gulf is the storm to see the lightning but not hear the thunder. Two hours later the thunder was here too. We have had heavy rain and wind all morning. A soggy, wet Paradise. And the forecast doesn't look good for the next week. Do we move on or stick it out, that is today's dilemma.

We need to get out so drive into the small community of Grand Isle which is mostly empty.

The fleet and the pelicans

We find a dock that sells prawns right off the boat. Six pounds for $28. Dinner for a few nights to come.

It is a summer resort area and as the woman at tourist info told us, this is "our" time. The quiet, non tourist time, but still a mostly fine climate through the winter. Today is an exception that we hope will pass on by.There is one super market that really is 'super'. It has a well stocked grocery store, liquor outlet and hardware.

Back to the barn for a quiet afternoon waiting out the wet weather. By dusk it is calm and warm again but still overcast. Prawns for dinner...maybe a Monday night football game?...it is rather decadent to have unlimited power so we have the TV on, a rare occasion for us.

These are the brutes that have taken chunks out of me....maybe they are even worse in the summer but I don't care I still don't like the results.

 

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