Greetings from Welsh!

 Good morning, Campers!

It’s Silver,Cliche’ with you again. This early morning dispatch is being prepared in tiny Welsh, Louisiana... population about 3,000.

Just a short update on yesterday. This trip is planned at 10,000+ miles over 3 1/2 months. You can do the math. Ok, I’ll do the math... that’s 30 days per month times 3.5... then divide that into 10,000... and carry the 6... watch the tens place... drop the remainder... and... oh hell! That means we drive a lot. You do the math next time. Yesterday was a straight out driving day.

When we plan a trip one of the first design points is how fast we plan to move and how often we plan to stay put. This trip has a few points where we plan to zip along (ohh... think eastern Montana and North Dakota) but mostly it’s planned for 3-4 driving hours on travel days and frequent points where we stay put for a day or even two. Yesterday was one of the driving days.

We awoke to the sound of highway traffic and police sirens at the French Quarter RV Resort. No, there wasn’t something unusual going on. We fell asleep to the same sounds, ate breakfast to the same sounds and watched our movies to the same sounds. Our “drunk uncle” generates a lot of first responder activity. Since I hadn’t shared it before, let me offer a picture of where we were.

With an 11:00 checkout time and “full hookups” for the last time in a while, we decided to put a new convenience to work... the washing machine. We added a portable washer/spin dryer to avoid (or at least minimize) the need to find laundromats on these long trips. Our unit fits perfectly in the shower, so it takes up zero living space. It also gets used in the shower so it can be filled from the shower spray wand and drained down the shower drain. The spin dryer is a separate section, so you can be washing on the left and drying on the right. The final step is hanging to dry. I added several “pad eyes” (small metal loops screwed to the wall) to the trailer. A clothes line runs through the eyes to form a z shape just below the ceiling. By driving with both roof vents open and the front fan drawing air in while the rear fan exhausts, the trailer becomes a drying cabinet. No more laundromats!

We hit the road at precisely 11:00 and headed toward Baton Rouge! The terrain was mixed. We had stretches of “universal interstate”... that flat land with dense mixed hardwood forest 30’ outside each shoulder and a grass median. That view can be found in every state east of the Mississippi and a few to the west, too. Then there was “coastal Louisiana”. For about 20 or 30 miles, the roadway was built on piles. It was essentially a bridge or trestle. We have traveled the 17 miles of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. It’s a marvel! This was a similar structure, except longer and without a tunnel. It’s called “I-10” and nobody notices. Strangely, the image on the GPS of the trusty Tundra showed us driving over solid ground. The view out the window was very different.

As we rolled along at one point we crossed multiple larger bodies of water separated by land that supported trees. These were grand enough to get one of those horizontal green signs with white letters telling you what you were crossing. There was a “river” a “lake” a “bayou” and a “pilot channel” (I think that a glorified “ditch”) all within a few miles of each other. I finally had to say “wait a minute... they’re hiding something here... this is one big ‘SWAMP’!”

We did cross two rivers that seemed worthy of the title. One was the Mississippi. It was teeming with traffic including ocean-going freighters and barge flotillas as big as city blocks. The other was the Atchafalaya. I love the way that name flows across the tongue. It’s a 140 mile long swamp with some open water that justifies the “river” title. If it wasn’t already in use as a geographic term, that name certainly would have been picked up as a creole dish. I can hear a waitress with a drawl saying “ Today’s speshel is the atchafalaya. It’s frahed and covered with a sowse. We maak it extra spicy here.”

Anyhow... a quick stop in Baton Rouge to resupply and we checked in to Sportsman Park in Welsh around 3:30. This is a campground operated by the City of Welsh on the fringe of the city park that includes 10 camp sites, 2 ball fields and 3 tennis courts. It’s a no-reservation, $15 per night stop-off about 5 min off I-10. We had to unhitch and run into town (0.6 miles) to pay the $15 at City Hall. It was just what we needed.

Today, we leave the southeast and enter the kingdom of Texas where we will spend the next 10 nights beginning on the gulf coast, then crossing south Texas to Big Bend and finally exiting near El Paso.

Later!