Skip to main content

Heading to the Gulf Coast

 After our tour of Mammoth Caves, we headed south, stopping not far past Nashville for the evening. Nashville apparently was having a big New Year’s Eve bash, but we did not join in that celebration. We walked next door from our hotel for the night to where there was a nice restaurant. Lots of dressed up folks, though kind of Nashville dressed up, so sparkly shirts and jeans, for the most part. We had a nice dinner, I got a texted photo of my nephew celebrating 2026 at 9:00 pm Pacific time, when he could watch the midnight ball drop in New York City without having to stay up late, and we called it a night, too.

Woke up in 2026 and kept heading south, through Alabama and then across Mobile Bay into Mississippi. We stayed in Biloxi, which is a city of casinos. We heard that twenty years ago, the rule was that all the gambling was offshore on big boats, but then Katrina came along and that was the end of the floating casinos. Now highrises line the waterfront, one big casino after another. We went for a walk a bit farther back from Casino Row and saw some old-fashioned pedestrian-only streets with shops and bars and restaurants and had a nice seafood dinner in a restaurant called Catch 110. Never been to a restaurant that offered complimentary cotton candy after dinner. And it tasted like a piña colada!


Mike enjoying some postprandial cotton candy

From Biloxi, it was only a short drive through Gulfport, Long Beach, Pass Christian, and Bay St. Louis to Waveland, Mississippi, and Buccaneer State Park. We stayed at the park last year, so we knew it was a nice one, and we even got a campsite in the same loop, the Long John Silver area. Yes, it’s a very pirate-themed park; apparently Jean Lafitte once had a house in the area that is now the park. Lafitte was a French privateer who operated in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century. He and his men plundered ships along the coast, selling their wares from New Orleans warehouses controlled by Lafitte’s older brother, Pierre.

President Andrew Jackson is also associated with Buccaneer State Park, which was originally called Jackson Ridge, because the president had a plantation on the site called Sea Song. He also used the property as a staging area for the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. So he was here at the same time as Lafitte; I don’t know if they ever ran into each other in town or not. Jackson’s plantation home burned down in 1935.


Seasong, Andrew Jackson’s plantation
house in Waveland, Mississippi

We made some new friends at Waveland: George and his dog Willow, and Steve and his dog Milo. Milo is a very personable corgi, and about the cutest thing on four legs—and he knows it. Willow was a nice dog with at least some golden retriever in her, and a gray muzzle. She also had her own carriage, a small wheeled trolley that attached to the back of George’s bicycle. George also showed us his do-it-himself van conversion, and it was really great. Some good ideas about keeping things in their place. He travels with an air fryer, which I found interesting, too. He has lived a lot of places, but now he lives (when he’s not on the road) on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and we are invited to visit.

We went to Bay St. Louis for dinner one evening; before dinner, I wandered through some shops and Mike took a walk in a graveyard nearby, with those above-ground graves like in New Orleans. Then we ate oysters, fish, shrimp, bisque, and more at the Thorny Oyster. We missed the Dolly Should festival, though. It was right after we left, and the person who told me about it said it is a sight to see, a town full of Dolly Parton lookalikes!


Looking down Beach Boulevard between
Bay St. Louis and Waveland

But we were off to deep south Louisiana, down in Cajun country, at Palmetto Island State Park. I really like this place, it’s definitely in the middle of nowhere, down in the bayous. It is so dark at night you can’t believe it. Unfortunately it was mostly cloudy so we did not see any stars or planets; we did get to walk around a bit during the day, but often had to duck into the camper to get out of the rain. Fortunately it was still warm, so the rain showers didn’t bother us too much, thought we kept having to open and close the windows at night to keep it cool but not have it rain in during the showers.


One of the trails at Palmetto Island State Park

Palmetto Island has a great leave one/take one library. Mike found a Louis L’Amour novel there, and I found an interesting-looking mystery. There are lots of these paperback trade libraries in parks, so we can always switch out reading material for new things to read. But after a couple of days at Palmetto Island, it was time to move on, heading for Houston to visit our friends the Michels. We got up early, but it was a rainy morning, so we took our time, going through our departure checklist between rain showers.

We finally headed out around noon, and took the backroads through rice fields, some filled with birds—egrets, cormorants, geese, ducks, and more. I read that some farmers also raise crawdads in the flooded rice fields; they control the insects as well as provide another cash crop. Maybe the birds eat some of the crawdads, though. We went through the Duck Capital of America, Gueydan, Louisiana, and a few other small towns where it looked like the residents preferred to communicate in French as much as possible. C’est vrai!


Rice fields in south Louisiana

We finally had to leave the state routes behind and take I-210 around Lake Charles, then I-10 into Texas. It’s never easy getting into Texas for some reason; this time, I got off at an exit just before the border to switch driving over to Mike, and we discovered the on ramp back to the highway was closed. So we took a small detour down US 90 to find a way back on the highway. We made it to Vidor, Texas, and checked into a motel. It’s always fun to find a restaurant we can walk to, so we don’t have to try to park with the Scamp attached. This time we settled for the nearby Whataburger. They have good fries, and the burgers are decent, I guess I’d say. After dinner, we walked up to the drive-thru window at the Baskin-Robbins next door and were briefly mistaken for homeless people, but that was straightened out quickly and we had some Rocky Road ice cream to top off the evening.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waterways and Wetlands of Western Ohio

  Though we are still not technically on the road for awhile, it’s spring in the Midwest and we are occasionally getting out to see some sites nearby. Last week we had a sunny, warm day that followed many days of rain, so we decided to head out somewhere to hike where there were boardwalks—or at least solid rock paths. We started at Charleston Falls, near Tipp City. The preserve was far more crowded than usual; the warm weather after a long winter apparently brought out the crowds, especially homeschooled kids and their families. We took the path less traveled back through prairie meadows (only slightly mushy) to the top of the falls, then wandered down the stone paths to the bottom of the falls. There was water going over the falls, though not a lot. The falls are fed by small underground springs several miles to the east, and the stream creating the falls plummets almost 40' as it flows to the Great Miami River, one mile to the west.  Charleston Falls Preserve in western O...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Platte River Road . . . and Big Rocks

The North Platte River runs the entire length of Nebraska, almost right through the center of the state. It’s a braided stream, a river or stream with many intertwined channels separated by islands or sandbars, so it looks somewhat like the strands of a braid. The folks heading west followed the main channel of the river, where there was grass for the oxen and mules, water for everyone, and fairly flat going. The government built Fort Kearny along the North Platte fairly early—1848, my guidebook tells me—to help protect the travelers along the Oregon and California Trails. Fun fact, both of those were the same trail until far western Wyoming, and they were on the south side of the river. When the Mormons started heading west to Salt Lake City, they walked with handcarts along a trail on the north side of the river, a route that was called the Mormon Trail, and met up with the other two trails around what’s now the border of Nebraska and Wyoming. North Platte River in Nebraska The tow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living with the Chill, Waiting for the Warm Up

 The Coastal Bend area of the Texas Coast is known as a birder’s paradise, and we have seen some pretty cool specimens, up close, including roseate spoonbills and brown pelicans and willets. This heron believes that he owns the wharf down at the harbor park in Port Aransas. He clearly is accustomed to posing for photos. Harry the Heron surveys his domain There’s also a tower to climb at the harbor park, giving you a good view of the waterway called Aransas Pass, where the ferry crosses to the mainland, and some of the huge ships that go through the pass. We often see dolphins in the water up there, but they are very tricky to photograph. The circle on the photo below shows a dolphin fin just popping up out of the water. This one stayed for quite awhile until we left to get a seafood dinner at Grumbles on the other side of the harbor. After dinner we drove around to the University of Texas maritime research facility and then past that, to the beach road which is amazingly well maint...
1 comment
Read more