New Orleans, LA – Here we are in the Big Easy! We’ve only driven in to our KOA camp ground, west of the city, so we haven’t really seen anything outside the approaches, but that will change as of tomorrow.
To backtrack a bit, on Friday we left our friends Scott and Mary Jane and drove west for 45 minutes to Navarre, where we stopped for lunch and a visit with Darrell and Sharon from Nova Scotia. Darrell was a former boss of mine and we visited them south of Tucson when we took our Arizona trip two years ago. It was great catching up on their news, but we weren’t able to stay for long, as we wanted to avoid rush hour traffic on our way to the Big Lagoon State Park, at the farthest western reaches of Florida.
“The real Florida” is what the state parks system calls places like Big Lagoon. It is surprisingly natural and rural, being so close to the city of Pensacola. Our site was entirely surrounded by bog, and, to our delight, a mockingbird serenaded us from a neighbouring tree with its amazing vocabulary of bird songs!
We had had a pretty cold night without the furnace; even our poufy duvet failed to keep us completely warm. Our hot breakfast beverages were very comforting the next morning!
The National Naval Aviation Museum was only a short drive from the park and had been recommended to us, so we spent the next morning exploring it. Scores of airplanes of many vintages were displayed on the ground and suspended overhead, and visitors could imagine what it was like to fly them in several motion-based flight simulators. There was another display that took you to a flight briefing on an aircraft carrier and then to a mock-up of a windswept flight deck where we could watch planes taking off and landing. We also watched an IMAX movie about the Blue Angels, who practice their aerobatics on the grounds here starting a week or so from now.
This morning we headed for New Orleans, following the gulf shoreline along Highway 98 and then turning north to join Interstate 10. In three hours or so of driving, we left Florida and crossed a stretch of Alabama, then Mississippi and into Louisiana. We saw quite a bit of farmland, with horses and cows, and roadside stands selling boiled peanuts, an apparently popular food in these parts!
When we drove past the shipyards of Mobile, Alabama, we caught sight of the crippled cruise ship that had been towed in a couple of weeks ago after it lost power in the Carribean for several days. Guess the cleanup was still underway.
On our way in to New Orleans, we saw what appeared to be lingering damage from Hurricane Katrina, which took place in August of 2005. After reading more about that devastating hurricane, it was understandable that some of the highways were still in rough shape in places, considering the extent of damage that occurred. Our KOA host told us our site has the only tree in our section of the campground that wasn’t blown down by the storm.
1 comment:
Glad you got to see the Imax show re the Blue Angels. I hope the museum lived up to your expectations.
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