Mother's Day

Sunday, May 8 - Happy Mother's Day to all mothers reading my blog.  I miss my mother every day. 

After our day off yesterday, we got on the road at 9:00 this morning.  We got to see our 6 baby geese as we drove out of the park.  As we drove through Arkansas, we drove through the town of Johnny Cash's birthplace, Kingsland -- there was a small sign, and an even smaller town.  We crossed into Louisiana about 2:00 p.m., 86 degrees and probably humidity about equal to that.  We saw some beautiful flowering trees that we assumed to be magnolias, which is the Louisiana state flower.

We drove through a town named "Dixie Inn," so we are still keeping our travels in the family.  Then we crossed the Red River, another flooded river. 

We chose our route today to avoid Shreveport, but it turned out that we just made it a longer drive.  Then, coming through Mansfield, we got caught in a speed trap, right where the speed limit changed from 45 to 35 (Joe was going 49, and he said he never in his life got a speeding ticket for going 49 mph!!).  Anyhow, we'll find out tomorrow what the cost of that will be, or maybe he has to hang around Louisiana and go to driving school. 

This just made our long day longer, and we finally worked our way over to 191, the "scenic byway" along the Louisiana side of Toledo Bend.  This also was a waste of time, with only a couple glimpses of the lake, and the drive wasn't even particularly pretty.  We chose the Louisiana side because there seemed to be more camping on this side, but it turned out to be a little more ambitious travel day than we expected -- 303 miles; we got to our campsite about 6:00 p.m., and it was 91 degrees.  The campground is very nice, but they are amazingly dry here.  There is a "burn ban" in effect, they haven't had any rain here for a long time, and the lake is 8 feet below normal.  Which is really too bad, since there is so much flooding not very far from here. 

Joe had put in a long day, so he relaxed for a little bit and sulked about his ticket.  He's accepting donations, so anyone wanting to contribute, just call and we'll give you an address where we can get mail.

After a quick dinner, we drove down to the lake, but it was not very impressive.  We will head south along it tomorrow, and hopefully it will be a little grander.  We have always heard about bass fishing tournaments on Toledo Bend, so it was some place we thought we should see. 

The boat docks here are out of the water just like we are used to in Arizona.

Today wasn't a great day, so hopefully tomorrow will be a better one.