An Interesting Day in Louisiana

This morning dawned clear and warmer than it's been for us lately.  Since Al had to work I decided to do some laundry, so took a load down to the RV Park's laundry room.  There I met Crazy Louisiana Lady.  She had her stuff spread over the 3 washing machines available in the room, and started to explain in hurried and somewhat disjointed tones that she worked as a night auditor at a local hotel and thus never really had time to do her laundry.  Apparently this was her explanation for rudely not letting me have one of the washing machines.  She loaded up all 3, then after announcing that the washers took 30 minutes and the dryers 45, she proceeded to tell me her life's story, including husbands, ex-husbands, dogs, parents' troubles, and how she keeps in touch with them no matter what, even though she's 54 years old and lives in her mini rv because she can't afford anything else though they designated that their house would be hers one day and....zzzzzzzz

Okay, so I smiled and nodded a lot, and soon Nice, Sane Lady came in, also with a few loads in her basket.  She and I and Crazy Louisiana Lady chatted until CLL's 3 loads were done, and she put them in 3 of the 4 dryers.  She then ran off - I don't know, to go visit the swamp or something, and NSL and I chatted on for a while until at long long last the one load of laundry was done and I FLED back to the RV lest I run into anyone else I needed to talk to.

In the meantime Al was having trouble connecting to the internet to get work done - which was odd since the evening before we had had no trouble.  Maybe a lot of other RVers came into the park overnight and they were all going online to check their email or something.  In either case, we decided we'd had enough of Lake Charles, and took off eastward.

Well, we learned some things on this trip!  First, we kept seeing signs advertising "Boudin & Cracklings".  We knew what cracklings were but I had to look up "Boudin" which turns out to be descriptive of a selection of sausages - Cajun or Creole, no doubt.  No, we haven't tried any...

But we passed a lot of wet lands - this whole part of Louisiana is just a few feet above sea level, which explains all the swamps and wetlands.

Since the internet connection here is so funky I'm trying to load my photos onto an album on Facebook for you and if the first few look somewhat skewed it's because I spent the first hour of travel with Dorian on my lap, insisting on getting some scratching, petting, and general adoration.  Hard to take photos with one hand while petting a brat with the other.

Anyhow, some of the areas we passed were very beautiful - right out of Pogo or any other image of swampland you'd like to visualize. We passed through a long, beautiful area called Henderson Swamp which was apparently fed by the Atchafalaya River (great name, isn't it?).  The area went on for about 17 miles before drying out some time before we reached Baton Rouge.

We noticed that so far, in our trip through Louisiana, there have been no "rest stop" or picnic areas on the road - just exits that you apparently had to already be familiar with.  When we needed to take a break from the 155 mile drive today we pulled into a truck weigh station and just pulled over,.

So, there we were, only about 22 miles from our RV Park destination and suddenly we were in the most horrendous traffic jam!  What was going on?  Well it appears that Baton Rouge is doing some major highway renovations, and both I-10 and I-12 were all sorts of under construction!  Sadly, this made our entire visit through Baton Rouge one large, major traffic jam!  Oh well -

At the end of the road we found this very pretty RV park with its own fishing lake but the trouble is that it's obviously very popular, and not only is the internet very slow as a result, the park requires that every computer have its own logon code - and we found this out an hour after their office closed, so Al has to check his email on his business computer - which is frowned upon.  I think I'll try to hurry off my netbook so he can use this computer instead...

Until next time -  tomorrow we visit three states in one day!!!