Starting Up the Mississippi-Baton Rouge to Simmesport/Three Rivers RA

May 1, 2014-Greenville, Miss.-K-

All is well with us.  We have finally started our trip up the Mississippi, and this is the first days drive.  We are so excited to be starting something we have never done and something we have always wanted to do, which is to be following the spring north. It will be really interesting to watch the changes in foliage as we head north. For some reason, we set the map up on the route we actually took, and when we preview the embedded version, Google has changed it to what Google Maps thinks it should be when you paste it into the blog-frustrating! There's two large loops north of I-10 that we actually did follow, at times on the levee top, where the map shows us further west of the river.

We left Abbeville, LA on April 15th and headed east and north and in order to avoid Baton Rouge.  It wasn't too long when we came upon the Mississippi levee that we would follow all day.  Unfortunately the views of the river are nil because of that.  Mostly they are used for grazing cows and horses.  But the grass is lush.  There are huge fields of winter wheat that will be harvested around the end of May after which they will plant soybeans. The wheat adds nitrogen to the soil for the soybeans. Corn has just been planted and is about 3" high.

Cows grazing on the levee.

We really wanted to get up on the levees, but most of the access roads are posted, so it wasn't an option. However, we finally found a way to get over it and on the water for a short spell.

Watch that first step of the deck!

The water was a bit high from all the snows up north.

Yippee we made it to the river!!!

Winter wheat field on Bean Field Road, near Simmesport, LA

Ladybugs

Lone church and cemetery carved out of a soon to be planted field.

I hope so.

We ended our first day at Three Rivers Wildlife Management Area. VERY interesting area, mainly run by the Army Corps of Engineers. We had a free camp spot to ourselves for most of our stay. (We did get invaded by a cranky fisherman and his wife, but then, I'm cranky most of the time too, so we just sat and glared at each other-well, I sat-he leaned on the tailgate of his truck). The kayaking there would have been great, but for the wind, so we did some driving around and checking things out, as well as finishing the installation of a fourth solar panel on the roof. The road past the campground (Bean Field Road) continued on into the gigantic winter wheat field in the pics above-the wheat was almost above the car and was a beautiful spring green color. There was an ACOE worker that visited us every day, and we learned a lot from him about the whole Three Rivers system he worked in. It turns out that 3 rivers all almost come together there-The Mississippi, the Atchafalaya and the Red. This is where it got interesting-back in the 1800's, Captain Shreve, a riverboat captain and whom Shreveport is named after, decided to cut a channel to eliminate a long switchback in the Mississippi and make a straighter riverbed. Then, in the early 1900's, the ACOE built levees and lock systems all along the Mississippi, and the combination of the two started caused the Mississippi to start using the Atchafalaya drainage and begin to abandon it's existing course from there down through Baton Rouge and on to New Orleans. The ramifications of that change were enormous if it were allowed to continue, between the petroleum industry that had built up along the lower river that used it for water in manufacturing and for shipping, the major cities that relied on it for drinking water, and the huge amount of agriculture down here.

In the early 1950's they built most of what exists today-some channels to let the Red river into the Atchafalaya as it always did, and some other dams and channels to insure the Mississippi stays in it's existing bed, along with a lock for barge tows to move back and forth between the Atchafalaya/Red and the Mississippi. Later flooding, I believe in the 70's, cause them to construct more flow control dams beyond where we were staying, which we checked out on a drive, and again when we left, as they were on our route.

 Camp at Three Rivers. The lock (below) is on our left, about 1/4 mile away

Adding panel #4, which gives us about 25 amps of recharging power on sunny days & about 4 to 5 on the cloudy ones.  

The lock on the Atchafalaya side-they lower the tows down to the Mississippi, and bring the empty barges back through the same way.

A tow moving into the lock. 

Gottcha!

4-7-14 A Ride Around the Block in Louisiana

Friends that know us well, know of our love of "rides around the block" and looking for "blank spots on the map", and going there to see just how blank the area really is! In Westcliffe, we have an around the block ride that's @ 20 to 25 miles, and takes 2 & 1/2 hours. We have taken our neighbor (whose name shall remain nameless to protect his privacy-that okay there "longpants"?) around on it twice, once while he drove, and he still can't do it solo!

On Monday, April 7th, we combined both approaches and took a drive over a road we had driven on when we came into Abbeville from Texas in 2010. Rt. 82 originates near  Port Arthur, Texas, which is where we left from in 2010 and headed east to Cameron, Louisiana and on to Abbeville. We always wanted to go back and explore the country along that lonely road, which we did on this drive. As the saying goes, "It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there"!

That southwest corner of Louisiana, an area about 100 miles long and 50 miles deep, is all marshland-there is no shore, and no beaches. It's also full of lakes, both large and small, and is a lot like a map of northern Canada, with few roads and lots of lonely country. People do live there, in the few places high enough to be out of the water, but recent hurricanes in the last 10 years have destroyed a lot of property, and many people have left, not bothering to rebuild. Quite a few places are/were weekend getaways and hunting/fishing camps. Other than the 2 state highways that traverse it (82 and 27), every side road dead ends, either at a pier, an oil installation or at a locked gate. There are also a bunch of wildlife refuges-some accessible by car, but most only accessible by boat. We poked around 2 of them, Rockefeller State Wildlife Refuge and Cameron Prairie NWR.

The road out of the campground (Palmetto Island State Park) ends at Rt 82, so from there to Forked Island you are still in farmland, but at that town you cross the intracoastal waterway on a very tall bridge, and down on the other side, the marsh begins and you are surrounded by marsh grass off and on for the next 60 miles.

We had spotted a road on Google Maps, Freshwater City Road, that left Rt. 82 at Pecan Island, and headed south down to the Gulf, so we did too. What a crazy drive! It was about 12 miles long, and continued on in even taller marsh grass. The pavement soon quit and we were on gravel. Don't ask me where they got it-there is none in southern LA, and no rocks you could crush to make it with either. After a bit, we came to some houses, one of which was a really funky house that had a pair of rowboat planters out front. The place was manicured to  "T", something you just don't see in these parts, and whoever was living in it was doing a beautiful job. We didn't get the greatest pictures here, as it's a little weird to be standing out on a road taking pics of someone's house. Especially in southern Louisiana-it could be detrimental to one's lead-free health.

Across and down the road from that place was...grazing CATTLE! And the pavement also restarted, after a 5 mile hiatus. 

This road did not have any curves-every turn was a right angle change in direction, and when we whipped around a corner on one of them, we got a little surprise...we weren't sure who had the right of way, but at least the boat was in the proper lane.

A couple more turns & we saw what was going on-shrimpers, and that we were at the end of the road. The picnic bench is a tiny Fish and Wildlife picnicking & fishing area. Nearby were docks for oil service companies as well as the fishermen, all on a channel that took them into the Gulf of Mexico.

The fellow in the blue coat out at the end was fishing, and hobbled all the way over to us to ask for a light-we didn't have a thing with us to light a smoke-we felt bad, as he struggled so to walk. We also have NO idea how he got there, as there was no car, and there were no houses for miles. His "tackle box" was a plastic grocery bag.

All in all, it was a great side trip-here's some other sights we saw along the way:

Glad they replaced the bridge!!!

We continued west when we got to Rt. 82, stopping somewhere alongside it to eat the lunch we brought along. There's not much of anything but marshland on the 30 miles between Freshwater City Road and the Rockefeller National Wildlife Refuge's west end, where the only road into the Refuge (Price Lake Road), heads south for 3 miles before dead-ending at a dock and an observation tower. 

We took a few pics there, but discovered the first flight of stairs was missing off the observation tower! You could get on it if you were nimble enough to jump up and grab the last stair tread and pull yourself up, but those days are long over for me! I asked K to do her wifely duty and let me stand on her shoulders, but she just laughed and tried to push me off the dock and into the alligator infested waters. Cheesh-I've lost enough hair without one of them chewing the rest off! Somehow, we forgot to get a pic of the tower on top of it all, but here's a Heron fishing off the dock. Big "L's" on our foreheads!

Another 32 miles took us through Grand Chenier, one of the towns struggling to survive, with less and less structures remaining after each hurricane that comes through, and into Cameron. Along the way, we tried to take Earl Road, which, had we been successful, ran deep into the marshlands to the north, and by a couple of remote Refuges, and wound back down into the back side of Cameron. Alas, we started up Earl Road, waved at the two old guys sitting on their front porch, went 2 miles north, around a 90 degree left and ran smack into a locked, steel gate. HATE it when that happens! We got turned around and retreated back to Rt.82, waved at the two guys again, and headed west into Cameron. Which we ALSO neglected to take any pictures of!  So, here instead are some pics from 2010, coming east on Rt. 82 from Texas. Rt 82 starts and ends at Cameron, and to continue on it or get to Cameron from Texas, you have to board a free ferry across the outlet of Calcasieu Lake.

Approaching the bridge over Sabine Pass, which is the Texas-Louisiana border, from the Texas side.

View off the top of the bridge, looking south at a jacked up oil rig under repair. We had taken a drive down through there a few days before and the thing was huge. 

We also visited a non-existent Texas State Park on that same drive, that was literally blown away in a hurricane, leaving only a few stretches of asphalt, and that was it. All  the buildings were gone.

Along Rt. 82 heading to the Cameron ferry through Johnsons Bayou and Holly Beach.

Along Rt. 82 heading to the Cameron ferry

End of the road, and waiting for the boat.

Random ferry passenger from that red car next to me.

 Another random ferry passenger!

No idea what this boat was for, but it sure was impressive! And I used to think the hose reels on the airports fuel trucks were big!

A local fix-it guy....couldn't cure my hair loss though.

So from Cameron now (in 2014) we back-tracked on Rt. 82 to to Rt. 27, and headed north towards Lake Charles. The last stop was along this road out of the great marsh, at Cameron Prairie NWF. Lots to see here, with a 1/2 mile boardwalk through a section of open swamp, and a drive around a bigger section of the Refuge, with a lot of alligators around.

Couple of boardwalk pics above

You gotta wonder who's crazy enough to try and take a bite out of an alligator, much less two! So THIS what they mean by "gator bites" on the restaurant menus...

Hunting from his man blind. I wonder if he has a Labrador Retriever to bring the bodies back to him....

From there we scooted along up to Rt 14 and followed it east back to Abbeville, a spectacular 235 mile ride around the block. Would love to get hold of a boat and see some of the interior some day.

Wed. April, 9, 2014-K- Abbeville, LA

We have moved a lot since the last post, and the map above shows where we camped and how we got to each place-after Conecuh CG in the last post, we moved to Isaac Creek CG, Alabama (Army Corps of Engineers-it's the next stop in Alabama but has no name displayed on the map), then to Cypress Landing, Mississippi (DeSoto National Forest), where we spent a week totally alone in the deep woods, by a beautiful, small river, then on to Palmetto Island, Louisiana (State Park) and up to Abbeville RV Park (Municipal). Bogalusa and St Francisville, LA, are towns I had to add in to make the map display the route that we drove. Hopefully we will get something posted about those places someday, as they each had their own funky stuff going on. Such as Cypress Landing, where I scared up an Armadillo at one o'clock in the morning heading to the outhouse, which was some distance from where we were camped. The Mississippi woods is the darkest place on the planet at that time of night-I can swear to it! Anyway:

We have been in Louisiana for about a week now.  This is our 3rd visit to Abbeville.  It is a wonderful town and it is in the heart of Cajun country.  The food and music are incredible. No veggies here, just meat and seafood.  TK would love it.

Our first stop was Palmetto Island State Park, south of town about 8 miles.  It is a new park that has only been open for a few years.  Which seems unusual that they are building new ones when other parts of the country are barely able to maintain what they have due to cutbacks.  We had stumbled on it and checked it out before it was open, back in 2010.

Nice place and very quiet.  Almost 100 sites and not a soul in there, not even on the weekend.  Not sure if the season hasn't started, but I hope it is working for them.  The bonus for us was it had FREE laundry in the bath houses! Yippee.

We certainly had our share of tornado warnings while we were there.  We have learned that we need to be proactive when it comes to the weather, as we can't have anything happen to the camper, it being the ONLY roof we have over our heads.  So when we heard that is was going to be 3 or 4 days of "stuff", we found a parking area that was fairly tree free and that would be "our go" to spot if things got stupid.  It wouldn't be protect anything if we had hail, but at least a tree wouldn't fall on us! (And we had a place to take shelter in a tornado in the bathhouse). As a matter of fact, we did pack once and sit in the parking area for a couple hours!

The bird life in the CG was incredible.  I wish I was more up on different calls, as I heard things I had never heard before.  We also had an armadillo that drove Gus crazy every afternoon while we would be playing cards and practicing our organizational skills.

There is no shortage of things to do in this area.  It seems like every weekend there is some sort of food and music driven festival.  I think they feel they need to have an excuse to eat food and listen to music and dance the day away!  This past weekend we went to a Boudin festival in Scott.  Boudin is a staple around here.  It is seasoned pork or beef mixed with rice and put in sausage casing.  Every convenience store, grocery or meat market sell these by the link.  There is great competition as to whom has the best.  They aren't overly spicy, but they leave just a bit of a glow in your mouth.  I enjoy the smoked ones the best and at this festival one vendor had wrapped the boudin in an egg roll wrapper with some pepper jack cheese and deep fried it. Was it delicious especially washed down with some beer! T doubled up on his Lipitor that night.

We did a great kayak here.  It started right near the campground.  It was a series of ponds that were connected by a canal out to the Vermilion river.  Right where we put in were 3 alligators, but they just casually drift off in a different direction when they see you coming. 

Tom saw this snake on the bank.  I think it was a garter snake.

So I decided to stay in the center of the canal.  It wasn't too much after that he saw another one and this one he thought was a cottonmouth.  No picture though, as he was too close to it, but we both got creeped out!

                                                 
                                                   A gator enjoying the afternoon sun.

Out on the Vermilion River the Cyprus trees were huge!  They were really leafing out.  We kayaked around an island.  Not much river traffic.  The river has quite a bit of barge activity on it.  We had just got off the river and back into the canal when we heard one heading upriver.

When we got back to where we had put in, we saw 2 wild pigs.  A woman we talked to who was fishing on one of the ponds told us a couple years ago they had a terrible problem with them and had to close the CG for a week to take care of it.  Apparently they were all throughout the camping area and had become a huge nuisance. Not a critter you want to have attack you-they are very dangerous if you can't protect yourself. Since this was the first pond and where we had to take out, we kept an eye on them while we loaded the Kayaks back up.

After a few days here, we moved up to Abbeville RV Park, a place we have stayed at in the past, and know the managers at, Gene and Cindy. And no wild pigs, at least the four-legged kind!