After New Orleans, I headed to Texas to spend Christmas with a cousin I hadn’t seen in over 40 years.

The Mighty Mississippi

Along the way, I drove across miles of swamps, followed the Mississippi through part of Louisiana, learned a bit more about the old plantations and Cajuns, and passed refineries and chemical plants. As much as I would have liked to have taken pictures of the swamps, there was no safe place to stop along those stretches of the freeway.

Once I was on terra firm, I drove along the Mississippi River where plantations lined the river. The plantations were laid out perpendicular to the river, giving each lot a bit of different types of land – riverfront and moving up in elevation to a place for a home and farmland. I stopped at the Great River Road Museum and Houmas House.

Nearby, I saw some fields with strange looking plants – sugarcane? Yup!

Some of the riverfront parcels are now owned by oil companies or related industries.

Intermittently, I would see a large white bird, usually standing in the ditch along the road. Later, I identified the bird as a snowy egret.

I spent the night at the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area Center, basically a welcome center (tourist info and rest area). The car parking area was very close to the freeway, so I moved to the RV area for a little quieter night (trucks had their own rest area on the other side of the freeway). This center actually had a security person at night, who immediately came over and told me that I had to park in the car area. I grudgingly moved back; it was fine for one night – toilets readily at hand and covered picnic tables.

Acadians and Cajuns

One of the things I’m enjoying about traveling in the off season, is that many places I visit are not crowded and, sometimes, I’m the only one. When I stopped at the Acadian Cultural Center the next morning in Lafayette, I had the theater all to myself. The center explained how the Acadians came from France to settle in what is now Nova Scotia. After years of being tolerated, often grudgingly, they were forced out of the area. Some returned to France; many moved to Louisiana, where Acadian became Cajun.

A chilly night

In Lafayette, I also stopped for gas and groceries – then back on the road to Texas. I managed to stay far enough from Houston to avoid the traffic. As I headed north the temperature dropped. I don’t like driving in the dark and avoid it as much as much as I can. For the night, I had identified several options, but pushed through to Buc-ees in Madisonville. Buc-ees is basically a giant truck stop without the trucks. They have clearly posted signs, “no trucks.” I guess that makes it a really big gas station with a really big convenience store. And, parking for the night is fine.

At the drinks the fountain, I can fill up my water bottle with hot water for less than a dollar. This night, I was hunkering in for a cold one and I wanted hot water to make my uninsulated water bottle into a hot water bottle. Yes, I can heat my own water, but that would have required being outside in the cold.

In addition to being cold, it was also windy. I parked my car on the leeward side of the cement block enclosed trash area in hopes of it being a tiny bit warmer for the night. At the very least, I wasn’t buffeted about by the wind.

Normally, I sleep with a down comforter. When it gets into the 30s, I toss on my down sleeping bag. This night, it was going to be in the teens, so I carefully wrapped the down sleeping bag around me, slept in leggings, my t-shirt, fleece jacket, and wool hat. In the morning, it was 13 degrees out, but only the tip of my nose was cold.

Well, I was warm until I got out of my car – it was still windy! Brrrr! I ate a simple breakfast in the car, did a couple of trips into the store for the bathroom and hot water for my morning drink, then did a quick shuffle to get the car ready to drive. Normally I have a precise place for everything while I am driving, but on this day, I piled it in, made sure I had good visibility for driving, and hit the road – the rest would get sorted when I got to my cousin’s.

A cousins Christmas

One of my few memories of my cousins as kids was visiting them in California and having the power go out. So, while I was with my cousin in Texas, you guessed it – the power went out! We both got out flashlights and battery lanterns. After about an hour, not knowing how long it would last – she had endured three days without power a couple of years ago – we started readying ourselves to go over to her son’s house. Just then, yup, the power came back on.

We had a delightful three days catching up and celebrating the holidays. We made gingerbread cookies, went for a walk, and cooked Christmas dinner. I tried to figure out how all the relations fit together. Meeting two of her kids over Christmas dinner helped sort out the family and was a lovely way to celebrate the holiday.