Our Travel Blog

Back to the cooler weather again overnight (global warming is so over-rated). It was an overcast day, and the temperature struggled up to 9°C. We headed out after breakfast for about a 70 mile journey to  the west of New Orleans.  Our destination was one of the many plantation houses situated on River Road. River road follows the Mississippi river along its south bank.

This particular house is called the Laura Plantation which is the plantation featured in the autobiography of Laura Locoul Gore called Memories of the Old Plantation Home.

Laura Plantation House

The tour started with an explanation of “Creole”. Many moons ago, back in the late 1600’s a mix of peoples arrived in the New Orleans area, primarily French, German, Swiss and Spanish. Native Americans were already living in the area, and amazingly the Europeans settled in with the natives rather than trying to beat the livi conquer them. They all worked together pooling ideas and resources; they were joined later by West Africans from Senegal. Today, to be classified as Creole you must be descended from this mixed group of people AND be French speaking. French was the only language spoken in Louisiana before it was bought by the US and became a state in 1845. Now very little French is spoken except in small country areas.

Balcony

The front of the house had seven sets of double doors facing the Mississippi River which was about 100 metres away. There was an avenue of trees down to the river which formed part of the “air conditioning” of the house. The three sets of doors on the right led to the men’s part of the house, the three on the left to the women’s side. In the summer the two sets in the middle were left open. They captured the cooler breeze off the river which was funneled towards the house by the avenue of trees. This cooler air then circulated through the house and exited out the back.

Not a single nail was used in the construction of the house.

Initially we were surprised to see a brightly coloured house, after all most of the plantation houses in the movies are white. Evidently this is only true for “American” houses not “Louisiana” ones. The reason for the colours was to aid in identifying the house from the river; the only means of transportation was the river, and people had to identify the house they wanted the boat to stop at, if they were all white, this could have been a problem!

Slaves Cabin

As you can see above the slaves didn’t have it as good, each family was allocated 16ft by 16ft.

A New Use For Old Wine Bottles

Evidently a lot of drinking went on in these plantation houses, as you can see from the photo they found creative uses for the empties. Not only were they around trees but also around the flower and vegetable gardens.

After the tour we had a decision to make. We had planned on taking a swamp boat tour, but the temperature was still around 9°C with a cold wind. Given that the swamp boat was open and would create it’s own wind chill as it moved, we decided to give up on that part of the trip. Instead we headed off to find lunch.

We found a truly unpretentious “local” restaurant and had a great meal of gumbo and shrimp.

On the way home we stayed off the interstate for a while and followed the Mississippi river along River Road. We couldn’t see the river due to the levee that had been built to contain the water during hurricanes and heavy rains. Having grown up in the era of “American Pie” I thought it only fitting that we took our chevy to the levee!

The Levee from the Chevy

The river is just beyond the trees on the left, the levee is about 30ft above the river level This particular levy is over 600 miles long and starts in Arkansas.

Tomorrow we head out towards San Antonio Texas, with an overnight stop just outside Houston.

A much warmer morning, so much so Lyn got up in the middle of the night to turn the heating off. We had some heavy rain overnight, which has left a lot of large puddles all over the place. Drainage in this area seems to be poor to non-existent.

It was overcast and there was a severe fog advisory in effect for the area so we decided it was a stay at home day. This morning we had to go and check-in as the office isn’t open on the week-ends. After that we headed into town to do some grocery shopping. When we got to the check out and pay for some wine I was asked for ID as I appeared to be under 40! There’s a first.

The temperature climbed to 74°F around midday, a welcome change from the cold days we have had since we arrived down south.

After lunch Lyn headed over to the laundry while I got busy doing nothing. Once that was done we combined our walk with some local geo-caching, followed by a drive out to a large “General Store” located on the outskirts of the town. On the way back we drove through a very nice sub-division where all the houses were located on small canals feeding into navigable waterways. I checked on the prices of some of houses later, they were ridiculous; for $499,999 you could get a 3600 sq ft, 5 bed, 5 bath house. $250,000 would get you a 3 bed /3 bath 2500 sq ft home with covered dock and boardwalk along the canal at the bottom of the garden.

Back at the camp ground it was warm enough to sit outside for our afternoon coffee, and my last slice of Christmas cake.

Tomorrow is forecast to be a bit cooler, and we are heading out to visit a plantation house and go on a swamp boat trip

A much warmer night, with no sign of rain when we woke up. A quick check of the weather showed that the rain we had expected had got delayed somewhere, and wasn’t expected to arrive before 18:00.

We decided to head out to the French Quarter in New Orleans, and then take a river cruise on the Mighty Mississippi.

It was about a 30 minute drive into the city, and I must admit first impressions were not that great! Even on a Sunday morning it was busy, the streets were very narrow and in disrepair and the place just didn’t “look” friendly.

With the aid of the GPS we made it into the French Quarter, the next problem was parking. All street parking was taken, so we found a parking lot, we figured we’d need at least 6 hours, they figured we’d pay at least $60. We tried a few more lots, but there seems to be price fixing in effect. We found a space on the street that nobody seemed to be stopping at so we grabbed it. There was a sign saying something about bus parking, but there were no buses in sight so we decided to risk it!

New Orleans was founded by a guy from Quebec back in the 1700’s so there is a fair bit of French influence in the old part of town. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

Balconies Everywhere

Horse Drawn Carriages and St. Louis Cathedral

Lost in Time

Music Everywhere and…… Anywhere

Ornate Copperwork over Entrance

When we started walking we saw a restaurant that looked as though it would a good place have lunch at, but as we were walking around the back streets we saw this bar which looked far more interesting. We had a great meal of local offerings.

Fire Truck Getting Ready for Mardi GrasMore Horse Carriages

We took a river cruise along the Mississippi which stopped at some obscure battlefield. The battlefield was pretty much just a field, but the trip was good. The paddle on the back was the only means of propulsion, no hidden propellers!The trip was remarkably smooth compared with conventional boats. Unfortunately the return trip was made in thick fog so there  was nothing to see.

A Happy Camper

Back at the truck we found a nice present from one of the local bylaw officers, a parking ticket! The good news is, the ticket will only cost $20 vs $60+ in a parking lot…. go figure

Tomorrow may be a stay at home day as there is rain and thunderstorms in the forecast

Woke up to a cooler morning, but clear skies. We were in no great rush as we only had a 3 hour journey ahead of us. After a leisurely breakfast, Lyn sorted out the inside of the trailer, and I did the out side stuff. We paid close attention to the check list as we hadn’t towed the beast for some time. Finally, we were all set to go around 11:00, trailer connected, lights checked, walk around complete, brake controller che….. ummmm where’s the brake controller?

For those that don’t know; large trailers like ours have electric brakes on the wheels to help stop the extra weight, it wouldn’t be very fair, or safe, to ask the truck to do the all the braking for both itself and 12,000 pounds of trailer. A small box is connected inside the truck that activates the trailer bakes when the truck brakes are applied, ours is a little more sophisticated than that, and will measure the degree of braking; the harder I brake the truck,the more power is applied to the trailer brakes.

Back to the blog, the brake controller is disconnected when I am not towing and is placed in the glove compartment, problem is it wasn’t there. In fact it wasn’t anywhere. The truck was searched by Lyn, then by me….. NO controller. No controller means no go (or more correctly no stop). After a quick discussion we decided to head up to camping world at slow speed and see if they had any in stock. At 40 mph in light traffic very little braking is needed, and luckily no emergency stops were required. In fact at slow speed the truck can handle the braking pretty well.

Even if Camping world had a controller in stock we would still have to spend quite some time mounting it in its bracket and wiring it into the truck, as each controller is different.

Finally our luck changed, Camping World had the exact same brake controller that we (once) had, albeit at $100 more than I paid for the original, but by now that was not an issue! 5 minutes later it was installed and we were on our way. Still no idea where the original is as it never leaves the truck.

On the good news side, the roads were clear, we ambled along at 55 mph getting a remarkable 14.4 mpg and my new rear view camera worked a treat. It really made lane changing much less stressful.

We arrived at the campground around 14:30, nowhere as near as pleasant as the one we had just left, but adequate for a 4 night stay. At the moment there is some rain in the forecast but hopefully it won’t prevent us from exploring the area.