Saturday, October 22, 2011

November 4, 2008--Louisiana vacation

We're back from our vacation in Louisiana! We had a great time. I took a lot of pictures, which are on my Facebook page, and I will put a few of them on my blog as I post about our trip. I won't be able to post about it all in one sitting, though, so I'll just start from the beginning.

We left a week ago from yesterday to go visit our friends from CBC. We left about 4:30am, while it was still very dark, and went west into Illinois, and then south. The road caught parts of Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Of course we lived in Missouri for five years, but this was the first time we'd been through this particular part and the first time we'd ever seen cotton fields. Many of them were being harvested, and there were bits of cotton lying all over the road and in people's yards and blowing across parking lots. We pulled over to the edge and picked up some cotton off the side of the road.

We had brought our laptop with us and our PC card so we could connect to the interned in the van. Erick needed to find a post office to mail in his ordination application before the end of the week, so we were able to look it up on Google maps and find the post office in a small town in Missouri. We found many uses for having the interned on a trip, such as finding out what towns coming up had what places to eat. I was able to keep up on forums almost the whole week, too.

Arkansas was very flat in the part we travelled through. The fields all had man-made ditches dug next to each one for irrigation. Every field had hoses or irrigation systems--they must not get much rain there or something.

Mississippi was very beautiful, with a lot of pine trees. The trees were very tall and skinny, with needles way at the top. I'm pretty sure many of them are grown for their timber. They reminded me of a forest of 2X4's. Other than that we didn't see any crops in Mississippi, although we saw a few cows. I don't know if they grow anything else besides timber.

We finally got into Louisiana, and went across this long bridge built right over the swamp. I'd always wondered why the maps of Louisiana looked so cut up and funny at the edge, like there was no definite border. It didn't look like there was any solid land anywhere. There were houses built right down into the water on stilts. The sun was just setting, and it was hard to see the trees because of the brightness of the sun but they looked really strange to me--like they had feathers. When I finally got to see them a little better I thought they were molding, or that someone hadn't brushed the cobwebs off in a long time. Between the gray, feathery trees was yellow flowers, the with the sun behind them they had a weird, other-worldly look to them. I found out later that what I was seeing was Spanish Moss. I'd heard of it, but I'd never realized what it looked like. I always though it looked like normal, green, grow-up-the-side-of-the-tree moss.

It was dark by the time we finally arrived in Thibodaux. It's pronounced "Tib-a-dough."

I will write more about our trip later.

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