Month: November 2016

 

November 12 to November 22, 2016

Lafayette, Louisiana

Route 10 west of New Orleans is one rough road, at least when you’re towing a lightweight Scamp. The road runs through the bayou on pilings and is a long series of low humps that set the whole rig a-vibrating in a bad way. We got an early start and made Lafayette by early afternoon. Brenda decamped with her friend Sheila that she met at Augusta cajun music camp. I consoled myself with dinner at Prejean’s restaurant. The next day the girls took off again for a day of sightseeing and cajun music while I took a long hike in a forest and walked around downtown Lafayette for a while. We would have liked to have stayed longer in cajun country, visiting some other people Brenda knows, going to some jams. Our original plan was to stay for the better part of a week and then go down the coast of Texas to Big Bend before turning north to Albuquerque sometime in early December. But Hillary asked if we could arrive before Thanksgiving to help with the kids because Tom was going east to spend the holiday with his mother and brothers. So we had to pick up the pace to shave more than a week off of our itinerary.

Coastal Texas

We did get a chance to explore some of Gulf-coastal Texas. Sea-Rim State Park south of Port Arthur is a nice park on the shore, but quite out of the way. To get to it you drive through, as in right through the middle of, several large oil refineries. Then you go along a shipping canal filled with tankers and other oil-industry-related vessels, some engaged in active work, some being repaired in the canal or in dry-dock, some abandoned and derelict. Then you drive a long ways through low grassy meadows of the type you find along seashores. We passed a number of historical markers but they came and went too fast for us to stop and read them. I think this area was important in the early history of Texas oil. Also a major battle in the war for Texas’ independence from Mexico took place nearby at Sabine Pass. There was a big ‘gator said to be in residence in an arm of the Gulf that reached next to our campsite but we didn’t see or hear him. The gulf shore was good for bike-riding and we went a long ways along the shore. The Gulf here is an unappealing brown thing with feeble surf.

 

 

Next day we jumped a few hours down the coast to Galveston Island State Park. The Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell song (“Galveston, oh Galveston”) was constantly running in the background. I had always been curious about Galveston–the 1900 hurricane flood, its reputation as an “open city” in the first half of the 20^th century.

The hurricane-spawned  flood of 1900 resulted in between 8,000 to 12,000 deaths in Galveston, a city of 40,000 people at the time. It was the highest mortality from a natural disaster in US history. Accounts of the ordeal are harrowing.  Prior to the flood Galveston was one of the most important cities in the country and on the make—banking, tourism, a cultural center, a shipping center, and an immigration port. After the flood the money fled and the town dried up. It was revived by Prohibition, or rather it was revived by flouting Prohibition. It became a sin city, the New Orleans of Texas. This persisted into the 1950s when city managers got all reform-minded and zealous. Some pinch-faced, bible-quoting, finger-wagging scold always comes along and ruins the party. Galveston likes to think it is on the rebound finally, and it does have a lively and appealing seaside, as well as an old town from the late 19^th century that had been neglected but was intact and is being restored. I wish them luck.

Tom Rush recorded a couple albums of blues and folk covers in the early 1960s that were, and still are, among my favorite records. One of them featured a powerful, bluesy spiritual about the Galveston flood. The lyrics were striking and original, with the refrain “Wasn’t that a mighty storm.” Here is a link to a discographer’s research into the songs origins. The writer is a little prolix but the story is interesting. http://singout.org/2016/08/15/wasnt-that-a-mighty-storm/

I toured an industry-sponsored museum on offshore drilling. It made a passing mention to what most people call the BP oil spill and which they refer to as the Macondo oil spill. The museum had some neat, detailed models of various drilling platform designs, but I felt guilty about even being interested in the technology and forking over 6$. The museum is housed in a retired drilling platform and has an expansive view of Galveston harbor, a busy, dirty place. Across the harbor they are building drilling towers to be towed into the gulf. The cargo and industry ships that I saw were some of the rustiest and decrepit vessels I’ve ever seen afloat. Nice pelicans in the harbor, though.

Back out our campsite a few miles outside of town I stayed up late drinking rum with a guy who just gotten laid off from his oil industry job. His specialty was designing the software and hardware that guide the underground drills that extend from the platforms into the seabed. These drills don’t go straight down—they can be steered left-right-up-down to trace a path through multiple cells of oil that have been identified by various seismic tests, soil studies and other technologies. (I had just taken a tour of the gulf drilling museum and was able to work in some industry jargon and acronyms. I do love jargon.) I was being careful not to be too damning of the oil industry but thought he went a little overboard praising the preventive technologies and practices on today’s rigs. I told him that the industry might have designed all kinds of effective safeguards and practice guidelines but, in the end, the workers in the field will take the path of least resistance and do whatever makes their lives easier and makes the work go more quickly. He agreed, saying that he had only been on a platform twice and was appalled by the cavalier handling of materials by the roughnecks and their dismissive attitude toward standards and recommended practices. In any human endeavor—oil drilling, food preparation, finance– you can make all the regulations and requirements you can think of but you can’t legislate away human greed or incompetence. Human frailty will out.

Austin, TX

We booked a site at an RV camp right in the heart of Austin, on the south side of the Colorado River (not the Grand Canyon Colorado, another one.) There were lots of fine eating and music establishments just outside the camp. We ate at Threadgills, and went to the Highball Lounge to see Dale Watson and His Lonestars, a septet with a three-piece horn section that played swing music and had a loungey sort of style. Lots of dancers who all knew one another crowded the big dance floor and Brenda was asked to dance several times which she enjoyed. One of her partners was a friend of the bandleader’s and he took her up to meet Mr. Watson, a flashily-dressed, silver-haired baritone. Watson asked Brenda questions from the stage using his microphone (“are you above or below the Mason Dixon in your part of Maryland?”) and then dedicated a song about Baltimore to her. We had a grand time.

Next day we got together with our old friend Roy who has lived in Austin since the early 1990s. He showed us the sights–we took a tour of the state capitol building, hiked a few miles along Barton River.

 

That night we went to The Hole in the Wall Bar for a multi-artist tribute to an Austin favorite son the late Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet). The most prominent musicians of the town came on stage one after another to perform one of Sahm’s songs so we got a whole showcase of the best local talent.

This period, from New Orleans to Austin, has been the most urban part of our trip and it was a nice change. We dined out, went to shows, and didn’t get in as much exercise as normal. And of course we went way over budget for those few weeks. But it was a really nice change of pace.

I was surprised to learn that Austin is the eleventh largest city in the US, larger in population than Boston or Baltimore. (In fact, of the eleven largest population cities, Texas has four of them.) Roy said that every day 115 people move to Austin. The evidence of this we saw was in the traffic; at least as congested as New York City at all times of day.

The Hill Country and West Texas

The Hill Country is a beautiful part of Texas, south central. Rolling hills, green, forested in places. LBJ’s ranch, a national park now, we paused at, just west of Johnson City. I had never seen this green part of Texas; all my traveling had been in the northern, more barren eco-zone.

 

We got as far as Junction, Texas before we started looking for a camp. The first park we found was closed for the winter. We wound up at North Junction RV Park on the North Llano River. Actually quite a nice, shaded park; clean and well-maintained. We took a walk along the river until someone started yelling at us from a distance and finally drove up to us on an ATV. The camouflage-clad young woman  was not entirely unpleasant as she informed us that people in the vicinity were hunting and we were likely to get our heads blowed off if we continued in that direction. We went into the fair-sized town for groceries and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single person was clothed in camouflage. And every single establishment had a sign that said “Welcome Hunters” or something similar. No lie. Junction is the most hunting-obsessed town I have ever been in. Actually, after reading a local publication the city appears to be in the huntingest county, Kimble County. Hunting-related paraphernalia was on sale in the most unexpected places. An object I had never seen one of before, a device for feeding corn to game animals in the wild, I saw at least a hundred of, for sale in parking lots of all manner of stores. If I were to tarry in Junction Texas I think I would run out of conversational material, tout suit.

 

Next was an rv park right on Highway 10 in Balmorhea. A hand-lettered sign directed us to a simple trailer within the dusty compound. I knocked on the door, a guy opened it and said “twenty bucks,” so I gave him twenty bucks and he went back inside and I picked out a site. I don’t know, maybe he had the actual owner of the place tied up in that trailer. It was a treeless parking lot sort of place about half-tenanted with oil industry roughnecks. There was a saloon next door. I discouraged Brenda from coming with me, saying I should check it out first. Boy was that a good call. Four guys playing pool trying to top one another’s stories about being arrested for drunk driving and surviving the worst county and city jails in west texas. One guy, in the space of twenty minutes, told of three acts of violence he had committed against people he had just met who bothered him in some way. At night we could see a gas flare from an oil well in the near distance. It’s been getting cold these past few nights, like in the 40s. Our first chills since Canada, three months ago.

 

I reserved a spot at a New Mexico State Park at Leesburg Dam, just north of Las Cruces, near the town of Radium Springs. Nice facility—spacious sites, picnic tables in half-wall enclosures with roofs at each site. Miles of trails through the scrub and along the Rio Grande. Mountains in the distance in all directions. The Rio Grande is pretty played out by the time it gets here—it is a thin thread that barely seems to be flowing. It is renourished by other tributaries further south before reaching El Paso. We met a couple, fellow campers, down by the river who were from Severna Park, MD and old hands at camping in the southwest. Another couple we met at the park, from Saranac NY originally, have been traveling in their Scamp-like Casita for two years.

We left Radium Springs to follow the Rio Grande up to Albuquerque where we will stay a month in a little house our daughter is having built on her property. Happy thanksgiving and happy Holidays to all!

 

November 6 to November 12, 2016

 

Davis Bayou, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Mississippi

 

Spent my first night in Mississippi, at the Davis Bayou campground, the western extension of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. This is a far cry from the dazzling sands and blue water of Ft. Pickens in Pensacola. This part of the park is in the bayou on the mainland behind the barrier islands. The barrier islands are a mile out and their descriptions very inviting; a longer stay here should include a kayak trip. We stayed two nights because there were some nice trails for walking and biking, and a large visitor center. The Davis campground was turned into a sort of refugee camp after a recent hurricane (Rita, perhaps?) that made many Mississippians homeless. For over a year the park was filled with full-time residents in campers and tents and some FEMA trailers.

 

We headed west, through Mobile and Gulfport to New Orleans. The infrastructure of the petroleum industry starts appearing here—drilling platforms on the horizon, lots of tanker activity in the ports, pipes stacked in the shipping yard.

A friend of our daughter from high school and college, Chris A., lives in New Orleans, in the Algiers neighborhood, and very generously allowed us to park our trailer in his driveway and hook up to his utilities. Not only that, our friends Donald and Lucy flew down from Bushwood and Chris made his extra room available to them. His house is very cool, a refurbished shotgun style home, only a short 2$ ferry ride to the French Quarter across the Mississippi. There is an historical marker on Chris’s house identifying it as the home of the renowned jazz trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen. (Chris rents his room as an AirBnB so if you are looking for nice accommodations in NOLA let me know.)

 

We made the crossing to the French quarter a couple of times each day—in the morning to take in the sights, in the evening to take in the sounds.

 

Among the acts we saw in clubs—the Iguanas at the Circle Bar; Wendell Brunius and the Preservation Hall All Stars; Tuba Skinny on Frenchman Street; The Palm Court SwingMasters; The Royal Street Windin’ Boys at the 21^st Amendment and another night at a club on Frenchman Street. Several of the city’s hard-charging funky brass bands we encountered on the streets blowing their souls out, nothing held in reserve. One such group had about fifteen members, including five trumpets, and took over an intersection on Frenchman Street for about 20 minutes blasting some high-powered anthems. There were dozens of clubs on a three block stretch of Frenchman street featuring world-class entertainers with a minimal or no cover charge. I don’t think there is a comparable concentration of music to be found in any other city of the world.

Election day coincided with our arrival in New Orleans, which cast a pall over the proceedings for a couple days. I kept hearing the tag line from a Melvin van Peebles song, “This ain’t America/ you can’t fool me.”

 

Veni, comedi, audire – We came, we ate, we listened. And we walked. And imbibed. And generally soaked up the scene. My third time in new Orleans, and each time I discover a new neighborhood to explore. Thanks to Chris I have some sense of Algiers. Next time we’ll spend some time in the Lower Garden district which was only glimpsed from a bus this time. I know what it means to miss New Orleans but after a few days we had to give the town some rest.

October 26 to November 6, 2016—Gulf Islands National Seashore at Fort Pickens Campground

 

The Appalachian Mountains end about 220 miles north of here above Birmingham, Alabama. The mountains have been eroded down to their hardest elements, quartz and granite. The erosion from these deposits tumbles down the Alabama River and enter the Gulf of Mexico as fine white sand. The beaches here are as white as any you will find and finer than sugar. It is fine-grained hourglass sand that squeaks when you walk on it. I had expected the Gulf of Mexico to be a brown, inert body of water but here it is as aquamarine as any beach in the Keys. The wave action is enough to attract surfboarders. Add in the white sand and this is one of the finest stretches of beach I’ve ever seen. Lots of life in the gulf, too. Schools of fish swimming nearby, the occasional sea turtle, blue crabs in the surf.

 

The Gulf Islands National Seashore encompasses long stretches of the barrier islands that extend from the panhandle of Florida to Mississippi. We are in the part adjoining Pensacola Beach. Loop A of the Fort Pickens campground is the smallest of the camping grounds here, maybe forty sites set amid live oaks stunted by salt and wind and lack of soil. I had reserved it back in April so we have the roomiest site if not the shadiest. Around every corner is a little clearing that looks ready-made for filming a scene from the Bible with the twisted live oaks standing in for olive trees.  The gulf and the sound are both a short walk away. Fort Pickens is about two miles down the road. Forts are the oldest structures in Florida and elsewhere because they are so massive and, with the invention of rifled artillery in the Civil War, became obsolete almost overnight.  They were so vulnerable that no army tried to defend them so no army felt compelled to attack them so they pretty much survive intact.

 

We are in full beach bum mode. Take a hike or a bike ride, go in the gulf, make dinner, a couple drinks before bed. Rinse and repeat. The Blue Angels flight team is stationed at Pensacola navy base across the sound and practice overhead frequently. Quite the sight. I wouldn’t get in my car to drive to an air show but I enjoy watching the six planes practicing their immelmans, power dives, double farvels, barrel rolls, etc. And the jet engine screams are out of this world. If I were an enemy combatant and experienced a formation of these suckers coming at me I think I would take up another occupation.

 

There are a few armadillos here and they snuffle about as if they own the place, brushing against your leg under the picnic table, knocking things over in their single-minded pursuit of the maggots that fall crawl out of the live oak acorns after they have eaten all the acorn meat. Can there be a stranger-looking critter than the armadillo?

 

 

 

 

November 1, 2016—Mechanical issues of the past five months

We have had some mechanical issues to deal with over the past five months, altho they have been mostly minor.

As light as it is, the trailer is subjected to a lot of bouncing around and things rattle loose. Early on I noticed that a trickle of water was running from under the toilet into the shower enclosure. Something had shook loose in the supply line to the toilet; the flushing mechanism and associated piping had to be dismantled, tightened and reassembled.

I detected moisture under the sink, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It took me over a month to find that the collar holding down the spigot over the sink had come loose and every time it was used a little water would trickle out and back down under the sink, spreading over the various water supply lines and water heater infrastructure under there. The small leak was impossible for me to track down until it became a torrent, then any idiot could see where it was coming from.

The screws holding the table base down backed out and the subsequent swaying of the table base eventually tore the screws from their moorings. I just had to rotate the base a little and screw it down again. The new screws have held fast since Michigan.

Back in North Carolina the guy who repacked the wheel bearings left the trailer breakaway pin disconnected, which is how I discovered that the breakaway device (which locks up the trailer brakes in the event it becomes disconnected from the truck, so it doesn’t pass you going down a mountain road) wasn’t working. Couldn’t do anything about it myself and had to wait until we were situated in a place for an extended period near a city so I could hire a mechanic to come out and look at it; that didn’t happen until 2 months later in Stuart Florida. I had a guy named Joe from Father & Son Mobile RV Repair come out. Joe and his mullet head arrived on schedule and he proceeded to disconnect and rearrange the wiring around my batteries. In short order the breakaway device was working. He couldn’t find the leak under the sink which was plaguing me at the time, nor could he address the slight leak around a seal in the graywater tank. So I paid $180 to get the breakaway device rewired. A week and 150 miles later I realized that my batteries weren’t charging, either by being connected to the truck or by being plugged in at campsites. I called Joe and his mullet and they immediately got all defensive, suggesting that both the truck and the trailer charger had, remarkably, blown fuses at the same time which prevented the batteries from charging (no), or some other miraculous combination of failures,  but whatever it was it wasn’t his fault because “..listen,  I work on million dollar motor coaches,” leaving something unsaid . When I had watched him work on the truck battery connections I wondered why he was hooking up an extraneous wire that I knew to be left over from some modification the previous owner had installed and removed. Not being in a position to find help from an electrician I decided to disconnect that particular wire and, behold, the batteries are charging when it is in towing mode. There is still a problem with the DC charging system but it can wait until New Mexico.

The graywater leak was a miniscule leak, maybe a drop every ten minutes, until Joe and his mullet started poking around, then it became a regular drip-drip-drip and had to be dealt with. I had to empty the wastewater tank, wait two days for it to dry out, remove old sealant around the suspect connection, and spread some epoxy over the pipe joints, which worked.

Every screw that can be seen needs to be tightened periodically. It’s the ones I can’t see that keep me up at night. But as you can see we have been pretty much trouble free these past five months. When we get to Albuquerque I plan on replacing some worn parts but it is mostly cosmetic.

October 21 to October, 26, 2016—west coast of Florida

From the Keys we made a long haul to Sanibel island on the Gulf of Mexico. The island is famed for shell collecting because unlike other Gulf islands it has a long beach exposure running east to west and so, owing to the current, intercepts more artifacts from the sea. But there were more shell collectors than shells the two days we were there and the beach was pretty much picked over by the time we made the rounds. A pleasant, reasonably-priced RV camp called Periwinkle. (Diane and Preston had stayed here once before; people still talk about them.) There were lots of exotic birds in cages, and also a handful of captive lemurs. We found a place to hike in the nearby wildlife reserve, but it wasn’t a particularly appealing trail through the mangrove forest in the blazing sun. I eavesdropped on a guided tour to learn that the mangrove seed is the only seed that fertilizes while still hanging on the tree. From the fertilized seed it grows a six inch tube called a propagule, resembling the cigars from cigar trees of our region. Theses propagules fall off and can drift for as long as a year before being washed onto their ideal grounds for sprouting, a shaded sandbar in shallow water.

We headed up the coast after a couple days at Sanibel to a private campground on the Chassahowitzka river. Took a little bike ride around the area and ate onion rings at a dive bar. A couple guys came in accompanied by a trail of marijuana vapor and started getting rowdy after a couple beers. We can get that at home so we rode back to camp at dark. Brenda turned in early, I wound up getting in conversation with a guy playing guitar across camp, a pleasant, philosophical chap. We had a couple beers and a couple laughs. While we were talking a herd of something commenced to stirring up the underbrush. On the way back to the Scamp I discovered they were armadillos as they made their way blindly across the campground nosing around for ants and grubs.

 

Moved a little ways up the coast to Homosassa to a pleasant-enough camp by the Gulf shore. Unfortunately a guy was running a small loader to smooth some ground in the camp making a horrendous noise, especially the alarm that beeped when he went into reverse. He said he was going to be at it until sundown and start again in the morning so we left without checking in and drove to another campground which proved to be located in a median strip next to a truck stop so we passed that one by too. A little further up the road we chose Newport State Park which was much to our liking. We wound up staying two nights instead of the one we originally planned. There was a little fishing camp town down the road, St. Mark’s, where we had dinner and watched the workboats bringing in the catch. One boat had two square baskets, bushel-size, filled with stone crab claws. Took two men to lift each one. I am guessing that each basket held about $1,500 to $1,800 worth, retail. (The restaurant was selling a pound of claws for $35.) Workers immediately began sorting them by size and packing them on ice.

Next day we visited, a few miles away, Wakulla Springs, billing itself as the largest freshwater spring in the world, 600,000 gallons per minute flowing out of an underwater limestone cave system that is the largest in the US, 30+ miles. For less than ten bucks you get an hour’s ride around the springs on a little pontoon boat. The water is  crystal clear to ten or more feet and you see untold numbers and types of fish and many manatees. At least a dozen alligators nearby and many species of birds. Wakulla Springs is a state property now but was founded by Edward Ball as a, here we go again, resort for the rich. The splendid hotel he built is well-maintained by the state. He dynamited the river to deepen it so his buddies’ yachts could reach the springs from the Gulf and put a fence across the river so the undesirables would be kept at a distance. I asked the boat guide how Ball made his pile. He said that Ball’s sister had married a DuPont and her husband hired Ball to manage the Dupont investments. Something sounded familiar and after a few minutes I realized that the woman who married into the DuPont fortune was Jessie Ball who we learned about from all the memorials bearing her name around Reedville when we stayed there in late August. What a coincidence. Both Edward Ball and Jessie Ball DuPont were significant investors and philanthropists in the building of Miami and St. Augustine and are lionized in Florida history, along with Henry Flagler who built the railroad to Key West and is known as the father of Miami and Palm Beach. You can’t throw a stone anywhere in southeastern Florida without hitting something named after Henry Flagler. (Edward Ball is know as the father of one of the most violent labor disputes in American history, a years-long showdown with the railroad union that went on into the 1960s.)

In years past the guides of the various Florida spring boat tours, local African-American boat captains, developed unique, stylized recitations that they would deliver during the tour. If you do a little searching you will be charmed by the recordings. Google “Welcome to Rainbow Springs” and there is an example on youtube. Another is on the florida state archives and features a guide from Wakulla springs named Luke Smith. His son works as a guide at Wakulla currently, tho he was not our guide. Our guide, named Pat,  arrived at Wakulla by accident in the early 1950s, hitchhiking around the south as a teenager. He was captivated by the place, hung around till they gave him paying work, and never left. He was an entertaining guide altho, sadly, he repeated two entire stories during the trip. Finally, I should not fail to mention that some of the Weismuller Tarzan movies were filmed at Wakulla as were the water scenes in “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Nature and Culture, together in one place.

(This is the “black lagoon” from which the Creature emerged in the movie.)

Tom and Renee Ewart, old friends from Bushwood Mill past, live in Tallahassee and we met them for dinner at a midpoint between Tallahassee and Newport. It was a nice, old restaurant reminiscent of now-gone crabhouses of old St. Mary’s county. In a remarkable achievement Tom had managed to find the only dining place in Florida that didn’t serve alcohol. Way to go, Tom! Once again I was sorry that we had not planned our trip a little better so that we could have spent more time with our old friends. We certainly wouldn’t have minded another day’s stay at Newport–there were lots of inviting bike trails in the Big Bend nature reserve surrounding the camp—but we are coming up on a deadline to arrive in Albuquerque in a few weeks and have to maintain westward progress.