So... After a long day and tales of Vicksburg yesterday I was spent and left you hanging with a promise to share a total surprise we encountered in Louisiana. I'll pick up where I left off. We departed the state of Mississippi yesterday afternoon by crossing a bridge spanning it's namesake river and carrying I-20 traffic. If you think of Louisiana being shaped like a boot (no... it's not one of those tall women's boots like Italy... its more of the "just above the ankle" variety that hunters, farmers and exurban slush-haters wear... but it's a boot none the less) then we entered the state through the second eyelet from the top. I-20 makes a straight line across the state from that point as if a cobbler had stitched it. We were about 50 miles in when we reached the exit for our campground. If you've ever driven the land just west of the Mississippi river in Louisiana, Arkansas and even into Missouri you may recall that the land is flat, flat, flat. Its been planed smooth by millions of spring floods and is chock full of agriculture. We were still in that flood plain when we exited I-20. At our exit were two brown signs with white lettering. One said "Poverty Point State Park". That was us. The other said "Poverty Point World Heritage Site". What? I am familiar with world heritage sites. That status is granted by UNESCO (that's the United Nations... ah... Earth (I think).... no Ecology.... oh, who cares?... it's the United Nations ESCO group... they're important... trust me... at least for this story they're important). There are approximately 1,000 sites at present and they represent the most significant natural and man made points on the planet. The list includes places like the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney Opera House in Australia (noteworthy... right?). The Great Wall of China. The pyramids of Egypt. Stonehenge. You get the idea. What in the name of God was a World Heritage Site doing on the Mississippi flood plain near our humble state park campground? There are only 23 of these sites in the whole US-of-A... less than one for every two states... and there is one here and I've never heard of it? That all turned out to be true.
Just a few miles from the campground sits the "Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point". Here is the best pic I could find online to capture the site:
The features that make this noteworthy are the arcs. They are mounds built with significant precision beginning 3,700 year ago and developed over about 600 years, then abandoned, then added on to again, then forgotten completely until being discovered after Europeans colonized the area (and as you can see, those Europeans used bulldozers to put a road through the pesky mounds). The mounds stand up to 30 feet high today and are over a kilometer long. If you allow for nearly 4,000 years of settling and compaction including a few floods then when they were built they were... well... I guess... much taller. Some of the objects and material that has come out of the site came from as far as 800 miles away. There are 53 million cubic feet of material in the ridges and they were built at a time after the Egyptian pyramids but before the Mayan pyramids in Central America by people who were hunter gatherers and had no "machines" (including wheeled devices). Somehow, between sessions chasing bison, noodling fish and gathering fiddleheads these people moved tens of millions of basket loads of dirt to make a structure that looks like ripples on a pond. Well I'll be darned.
So, with the sun halfway to its zenith for the day we pressed on west, across the "boot state" and headed for its third largest city -- Shreveport. The trip was uneventful (our favorite kind!). Shreveport is a city of just under 200,000 population sitting on the Red River. Based on the significant number of billboards along I-20 as we approached the city, it's principle industries are gambling and the practice of personal injury law. In reality there is actually some other stuff happening there including transportation (the Red River is navigable all the way to Wichita Falls, Texas which is over 325 miles away). The other major industry in Shreveport is the serving foods that people in most other parts of the country refuse to eat. Naturally, we jumped in! The top rated restaurant in Shreveport according to TripAdvisor is Crawdaddy's Kitchen. We went! Here are a few pics from that experience which is best described as "an experience".
So after lunch we wandered out of Louisiana and into Texas. We are at Tyler State Park just outside of Tyler. Tomorrow is our first day off the road for this trip. We'll visit Tyler and do a bit of shopping to replenish our stores before making two more stops in Texas, one in New Mexico then landing on Colorado for a couple day visit with Mrs. C's neice.
I'll leave you with two shots from Tyler State Park. Today was the first day of the trip where the weather could be described as "beautiful".
Until tomorrow...
SC'
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