This is our last day in the Baton Rouge/New Orleans corridor. Spent the morning in the Bass Pro store. It is not as big as the original one in Missouri but I enjoyed it more because of its Louisiana theme. Live Oak moss everywhere, crocodiles, and snapping turtles along with the regular animals and birds. Plus add all the Christmas decorations now too and you have visual overload.
Had a really good bowl of clam chowder and headed back to the RV. We are pretty much putting in time waiting for my art supply parcel to be delivered. It is on track for a 3:00 delivery to the Gonzales post office for the second time. Email from FedEx of its arrival and so we are back out on a crazy busy Friday afternoon. We do our shopping, fuel up and prepare to leave for Grand Isle in the morning. We have appreciated Cabelas letting us stay in their parking lot while we did day trip touring of this area but after a week we are tired of city life and ready to get back to the small towns we enjoy.
We are hooked up, sani chores completed but when we pull out of the lot Bob realizes our trailer breaks aren't working. We are not going anywhere until this problem is solved. Luckily Bob had been watching carefully when the diesel shop was trying to find the problem with the exhaust brake. He found a wire that wasn't connected properly. We are very relieved because we would have been sitting for another two days til they opened on Monday. These are some of the things that keep the stress locked tightly in Bobs neck.
Our GPS zig zags us across a couple of highways til we are finally on Hwy 1 which will take us all the way to Grand Isle. We have crossed the 'Missipi' possibly for the last time. To follow it completely to the end would mean pulling the RV through New Orleans. It was bad enough with just the truck so we will settle for knowing it is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico just a stones throw to the east from where we are camped.
We are in Cajun country, Thibodaux, Lafourche, a town called Cut Off and to Leeville where the toll raised-highway begins. We are traveling along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Bayou Lafourche. Everything, both old and new, is built right on the edge of the water. Huge trawlers pull up to the shore where there will be a deck or platform to provide a small bit of land to call home. At places you will see a mail box sitting by itself among the reeds waiting for its resident to return from fishing. The waterway is the life to all these fishing communities that both live and work on the bayou. There are beautiful homes and sugar plantations set back from the highway and across the road you see an old shack where someone is fishing from their porch. It's the weekend and communities are out doing Saturday morning things like anywhere. People are standing in the intersections collecting money for their Relay for Life, we come to a stop because a sheriff in front of us puts on his lights, stops, gets out and picks up a garbage can that has blown into the road. We continue through town only to be stopped by another sheriff that is controlling traffic at an intersection for what we think may be a funeral ....there are throngs of people and an old white Cadillac hearse parked by the side of the road.
A beautiful cemetary
We arrive at Grand Isle, our Gulf of Mexico paradise for at least the next couple of weeks. It's been more than 3 months since we left home and I think this may be the place for us to recoup and get the travel juices revitalized. The literal and 'figurative' end of the road is a State Park, $20 a night for full hookups, modern bathrooms and showers and even free laundry facilities and wifi.
It is hot, humid and we are exhausted. We manage a BBQ steak with our comfort food pack of veggies and some wine. We sit outside in the dark, damp, warm evening watching the almost full moon rise in the east where the Missipi is flowing to its end.
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