Chapter 11 - Texas to Mobile
October 29 to November 16, 1997
10/29 Today was one of life's big events. We stopped being New Yorkers and became Texans. According to our lawyer, we actually became Texans back in June when we sold our only New York property, left the state, and stated our intentions of becoming domiciled in Texas. But it didn't feel real to us until we surrendered our NY driver's licenses and vehicle license plates, which we did today. It feels strange - I really feel like I have personally changed in some significant way. The process was remarkably easy. One advantage of doing this in Livingston, Texas, is that a significant percentage of the county population is living in RV's. Livingston has a population of 5000, and there are 8000 Escapees who have a Livingston mail forwarding address. A substantial fraction of these people have established domicile in Livingston, and had their RV inspected and registered there.
Because of this, both the people in the Escapees office and the people at the Motor Vehicle office had the answers to all our questions - where to take our trailer for inspection, how to register to vote and to get absentee ballots, and so on - they probably have to answer these questions several times a day. The place we went for inspections of truck and trailer handled big motor homes and trailers as a matter of routine and had a convenient pull-through circle out by the road. They inspected the trailer right there. It took about five minutes.
11/1 We drove to Houston for the day. At the Houston Museum, Dave sat through a good IMAX double feature - one about Indy Car racing - including the design and development of a race car, the other called "Flight", which had a little bit of the history of flight and a lot of Blue Angels footage - some with the IMAX camera mounted on one of the planes. They followed a Blue Angels trainee through some of the rigorous preparation necessary to become part of the team. Helen skipped the racing film and spent the time in the exhibit of oil drilling technology. Then we headed to Bayou Bend, the estate built by Ima Hogg and her brothers, to tour the extensive gardens. We skipped the house itself. We didn't have time to go out to the Houston Space Center - that will have to wait for another day.
11/5 It's raining - seriously raining - steady, hard, rain. Now I understand why this part of the country has big, well-maintained ditches everywhere. There's a little ditch behind our trailer that is full to overflowing with water, flowing very fast to somewhere. The entire area around our trailer seems to be about an inch deep in water, flowing slowly back to the ditch. We can hardly carry on a conversation in the trailer - the noise of rain on the roof drowns out everything. Bright flashes of lightening occur every few minutes, causing us to instinctively pause and wait for the crash of thunder. At home, I'd have shut down the computers by now, but with the laptops, (and a heavy duty surge suppressor on the power input to the trailer) we don't worry - if the external power dies, the laptop switches over to its internal batteries without skipping a beat.
It's not a good day for sightseeing . We'll catch up on reading and on indoor chores and projects (always a long list)
11/8 I spent most of the day working on the truck, with parts spread all over the place. Removing all the plastic trim from the dashboard to get at its innards turns out to be surprisingly easy compared to older vehicles I've owned. I also had to remove some trim along the passenger side, in order to lift the carpet. We now have a pair of power outlets under the passenger seat, where GPS and laptop computer can be connected. The cigarette-lighter style of plugs have turned out to be very unreliable, and I cut them off everything and replaced them with Molex connectors from Radio Shack - smaller, easier to use, much more reliable. Now I'll have to replace the 12v. outlets in the trailer with the same kind of connector.
While the truck was apart, I also reinstalled the control head for the built-in radar detector. I removed it before entering Canada (it's illegal in most provinces), and got all the way to Texas before getting around to putting it back together. And, hopefully, I found the reason for the intermittent failures of our add-on exhaust brake (a loose connection). I got everything put back together with no leftover parts.
11/9 Drove the back roads to and from Big Thicket National Preserve - a little piece of what East Texas might have looked like before the Europeans arrived. We did a 6-mile trail, through an incredible variety of terrain. Some of the forest looked almost familiar to us northerners - oak, beech, and pine. But then we'd come around a corner and find a huge evergreen magnolia tree, or a thicket of holly. And a few minutes later we'd come down into a hollow and find a stagnant pond full of giant bald cypress trees, with a thicket of cypress knees sticking out of the water all around. We found quite a bit of something that looked like bamboo - locally called "cane", and found from the trail guide that it really is bamboo - the only native American bamboo. Another first for us was rattan vines. Now I know what real rattan furniture is made from. Some trees were covered with a mixture of spanish moss and a species of little fern that is an air plant - essentially rootless. There's also supposed to be palmetto thickets here, but we didn't find any. On the way back, we tried to take a shortcut along the forest roads shown (very accurately) on Map'n'Go. Unfortunately, Map'n'Go didn't tell us that many of these roads are private and have locked gates across them periodically. We did get through enough of them to discover what very rural East Texas really looks like. It's quite variable, ranging from tarpaper shacks to impressive ranches. The natives talk about East Texas as if it were a separate state. We haven't seen enough of West Texas to know the difference, but I suspect these dense forests and fairly high annual rainfall are limited to the East.
Another way to know you are in the South: the road kill begins to be opossums and armadillos. Texans still like to drive fast. The state speed limit is only 70, but it's 70 on these little back roads as well as on the Interstates - brings back memories of youth, when many states still had no speed limits at all.
11/12 The days speed by. We're puttering around the trailer, reading, updating records, etc. Yesterday, I had to drive to Kingwood (a Houston suburb - an hour of driving, each way) to sign insurance applications to get Texas truck insurance and also our umbrella liability policy changed to Texas. We're not changing companies, but what started out as a simple phone call to transfer the NY policies to Texas turned out quite different. New applications had to be filled out. The agent had our old policies on her computer screen, but still had to fill out paper applications just as though we were brand new applicants. Anyway, it's done. The insurance, in a rural Texas town, is almost twice the price of the same coverage in Rochester NY. Actually, it's worse coverage - the glass breakage coverage in NY had no deductible. Here, it's the same deductible as for collision.
Today, I took the truck to the local Dodge dealer for its major service interval - the expensive stuff like getting the valves adjusted, transmission bands adjusted, etc. I intended to ride my bicycle back to the trailer, but it was dark and raining. The dealer had no loaner or rental cars available, and offered to drive me back home (about 10 miles), and pick me up when the truck was ready. Wonderful service. I hope they are also competent mechanics.
This afternoon, walking past the new arrivals area, I saw an old yellow school bus, with what looked like the top third of a VW camper welded on top - sort of like the turret in a railway caboose except it was off-center. The whole top of the bus had a railing around it - I wonder if it's used as a patio? There was also a motorcyclist with a long flowing white beard, towing a small travel trailer. And yesterday we watched a Prevost bus conversion drive past us on the way out of the park - probably half a million dollars worth. And just after that, a big motorhome towing a double-deck trailer. The bottom deck had a full-sized SUV, with a big motorcycle crosswise in front of it. The top deck had a good-sized motorboat, on its own trailer. This place has by far the greatest diversity of RV's we've seen in one place (no tents or popups allowed, but otherwise a little of everything.)
11/14 We finally got ourselves back in gear, finished the essential chores, and got on the road. We're at Belmont Campground in Lafayette LA. On the way here, Interstate 10 passes through miles of rice fields. Actually, at the moment they are crawfish farms. From October to April, they re-flood the fields and harvest crawfish, which, apparently lie dormant in the mud among the rice plants all summer. This afternoon, we toured the Tabasco factory - it's a little family-owned business on Avery Island (in a swamp on the Gulf Coast), started before the Civil War, which currently ships 400,000 bottles of Tabasco per day. The ingredients are simply hot peppers, vinegar, and salt, mashed up and then aged in oak barrels for three years. During the early part of the aging, there is an active fermentation process. We bought a small bottle - haven't had any for so long that we can't remember what it tastes like.
The campground is very pleasant. We drove through extensive sugar cane fields after heading south from I 10 to get here. We narrowly missed hitting a big white egret which flapped slowly across the road in front of us. We're camped in a grove of mature oak trees. Some of the live oaks are ancient - six feet in diameter at the base, and spreading 50 feet or more sideways. The lower branches are densely covered with tiny little ferns, and have long streamers of spanish moss. The oak tree immediately above our trailer, a different variety, is very tall. Every once in a while, it drops a big acorn, which builds up so much velocity that it hits the trailer roof with a loud bang, bounces high in the air, then hits again after more than a second of delay.
Louisiana Acadiana humor:
T-shirt, for sale in a tourist shop: "Bon jour, Y'all"
Bumper sticker on an old local pickup truck "Raising Cane for 200 years"
11/15 We've noticed that the sides of nearly every road are littered with sugar cane - an ugly mess, even in the center of the small towns. As we started our drive this morning, we discovered why. Every minute or two, we met a tractor, each towing two huge cages on trailers filled to overflowing with cane. Coming with us were empty tractors. We turned around and waited for another tractor, then followed it, soon finding ourselves in the middle of a tractor parade as they converged on the processing plant. Long before we got to the plant, we could see a huge plume of steam and smoke on the horizon. There are apparently no tours available. All we could see from the outside was huge tanks, belching steam, and conveyor belts nibbling away at giant piles of sugar cane. A steady stream of tractors and trucks appeared, from all directions, dumped their load, and disappeared. We decided to follow an empty tractor to watch the harvest. It led us down a sequence of ever-smaller country lanes, and eventually turned into a cane field where we didn't dare follow. Unfortunately, the actual harvesting machine was so far back among the cane that we couldn't see any details. We were told later that the factory runs continuously from October through December. The cane is cut during that period. It sprouts from the same roots. Once every three years, they plow up the roots and replant. We saw cane in several stages of growth from tiny grass-like plants to knee high to mature 7-foot-tall plants ready to harvest. The young growth is killed to the ground by the winter frost, and the cane regrows in the spring, reaching maturity by October. Some cane fields were being burned - causing large smudges of smoke on the horizon. We passed one field where a tractor seemed to be spraying a flammable liquid on the cane plants just ahead of the fire.
We toured the Konrico Rice factory, still an active business and now the oldest rice mill in the U. S. They buy rice from the farms we passed by yesterday. They ship lots of ordinary medium and long grain brown and white rice, but their specialty is "Wild Pecan Rice" a hybrid developed here from Indonesian strains, reputed to have an aroma of pecans when cooked. It's pure rice with no nuts, in spite of the name. We bought some to try out. Much of the machinery in the mill, which husk, de-brans and bags the rice, is very old, and still operating. They have a retail factory store, selling all their products plus the usual tourist junk, but otherwise, they've made little concession to the tourist business. The "auditorium" where we watched a slide show about the history of the area, was also a warehouse, with cases of rice packages stacked along most of the walls. The factory was an old wooden building, with little drifts of rice bran in the corners and on top of the wooden beams. Big bags of rice bran were stacked everywhere - they sell it for animal feed - 12% protein, 12% fat. Other companies sell rice bran for human consumption, but it takes refrigeration and more careful handling, so this mill doesn't bother. An old advertisement talked about the health benefits of rice bran oil.
After lunch, we drove back to Avery Island and drove through the Jungle Gardens, which is "200 acres of subtropical flora, aged live oaks, mirror pools and sunken gardens. Thousands of camellias, azaleas and irises are usually in bloom November through June. The Bird City sanctuary, established to protect the nearly extinct snowy egret, is home to more than 20,000 herons and egrets during nesting. The Chinese Garden contains bamboo stands and a Buddha dating from AD 1000."
It doesn't quite live up to that advertising, but is a very worthwhile visit. The old live oaks were impressive. One was identified as a marker tree referenced in an 1812 land survey - so it was presumably an impressive mature tree at that time. The camellias were in peak bloom, and some were 15-foot bushes covered with flowers. "Bird City" indeed had lots of egrets, in mid-afternoon, and more flocks were arriving at dusk, as we were leaving. The whole place was slowly being engulfed by giant timber bamboo.
Dinner in St. Martinsville, at Place de Evangeline - just down the street from where the Evangeline of Longfellow's poem died of a broken heart. I had a wonderful crab and corn bisque as appetizer, followed by an unmemorable stuffed shrimp. Helen had a fairly ordinary seafood gumbo, and a very good blackened red snapper. Both meals were served with a side of jambalaya - a slightly spicy rice and seafood mixture. So we've started on our Cajun food education, but hope to explore this cuisine in much more depth.
11/16 Drove to Mobile, Alabama. Interstate 10 lived down to its reputation - very rough. The expansion joints are spaced so as to cause our truck to pitch up and down violently, for mile after mile. Just west of Baton Rouge, the expressway crosses a swamp around the Atchafalaya River on a 16-mile-long causeway. Somewhere in the middle of this, we crossed the Intercoastal Waterway. It's hard to imagine traveling through these swamps in an ocean-going boat. Someday, perhaps we'll trade the RV for a cruising boat and travel the full length of this inland waterway.
We detoured on local roads down to Plaquemine Lock - an abandoned lock between Bayou Plaquemine and the Mississippi River, now a museum. The museum exhibit was primarily about the technology of locks - which is quite familiar to us, and so we spent no time in the museum. The lock appears to drop about 30 feet down from the Mississippi - so it was presumably used when the Mississippi was higher than normal. We walked up the levee, and had an excellent view up and down the Mississippi. We took Levee Road back up to I-10, but it didn't go along the top of the levee, but rather on the low ground inland from the river. So we never saw the river from the road. The small towns were very interesting, however. At one point, all we could see to the west was chemical plants - piping, storage tanks, and distillation columns on the skyline for miles. Immediately to our east, the high levee was fenced, covered with lush grass and cows. Most of the population along here seems to live in decrepit mobile homes and tarpaper shacks. At we got closer to I-10 (and to Baton Rouge), we started seeing occasional large, expensive homes with acres of manicured grass, right in among the mouldering mobile homes.
Canals wander all over this country - sometimes geometrically straight, sometimes meandering along the path of a natural bayou. ("bayou" - a slowly moving waterway, bigger than a stream, smaller than a river - that's what the natives told us. Our dictionary says "an arm, outlet, or tributary of a lake, river, etc.; any stagnant or sluggish creek, marshy lake, or the like"). Many of the canals are navigable, and the bridges crossing them can be raised to allow large vessels through. We assume that these canals provided the primary access to cane plantations before roads and motor vehicles existed.
We skipped New Orleans, passing well north of it on I-12. We'll have another chance when we come back through here after Thanksgiving. Shortly after crossing into Mississippi, we left the Interstate and went down to highway 90, which is right on the Gulf Coast. For 25 miles, one side of the highway was continuous white sand beach and blue Gulf water, and the other side alternated between huge mansions, motels, and condominiums. As we got closer to Biloxi, the ocean side changed from beach to casinos, yacht clubs, and commercial fishing harbors, with industrial buildings on the skyline ahead of us. We decided it was time to head back up to I-10.
We stopped for the night within easy reach of Mobile, at I-10 Kampground - a pleasant wooded enclave with plenty of long pull-through sites. Add it to the computer-friendly list - the office lady allowed me to hook up and download mail. It's very cold this evening - a hard freeze predicted all through the area. Our little electric heater is running continuously, and not quite keeping up. We finally fired up the propane furnace - first time we've used it - and we're cozy. Along with the cold comes a sparkling clear sky - great weather for walking around the historic districts and gardens of Mobile for the next two days.