There’s an old Levon Helm song that goes, “I was born in the rain on the Pontchartrain,” and I’ve read about the big lake north of New Orleans in many books, but this week I got to see it for myself. It is BIG, an oval about 25 miles by 30 miles or so. We found a state park on the north shore, and from the campground we could see New Orleans rising like an architectural ghost on the far shore. Much closer was the 25-mile-long causeway that bisects the lake and connects the north shore to the city; it begins in Mandeville, Louisiana, and that’s where Fontainbleau State Park is located. Lake Pontchartrain, with New Orleans in the far distance I learned a bit of marine lore and some history, too, while we were there. First, it’s called Lake Pontchartrain, but it’s actually a lagoon—it’s salt water, and it is connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a small channel. I read a fun fact, the only way you can get into the city of New Orleans without crossing a bridge is by boat . . . The stat...

We stopped near Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis, and stayed at a nice RV park at Barnes Crossing for several days, just to rest and relax and do laundry. We didn’t see any of Tupelo itself; we had seen it once years ago with Cyrus, and you really only have to see Elvis’s birthplace one time in your life. What!? You didn't visit my birthplace while you were in Tupelo?! We got off the Trace again in Kosciusko, Mississippi, because there was a welcome center there and we thought we might get some idea of where to stop for the night. Fun fact: They have something like fire ants—heck, maybe they WERE fire ants—in Mississippi. We parked right on an ant hill. Which was actually a long flat ant community, so not immediately recognizable as an ant hill until the ants started biting my right foot. I didn’t even realize what was going on at first; I thought my foot was just suddenly paralyzed. A cleverly disguised fire ant community What ensued was a lot like a Keystone Kops routine, as I t...

First, I want to announce a couple of milestones: We finished our drive down the Natchez Trace today, ending in Natchez, Mississippi. There were a couple of camper parts waiting for us at a UPS pickup location in town, which we were pleased to see. I figured that would work to get things delivered to us on the road, but you never know. The Scamp folks sent us two parts for the camper that had broken—the table leg (just a button at the top had popped, we could still use the table) and the cover for one of the wastewater tanks (Mike had temporarily Gorilla-taped it back on). We had been camped at the Natchez Trace State Park, about 10 miles from the end of the trail, for the last two nights, but this morning we completed our passage down the parkway and crossed the wide Mississippi River. We moved camp to a nice place called Riverview Park, which was indeed right on the riverfront in Vidalia, Louisiana. Another milestone: It was our first time setting foot in Louisiana, so now we can s...

  Well, I was expecting a treatise on “How Not to Prep a Camper for a Long Trip,” but instead I got another view of the trip so far from Mike. When I asked him about what he wanted to say about getting the camper ready to go, he said, “Tell them not to do it the way we did it.” And I do see he mentions the preparation process once in his travelogue on the past few weeks. Here's his update: Mike Report We picked up the camper in Backus on the 25th, left the lot, and turned right back around because they'd forgotten to tell us how to dewinterize the trailer. The second time out of the lot was uneventful. The Scamp factory in Minnesota   We headed South. Due South. The wind decided it wanted to go due North. Apparently the wind was angry with us for not going along North, and so blew at 10 – 20 – 30 mph steady and gusts even stronger for 2 days, to Peoria, where we picked up I-74. We now laugh at headwinds.  Possibly being angry at that laughter, th...

 It dawned on us sometime this week that most people load up their camper and get ready to hit the road from the comfort and convenience of their own home, an element of all this that somehow escaped us when we decided to do it “entre maisons,” which is to say, our home base was an RV park about 45 minutes from our storage bin. Not ideal. Mike has a few words to say about that, so I’ll leave further discussion to him in the next post. For the time being, I’ll say it took far longer than we expected. But then we realized, we have no schedule, so we tried to relax and take our time. So we wound up staying at the Indian Springs RV park on State Line Road for most of a week. Alice’s organizational idea for the van worked very well—things are really working well there. We have shifted a few things to the camper for travel to keep the loads even, so it’s a work in progress, but it’s a plan that works, and that’s what counts. An organized van Just when we had everything ready to go, t...

 We practiced driving and turning the van + Scamp in a movie theatre parking lot down the street from where we were staying, then had some soup and walked across the street to the A-Pine restaurant for some postprandial pie. I had bumbleberry, Mike had strawberry rhubarb—and they were DELICIOUS. The Place the Music Died Then next day we hit the road—mostly back roads—from Pequot Lakes south to get the rest of our stuff to outfit the camper from our storage bin in Cincinnati. It was kind of slow going as we learned how to negotiate with the trailer and how the camper worked. We skirted Minneapolis—no big cities on this shakedown run—and made it to Iowa the first night out. We stayed in the Clear Lake, Iowa, area, which is kind of famous. We passed by a historic marker for the Surf Club in Clear Lake (the name gave me a laugh, since I almost remember the Surf Club at Western Bowl, and this seemed like a bigger version of that place). Anyway, the Iowa Surf Club was where Buddy Hol...