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Water, Water Everywhere

 The day after our intriguing tour of New Orleans, we had another day to spend in the city, and after considering our choices—having found that you can actually park in town, and it’s not quite as difficult to traverse as we may have thought—we decided to go back to City Park for the day. It is a real jewel; we’ve wandered through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York, and I’ll tell you, New Orleans’ City Park has them beat. 

City Park in New Orleans
The park is really lovely, full of live oaks (many of which were planted after Katrina, when a lot of them were lost, but quite a large number of them survived and are the biggest and oldest in the park). It also has a lot of things to do, not just soccer fields and a rugby pitch, golf course and frisbee golf course, and those kind of usual things. There’s also the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), a botanical garden, a lovely sculpture garden, and Story Land (not to be confused with Storyville), a mini kids’ amusement park filled with Fiberglas statues from children’s books and fairy tales (some of which veer so close to the Disney versions that it’s a wonder they haven’t gotten a cease and desist order) that has been entertaining three generations of New Orleans kids.


The entrance to Storyland in City Park

There are a few follies in the park, one of which is a round bandstand with a stage in front of it; nearby, there’s a peristyle that is reminiscent of the Parthenon. It turns out the peristyle was meant to be a place for people to dance to the music played at the nearby bandstand folly. And then there’s that secret map of New Orleans hidden in the woods. I still don’t know quite what to make of that, but I’m glad I saw it.

We started the day with beignets and coffee from the Café du Monde in the park, which looks like something you would have seen at Coney Island in around 1910, and we listened to a saxophone player sitting outside playing Christmas songs. There is definitely a lot of music in New Orleans.


Mike at Café du Monde

After wandering around the area near the cafe, we rambled through the sculpture garden, where I had fun recognizing Rodins, Moores, Segals, and so forth. It’s an impressive collection of sculptures, but I think the giant spider might have been my favorite because it was weird. There was also a great statue of Hercules the Archer, another archer, Diana, poised on a golden ball, and a lot of other sculptures, some interesting, some just strange.


Nothing to see here, just a giant metal spider . . .

The Atchafalaya Basin
We took our leave of New Orleans the next day and drove out of town in a driving rain, then not far out of town we were suddenly in open country. Well, it turned out that it wasn’t exactly open fields. We were crossing the Atchafalaya Basin, a wide area of swamps, bayous, and open water that is bigger than the Everglades and is crossed by a bridge that is almost 20 miles long. There are trees dotting the open water throughout, which are sort of eerie looking, like the world has flooded. The Atchafalaya River Basin is part of the swamp and bayou and river systems that surround New Orleans and southern Louisiana; it is a flood relief outlet and important filter for the Mississippi River, slowing its flow and trapping nutrients and pollution to improve water quality before it empties into the Gulf of Mexico, to quote the Internet on that subject.


The view from the Atchafalaya Basin bridge

Across the bridge, we headed north for a bit and went through Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge, then west to Lafayette, where we spent a cold, wet night. The next day we went west again, stopping at a small park in Jennings to eat a picnic lunch and then crossing the Lake Charles bridge very slowly because there were bridge inspectors at work. Lake Charles is the largest conglomeration of chemical plants I’ve ever seen. I knew our friend Gary had overseen the building of a chemical plant there, and I thought we might see it. We probably did, but since it was one of a hundred or so such plants, I do not know for sure.

We crossed the Louisiana-Texas border and stopped at the welcome center, where there was a walkway over a swamp. This is the wet part of Texas. We weren’t planning on going far, just to Vidor, Texas, to a campground, but suddenly traffic was at a standstill. Some online investigation found that there was a bad wreck ahead that had happened less than a half an hour before. I was glad we had made the decision to stop and have some lunch, so we were stuck in a traffic jam but not in the middle of the collision, which was pretty bad.

The East Texas Gulf Coast
It took a long time to get to the place where everyone was channeled off the highway, and we were past the campground. There was another one that showed some promise in Beaumont, but with one thing and another, not the least of which was the threat of more rain, we decided it would be a hotel night, and stayed at a nice place on the west side of Beaumont. Turns out we were just where we were supposed to be to take a state route down to the Bolivar Peninsula on the Gulf Coast, where we were promised some warmer weather by the weather forecast.

It was warm, but still wet. Rain poured down all day while we drove to the narrow peninsula and scoped out one small RV campground after another. We finally decided that the Palala RV Resort looked good, and the owner, Mel, met us there to check us in and assign us the first campsite, just across the highway from the beach. It rained and rained and rained, but stopped long enough to set up camp.

A rainy but colorful view of Palaya RV
Park on the Bolivar Peninsula

The next day, it cleared occasionally, and we walked along a shell-strewn beach in the fog, then later we went to a party at the RV club room, thirty feet in the air. (Everything on the coast here is built on high pilings because, well, hurricanes and storm surges are a part of life in the wet part of Texas.) The food was all delicious, especially the potstickers that the camp host, Dan, had made. We met lots of people with lots of great ideas about places to go and places to camp, too.

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