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It is a miracle. Today, I was on the road
before 10 am! At the Northern tip of
Galveston Island, I
caught the free ferry to Port
Bolivar. Despite the cloud cover,
the air was warm. Hundreds of black-headed gulls
skillfully swooped and dived over the stern as
three young children threw balls of bread into
the air. I stood on the public observation deck
and watched this while Galveston shrank into the
distance.
Last night its attractive mix of
Victorian and Art Deco buildings - and the over
priced souvenir shops and restaurants that they
housed - where largely closed, waiting for the
end of the month. Then the place is meant to
become a world of crazy youth. From the few
pictures I saw of previous seasons, I am
thankful that I missed that craziness.
It was a very short trip, and on the
other side I set off along Route 87. Today I was
determined to follow the same strategy as on
Monday; I would keep off the main Interstates as
much as I could. I had purchased a more detailed
atlas to help me in this quest. Most of the trip
along the Bolivar
Peninsula was through sandy wild
life reserves and small, quite resort towns. I
had brunch in Bridge
City. Gary's Family
Diner was surrounded by pickup
trucks and I drew some unusual looks as I walked
through its clientele of "Good Old Boys", on my
way to an empty table. I was the only one not
wearing a base-ball cap. My waitress had these
incredibly long fake pink nails too. The chicken
fried stake was pretty good though.
I joined the Interstate 10 only long
enough to cross into
Louisiana. It was
interesting to note that the flowers which had
lined my route through Texas, stopped just shy
of the state line.
I dropped onto Route 90. The story with
Route 90 is similar to the one with Route 20.
Only in this case, the towns still look well
maintained; Children play around the houses and
people enter and leave local stores; Buildings
have a fresh lick of paint and gardens are
maintained.
For the majority of my trip, the road cut
its way through swamp land. Occasionally it
would traverse bayous
and Intracoastal
Waterways. Homes and fields would
be cut into the solid wall of green forestation.
Louisiana wins, hands down, for the most
visually appealing state visited on this trip.
Or is that most visually unusual? As the 90
swung into Houma it ran
parallel with a navigable waterway. Here men and
boys were fishing and willow trees bowed down
low into the water. The image was exactly
Huckleberry-Finn. The
air was heavy with the sent of damp plant matter
and my brow was damp with humidity.
This land is so green and fertile that it
is bursting at its seams with wild-life. A large
number of which was lying dead by the roadside.
I had hoped to stay the night in
Lafayette.
Cajun central. But I
reached it at peak rush-hour. Lafayette is
supposably home for over 100,000 people. Every
one of which were on the road and getting tense.
The down town business district had just been
re-painted. And I had arrived on the day before
all the street signs went back up. It was
confusing. But I also did not feel too drawn by
it all. As I stared intently at my map for some
inspiring morsel of as yet unnoticed Lafayette
information, the number "129" jumped out of the
page at me. It was the distance, in miles, to
New Orleans from
Lafayette. After another couple of blocks of
blank signs and blank enthusiasm I headed back
to the car and drove the 129 miles.
I fumbled straight into the
French Quarter. It was
already quite late, but the narrow streets were
still full of people wandering from petit store
to petit store. I felt like I had been
transported to Lisbon or some other European
city.
What a place!
Will it look as appealing in the day
light?
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