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Trip06

Friday.

We’ve tapered off to nine. We’re not afraid of no stinkin sleep monster. It was good to stop and search the swamp for wood ducks, but I wasn’t through driving yet. I like the feel of just rolling down the highway, then looking around after eight or ten hours to see where you are. We only drove a couple hours on Wednesday, then the motorhome didn’t move at all on Thursday. We got up this morning before the sun. We turned left. We turned left, driving straight east, into the strobe light torture of a brilliant sunrise over perfectly flat Louisiana through a tall pine forest (picture). The strobe light torture lasted about two hours. It was harder on Judy than on me. She occupies the south side of the car. The low winter sun lasts longer on her side than on mine. It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it is. We’re considering only taking trips in which we drive west from now on, just to even things out for awhile. Louisiana is behind us. Mississippi too. Then Alabama. Tonight we’re in Florida. We have crossed a lot of rivers on this trip. Down south, they have all had a chance to get big from all the water flowing down from up north; by the time we cross them. They are all crossed with impressive bridges. The bridge over the Mississippi was the biggest, but there have been bridge after bridge to cross these rivers. In Colorado we have streams. These are clearly rivers. Our favorite bridge of all, though, is the one in Mobile that goes under the river instead of over it. Here you are, driving along. You know you’re approaching another river and you’re watching for the bridge approach. You get closer and closer, and still don’t see the bridge, then you just duck down and go under it instead. Cool. We stopped for the night at Falling Waters State Park in the Florida Panhandle. Before it got dark, we took a walk to find the falling waters. Halfway there, is the impoundment with the swimming beach. Now remember, this is Florida. Right next to the swim beach, is the sign announcing the presence of alligators, and warning that it is illegal to feed or molest alligators in Florida. I swear. I’m not making this up. It didn’t say to be careful not to get eaten by alligators, it warned everyone to be careful with them. Farther down the hill, (you go downhill to go see the waterfall in Florida), is Florida’s highest waterfall. Wait. Let me rephrase that. Farther down the hill is the waterfall with the most vertical drop of any in Florida. That’s it. Remember, this is Florida. Florida is pretty flat. There is not anyplace really all that high to fall from in Florida. Sixty-seven feet, and an impressive sixty-seven feet it is. Now you might be wondering how Florida manages even a sixty-seven foot waterfall. And you’re right to wonder. There is a trick. They manage a sixty-seven foot waterfall by having a stream fall into a one hundred foot sinkhole. To see the waterfall, you follow the stream downhill to the point where you can look over the edge and watch it fall sixty-seven feet into a hole. And you might be wondering how the water only falls sixty-seven feet into a one hundred foot hole. Well, me too. I’ve just telling you what the signs said. It was an awesome sight. For Florida. A four hundred mile day.

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Trip05

Thursday. The Wood Duck has landed! Got our ten hours. Got to the Bluebonnet Swamp, just as it opened at nine am. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? Having to wait for a swamp to open? This swamp is a city park. It has a headquarters and exhibits and staff. Maybe it is an elusive duck after all. Our search involved considerable debate at the swamp headquarters about whether the wood duck is actually there right now at all. Seems they can’t always tell. After three hours of searching the swamp, we finally spotted them. We got to see a whole bunch, but never any one for very long. They were only in one place, way back between the trees, paddling around in a little open spot of water. We couldn’t spot them at all with the naked eye. We only saw them by staring through the binoculars at just the right spot, at just the right time, until one swam past the field of view. Once we saw them, though, we got a really good look and got to watch them for as long as we wanted. Victory! This is what we came for. We came for wood ducks. We got wood ducks. The Bluebonnet swamp is a young swamp. It wasn’t always a swamp. Two hundred twenty-five years ago, it was a creek. Settlers here shifted some land around, inadvertently changed the water flow, and voila! A swamp was born. The high ground is an oak ( and whatever else kind of tree) hardwood forest, just like it always was. The swamp land is Cypress and Tupelo Gum trees (picture). No pictures of wood ducks. They were a little too far away for that. Would have needed a camera mounted to the birding scope. We saw other birds too. We saw cormorants, great blue herons, great white egrets, snowy egrets, killdeer, turkey vultures, red tailed hawk, red-bellied woodpeckers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, eastern phoebes, blue jays, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, American robins, northern mockingbirds, brown thrashers, cedar waxwings, orange crowned warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, and northern cardinals. The wood ducks, red-bellied woodpeckers, and Carolina chickadees are all new birds for us. We can’t quit thinking about Lake Murray in Oklahoma. When Judy checked in, the camp-host told her it had been raining all day, but that the lake didn’t have any streams emptying into it, so we didn’t have to worry about flooding. OK. It doesn’t have any streams emptying into it. Let’s see. It doesn’t have any streams emptying into it. We can’t figure out where all that water in the lake came from then. It’s a big lake… Wow. We found the wood duck. Now what? What else is there to do? A zero mile day in the motorhome. Not very far in the car either.
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Trip04

Wednesday. It took twelve hours of sleep to recover from that long day. The first couple days we drove in mild weather. Not too cold. No significant wind. Yesterday we drove in gusty wind and the second half of the day in pouring rain. Woke up to clear blue skies, mild temperature, and no wind this morning. It sure is wet down here. Of course there are swamps all around, but even plowed fields are underwater now. No sign of any drought here. They had sixty inches of rain. Some places had twenty inches from one storm alone. Not from the storm we just went through. Twenty inches from the last tropical storm through. Twenty inches in two days! Try to imagine! Anyway, we got up and walked around a little bit and saw some Eurasian collared doves, a yellow bellied sapsucker, and a red squirrel pretending he was a whole flock of birds emptying the bird feeder. The motorhome has suffered a significant change in handling. A couple trips back, I discovered that, for some reason, there are air bags in the front suspension that need to be inflated to ninety pounds per square inch. I checked them a couple times, and each time, they needed air. So this last trip to the repair shop, they got replaced. Now, Shamu feels much steadier on the road. The gusty wind we drove in yesterday does require a little more steering, but it was never difficult. I think we’ve made a significant improvement. We visited with a guy in the park with us this morning who is full-timing. He is forty-one years old and is still working. He and his wife and five kids, all in a fifth wheel. Kids from seventeen months to ten years old. He is a carpenter/welder/plumber with all his own gear. He can work anywhere he wants, so he stays in one place for awhile, then just relocates somewhere else, and goes back to work. We have passed hundreds of fireworks stands on the drive down, all gearing up for a big New Year’s celebration. It was way too windy and rainy last night for fireworks, so it was nice and quiet for us. We didn’t get woken up at midnight at all. Tonight: a different story. Now they’re all being blown off in frenetic pyrotechnic excess. Driving from Lafayette to Baton Rouge didn’t take long. Twenty miles of it was on a road entirely up on concrete stilts. We drove straight across the Atchafalaya swamp (picture). We knew we wanted to go to the Bluebonnet Swamp in Baton Rouge, but before that, we wanted to find the campground and set up and unhook. We had really good directions to the swamp. We were left to guess our way to the campground we had picked out. We explored for awhile, but couldn’t find it. It happens to be New Year’s Day. Nothing is open, and no one is answering their phone. We couldn’t get any help. Finally, Judy called the Baton Rouge KOA, and they answered their phone, so we went there. Since then, we’ve unhooked, fired up the car, and explored. We’ve found the Bluebonnet Swamp. We found the campground we meant to find in the first place. We found the Mississippi. We found the Sam’s Club. We found Local Color. The Waffle House. The Waffle House is big here. It’s everywhere. We had dinner just before dark. It’s like a fifties diner, but with waffles. I think we had one of the original waitresses. We had a great time, and made it home to the alka-seltzer without a single emergency stop. A one hundred mile day.
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Trip03

Tuesday. Happy New Year’s Eve. Drove the longest day of the trip today, probably. Drove from dark to dark. Didn’t mean to, it just happened. We did get our ten hours first, though. We dropped down into the prairies and lakes region of Texas, skirted Dallas, then blew through the Piney Woods of East Texas. The book says there is more forest in the Piney Woods of Texas than in all the forests in New England combined. We didn’t stop at Caddo Lake in East Texas, because it wasn’t even noon yet. We decided to drive on into Louisiana, and stop at the Alexandria KOA on a lake. We needed to dump and fill and get some propane, so it seemed like a good idea. But remember that rainy weather that was to the south of us the day before? Well, we could get to the propane tank to refill, but the Alexandria KOA is built on a hillside. Each site has a nice level concrete pad, but the rest of the campground was pretty much blown-out. Wind and rain made erosion ruts and rivers in all the roads. The guy said I wouldn’t have any trouble at all getting down to the campsite, but that I might have a little trouble the next morning getting back out. There aren’t many places to camp in Alexandria. And there aren’t any towns close to Alexandria. We opted to drive on into the night to the next town, Lafayette, almost a hundred miles south. There is a KOA there we have been to before, and really like. Any KOA with it’s own bass pond gets bonus points in my book (picture). They were closed and gone by the time we got there, but there was a nice note taped to the door, assigning us a site, and welcoming us for the night. They made it very easy. Not all our driving is on wide-open empty freeways. About seventy-five miles of today’s drive was through the Dallas Metro area. Nothing bad happened, but finding our way in unfamiliar territory, through traffic, making sure we’re in the correct lane for each interchange, was the most intense driving of the trip so far. By the middle of the day, I had already developed a serious case of TB (tired butt). Can’t use cruise control through all that traffic. Have to do a lot of actual driving. Guess maybe I tensed up a bit as well. Anyway, nothing a rest-stop run and some Advil wouldn’t cure. Tonight we have thundering pets. Dashboard to Headboard….. and back. We’ll just stand clear until it’s over. Five hundred plus miles today.
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Trip02

Monday.

Got our ten hours. And we were still up and off at seven am, central standard. Well before sunrise. Uneventful day. We spent last night in Kansas. Midway USA: the geographic center point of the contiguous forty-eight. Dropped south out of Kansas and through Oklahoma. Ended up just north of the Texas border, at Murray Lake, State Park in Oklahoma. It’s set in the Arbuckle hill country. Very nice. Beautiful campground all to ourselves this off-season. Picture attached, but I forgot to take it until late. Saw more birds today. Saw an owl on a phone pole this morning at dawn. Got to see meadowlarks, flocks of blackbirds, and soaring hawks. Cardinals, juncos and mockingbirds. By this time last trip, we were having electrical trouble in Shamrock Texas. No such luck this trip. Marty Malone, owner and operator of M&M Sales and Service, fixed it last time, and it has stayed fixed. Thanks again Marty. Stopped at the worlds-largest-factory-direct-Christmas-store. Lots of nice stuff; stuff we haven’t seen before. Nothing we can’t live without: at least until the return trip. We got their catalog, phone number, and web site address just in case. It rained all day to the south of us as we drove. It had stopped just before we got there. Didn’t get to sleep to the sound of rain on the roof. Slept well anyway. Had Judy’s homemade spaghetti dinner. Last year at this time, we were dealing with the heart-healthy diet. This year, our diet is something else. This trip is all about wood ducks. Nothing else matters as long as we see the wood ducks. I don’t think it’s a particularly elusive critter. I think we just haven’t been in the same place at the same time yet. Another four hundred miles today.