From New Orleans to Alabama

Saturday, May 21 - We left the Big Easy about 9:00 this morning, heading East.  We found our freeway without incident, after a quick stop at the Winn Dixie and McDonalds (for Joe's soda), and came across the end of Lake Pontchartrain.   We had water on both sides of us.  I looked out my window and saw what I thought was our next bridge, and it looked pretty steep and high, but it turned out to be a roller coaster.  Whew!  That was a relief. 

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As we were driving along the highway, I was checking every creek, canal and river for alligators, and I did see one swimming along in a brackish pond.  We had our first bird hit the window this morning, so we added to the roadkill on the road.  We came past this nice little green area, I'm sure it was quite swampy, just as we crossed into Mississippi, so we said goodbye to Louisiana.  We had a good time there.

This is another state full of bridges, and these have really nice walking/running paths on them.  They seemed to get a lot of use.

 
We drove Highway 90 right along the coast -- a beautiful drive!  There was street parking right along the beach so we finally pulled over, and I finally got to get my feet in the Gulf!  We were in the Bay St. Louis/Pass Christian area here.  I dropped the camera in the sand here so I didn't get any pictures of us at the water's edge.  Fortunately, the camera seems ok, after Joe used the blow dryer and eyeglass cleaner on it. 









 We could imagine hurricanes blasting into this area, but there were sure some beautiful beachfront homes along this drive.

Some of this beach area was cordoned off and posted with a sign that the Least Terns were nesting.

 

Last year we drove past many snow fences in Canada and Montana.  This year, we are seeing sand fences.  We prefer the northern routes over the southern ones -- the humidity has caught up with us, and it is supposed to be 90 here tomorrow. 

Mississippi has a pretty nice piece of the Gulf Coast.  We saw gas prices in Mississippi of $3.42 today.  Unfortunately, we didn't need gas then, and now we are back to the $3.77 prices.  We are hoping Florida will be better.  The Biloxi beach was nice, as well, and there was a Hard Rock Cafe & Casino right along the coast, which I thought looked very interesting and worth a stop, but alas, we drove on past.


 

 We are always checking out the bridges, and in this area, we saw a railroad bridge that has a rotating section to allow boats to pass through.  We didn't know if this was an inactive railroad and this was a permanent position, or if it does still actually rotate.  Sure hope a train doesn't come along unexpectedly! It didn't move while we were passing.

The color of the soil always surprises me in this part of the country, although I know Georgia has really red clay.  This is a nice contrast to the white beach.  As Joe is driving along, gawking out one side, then the other, I'm thinking he's practicing his NASCAR driving again -- this time it's the blocking.  I'm sure the people behind us keep hoping we will turn off.  So far, no one has reported him for erratic driving -- at least that we know of -- but there would have been opportunities today.

As we came through Mobile, we spotted a Carnival cruise ship in port -- the Elation (which we have actually cruised on).  We would have liked to have just got right on it and went wherever it was going.  That's the first cruise ship we've seen, although I think we just missed the one in New Orleans.

Then we went through the Mobile tunnel, which actually goes UNDER the Gulf of Mexico.  That's amazing to me.

Just after we came out of the tunnel, we passed a Battleship Memorial Park, which looked interesting.  There  were several ships and planes on display, including a B-52, which Joe is always interested in examining. We didn't know anything about it, but maybe next time we come this way we can stop and tour it.

We got back off of I-10 and came the scenic route down Hwy 98, then 59 and 42 to Gulf State Park, near Orange Beach which John had recommended.  We passed through the very pretty town of Fairhope on this route, and it had lots of blooming flowers at every corner.  Looked like a very pleasant place to live.

We got to the state park just after 3:00 and lucked out with getting a spot.  There's a big music fest in town tonight, expecting a crowd of 35,000, just up the highway about a mile, and this campground was very nearly full.  This music fest is called "The Hangout" at Gulf Shores, and we could hear the music and applause from our camp site.  We rested for a while, then drove into the town of Orange Beach, but decided John had really meant this beach along here, which is a national seashore.  The beach is gorgous, with white, sugary sand, and the waves were rolling in with a pretty good surf.  There was even a wedding getting ready to start, right on the beach.  We saw the arch and chairs set up, and the bridal party as well, including the bride getting ready to walk across the beach.

We plan to take our lawn chairs and have some beach time tomorrow, after we drive over to Pensacola to the Naval Museum.  It's been many years since we spent any time on the gulf beaches (since my kids were young).  We enjoyed our drive today and are looking forward to getting into the water tomorrow.

On our own in the Big Easy

Friday, May 20 - On our first two tourist days, we used the shuttle and tour buses, but I knew we would not get out of this city without Joe needing to drive it himself, so that was the plan for today.  I got the laundry caught up this morning, then we headed into the art district, which is just west of the French Quarter, to the New Orleans GlassWorks & PrintMaking studio.  We plugged the address into Lucille and she got us next door (for some reason, the book listed 722, but the actual address was 727, but it was close enough).  This was a fantastic stop -- it wasn't a tour, we actually got to just sit and watch two artists making glass creations.  The two of them (husband and wife) were working on a mardi gras type cast-glass creation.  It was part of a much larger art piece, so when they finished that part and put it in the cooler, they took and break and she talked to us for a few minutes and explained that she rents time from this place that has two continuous-melt furnaces.  We walked through the showroom and they had some fantastic pieces there (no pictures allowed), then we went back to the workroom and watched  them work on some glass leaves.  It was very interesting, and amazing.

Cathy told us there was a Crystal Hamburger place on Bourbon Street (similar to White Castle hamburgers), so that was our next venture, and fortunately we even found a place to park on the street for this place.  We then drove on down through Bourbon Street and parked down by the marketplace we had walked through on Wednesday so I could pick up a few items I had spotted then.  The streets were full of pedestrians and street traffic through this area was heavy, but Joe managed not to hit any persons or mules.  (We did follow a mule and carriage for a little while.)

Next, we decided to see if we could drive by the Superdome, since we had seen it from a distance every time we had come into the city.  We followed signs and got near it, but could not get right beside it.  The basketball stadium is right next to it and I got a picture of it.

So Joe says, "I wonder where this road goes," and of course we took it.  Well it took us right across the Mississippi River!  So much for the Superdome - we never did get back to that!  We tried to get right back on the bridge to come back across, but that was a toll bridge and we didn't think we had enough change for that (it turned out it cost $1), so he didn't take that ramp.  So we're driving along, on Mardi Gras Boulevard, and I mentioned that Cathy said they had gone to someplace here where you could see some of the Mardi Gras floats.  Sure enough, right in front of us was the sign to Mardi Gras World.  We didn't intend to go to that, but we happened to be in that lane and were forced to turn, so off we went again.  We ended up right along the river bank, but we did see a few floats sitting outside.

Finally, he resorted to Lucille, so he clicked on the campground address to let her bring us home.  The next thing we knew, Lucille was saying "turn right onto ferry."  And sure enough, we ended up on the ferry across the Mississippi River -- that would be the "flooded, fast-moving Mississippi River."  So we were first in line, not at all sure what we were doing, or even if it was running, but cars slowly started building up behind us, and we could see some boat, possibly a ferry, moving out in the river.  It came and picked us up, and we drove right on just like we knew what we were doing.  And it cost $1.

We actually like ferry rides, but I didn't really want to be on this river on this trip.  But it was good.  The river was certainly flowing rapidly.  Joe said we were seeing the river walk from the river side, and I guess we were.

We watched a barge go past, and the steamship Natchez was also out here with us.

We finally got back to the the right side of the river, and headed to the campground.  We drove up and down Canal Street several times today, so Joe feels like he has mastered this city.  On our way home, we passed the area close to the Seventh Ward where artists had painted beautiful scenes on the support pilings under I-10.  We had seen this on the bus tour, don't know if they are only in one part of the city, or if this was a different group, but they were pretty awesome.  When I-10 was built, the beautiful
live oaks along Clairborne Avenue were torn down to make way for the interstate. This adversely affected property values in the neighborhood. Residents responded by painting images of these trees and other scenes on the cement pilings that replaced the trees. There are dozens of these paintings and they are very good.

As we got close to home, we tried to scope out our route for tomorrow as we head east.  There are lots of freeways, bridges, and one-way streets here so we tried to educate ourselves a little so we don't have to be too creative when we are in the RV towing the car.  We think we have a plan, so I'm sure Joe will leave with confidence!  Florida, here we come.




 

Swamp and Bayou Tour

Thursday, May 19 - Well, today we went looking for gators.  We took the shuttle back to the river and took another grayline tour, this one of the swamp and bayou in the Jean Lafite National Historical Park.

There were only 8-10 of us, so we had lots of room to move around on our pontoon boat.

We headed out through the first canal, into a second larger canal, then that opened up into a bayou.  A canal is man-made (most of these were made by the oil companies to haul their equipment in and out) whereas a bayou (defined as  "a sluggish marshy tributary of a lake or river") is a natural body of water.  Many canals dead-end.   You will see in later pictures that the canal gets wider.

 We saw lots and lots of turtles.  Actually, this has been the year of the turtle for us, because we have seen turtles throughout our entire trip, in Missouri, Indiana, Texas and now in Louisiana.  We probably saw a couple dozen on this boat ride.

Most of them were like this one, but we did see a soft-shelled turtle just under the surface of the water.  And back at the camp, they had a large alligator turtle, and a large soft-shell turtle in a tank.

Then we started seeing gators.  Most of them were fairly small, but they were really hard to see in the mossy stuff on top of this water.

Our boat driver explained some of the foliage we were seeing.  This is a cypress tree, and around its base are what is called "knees" which help support the tree.  He said that if this tree fell into the water, it would not rot, and years later the wood would be the same as if it were still standing.

Alligators are territorial so the guide knew where to look for the gators, but he said there is one big one here called "Big Joe" (of course) that rules the roost, and he roams this entire bayou, starting at this sign.

He said they don't always see him, he just comes out when he wants something to eat, and, fortunately or unfortunately, we did not see him today.  But we saw more gators, some a little larger than the first ones we had seen.

On this middle picture, the gator is lying on the log.

Along the way, we passed some structures including this cabin, which has been used in a couple of movies.  This bayou was used in the movie "Pelican Brief" and some of the jungle scenes from the Survival TV series were also filmed here. 

We saw a lot of Spanish moss hanging on trees, and we have seen this throughout the south as we drive.  On these trees, though, we also had to watch out for any snakes that might want to drop in on us.  We didn't have any of those visitors, thankfully.  We were told that they used to make pillows and mattresses out of this Spanish moss.  They would soak it in water to get rid of any living varmints in it, then dry it out and bundle it.  But they had to do this about once a month because bugs would re-inhabit the moss.  Another source of bedbugs, I guess.  As we went into the bigger bayou, we same a couple of different species of birds.  The white one is an egret, I forget what the blue one was.

Our boat captain then got out his show and tell.  He had an alligator skull, which was very heavy.  He told us they measure alligators in the water by the inches between their nostrils and their eyes.  Each inch equals a foot in length, and this is useful when they are trying to capture gators in the water, so they know how big a gator they are dealing with, even if they can only see its head.

Then he got out his real surprise -- a live alligator.  He showed us how to hold it, and pointed out that it's mouth was taped shut.  Guess who was the first brave soul to to step forward!

We all took our turn, the Joe decided he needed a second look.

This gator is about 3 years old, so you can see he has a lot of growing to do.  The largest gator we saw today was a female back in the weeds.  The boat captain tried to get her to move by throwing ice toward her (they used to feed them marshmellows but since this is now a national park, that is no longer allowed), but she never did come out where we could see her very good.  So we headed back in, still keeping an eye out for any life in or out of the water.  Just before we got to the dock, a gator led us in, and we later found it lying right by the edge of the water.

We finished the tour and headed back to town, for lunch at Bubba Gumps.  Joe opted for some shrimp dish, of course, but I stayed safe with a cheeseburger (which was very good).

They have 2 license-plate size signs on each  table that say "Run Forrest Run" or "Stop Forrest Stop" and if you need a server, you turn up the "Stop" one and any server going by will stop to see what you want.  A rather unique idea, I thought.

We finished our nice lunch and started heading back to the bus stop, stepping in and out of gift shops along the way (there were a lot of them.  As we waited for the bus, a very colorful gal walked by us, and we had seen her yesterday in similar garb.  She said she was a teacher, and ran a summer dance camp, and this was her way to raise funds for her summer program.  She expected a tip for her picture, so we finally dug up $1.

We got back to the campground about 4:30 and rested for a while, although today was not nearly as tiring as yesterday.  We decided to walk over to the bar area, where they serve pizza and wings, so we relaxed on the patio overlooking the navigational canal we are camped on, a very pretty, restful view.  It was a good day.