Day 22 July 22, 2016 Orange TX to Thibodaux LA

 We left hotel and immediately felt the humidity.  Saw our first cemetery with above ground graves.  We left Texas and entered the Louisiana bayou country.  Mosquito farms everywhere.  Passed through NUMEROUS little towns with stoplights and very low speed limits. Didn’t make good time at all. Drove through Lake Charles and saw some big southern homes. Saw where Dandy’s ferry would have been in Mermentau.  Saw lots of sugar cane fields.  Roads really bounced us around. By the time we hit Morgan City there were so many long bridges that we were on bridges more than regular roads.  Stopped at Oak Alley Plantation for lunch and tour.  Passed by several other plantations.  Crossed the Mississippi River.  Drove to Thibodaux for supplies and to camp for the night at the Hampton Inn.  Mileage: 289.9

 

Humidity, humidity, humidity.  Everything fogs up as soon as you walk out the door.  We left the hotel and immediately wished we had the hot desert air again and it was only morning.   We crossed the Sabine River on a bridge since there was no ferry like Dandy used.  We tried hard not to see the alligators and snakes that he saw.  We did, however, see numerous Mosquito farms and a few mosquito plantations.  The area was covered with them.  Pam and Susan are mosquito magnets and were cringing every time we passed one.

We almost stopped by a sulphur museum but decided that the museum would probably “stink”.  We were stuck behind slow traffic for so long that when we had a chance where the road split for a brief moment at a traffic light, we told Pam to gun it and beat the cars waiting beside her.  So….Pam peals out in a loaded down minivan with three middle age women in the middle of a small town.  We were all laughing so hard that no one could breathe for the next mile.  We had to find the tissues because we couldn’t see for the tears in our eyes.

There were no mountains for me to capture with my camera.  There weren’t even any hills at all except for the lumps in the road and the hills that the bridges made.  Speaking of bridges, they are miles long here and I mean miles.  At first we thought our water drinking game today would be that we would drink every time we went over a bridge.  Susan and I quit when we realized there are way more bridges than bathrooms.  Pam tried to drown herself.  She finally cried uncle too.  Dandy had said that the roads were better after crossing the the bridge at Mermentau, but we disagreed.  It was like galloping on a horse across the country.  We could see the cars in front of us doing the same thing.

Dandy said that they had camped in a cane patch.  OMG. Never in a million years would you catch us doing that.  We did see sugar cane fields everywhere even in the middle of the mosquito plantations.   We could imagine all of the creatures living in that mess.  What an awful place to camp.  We also saw where the swamp people live…houses surrounded by swamps.  Cringe….

As we traveled we were thrilled to see more and more of the beautiful Spanish moss hanging from the trees.  We stopped for lunch at the Oak Alley Plantation and ate entirely too much good southern food.  It was midday so we decided we would just skip supper and went for dessert…except for Pam :(.  I had buttermilk pie and Susan had pecan.  After lunch we toured the plantation and learned a great deal from our guide.  The most beautiful part of the plantation was the live oak lined walk that led to the house.  The live oaks were over three hundred years old…28 of them planted in two rows 80 feet apart.  One had a girth of 30 feet and a 127 foot spread of limbs.    We were glad we did the tour but the history of those times made us sad.

We drove by the other plantations in the area but they were closed, so we just tried to get pictures from a distance.  We were very glad we had a Florida tag on our car.  We drove over the Mississippi River just because we wanted to.  The levies for the plantations were right beside the river, so when we saw a bridge (big bridge) we just couldn’t resist.

We headed into Thibodaux for the night.  I stopped by the urgent care to get my ear checked out.  It turns out it was my throat and not my ear.  Got a shot and pills.  Camped for the night at the Hampton Inn.  It cost 12K miles and $50 for the night.  I got us upgraded to a room with a sofa bed.  The status I have this year has really helped on this trip.