Current location: Terlingua Abajo campsite, Big Bend National Park, TX (like I said, we got a bit behind).
I (Eric) have been to New Orleans a few times for work. Each time I came home with a story of great food and a really interesting city. This was one of a very few cities that Lara said she really wanted to go to and experience. Our first stop was the National WWII Museum. Each time I was in NO for work I heard great things but had never been. It did not disappoint. It was extremely well organized, it coupled interactive stories with videos and artifacts from the war. It covered the history from a macro and micro perspective with each visitor getting a “dog tag” to follow along a singular storyline from one American soldier. What I found truly intriguing were the handwritten letters, the journals kept by soldiers and even the actual flight log of the Enola Gay, who famously dropped the first atomic bomb. There was something about seeing handwriting, actual ink and the phrases of these soldiers that hit home. I think it has something to do with the handwritten journal we are keeping for our, obviously, much less historic journey.
From the museum we checked into our hotel…wait, whaaaa?? Yeah, we got a hotel so we could safely leave Rooney in the room as well as take a shower and be all fancy-like. Well, as fancy as we can be with our vanlife wardrobe. I made a reservation at Restaurant R’Evolution, which I had been to before and was one of the locations I spent a few minutes raving to Lara about on the phone the last time I was in NO for work. I knew the food would deliver the local flavor that she was looking for. We partook in the Death by Gumbo (quail, andouille and rice) and turtle soup, crab bingets, grouper with crabmeat and seafood cioppino. Needless to say the desert menu did not even make it to the table. We continued the night with a wander down Bourbon Street and a stop in at Fritzel’s Jazz Bar. The live jazz band was New Orleans to a T. Sitting on the old wooden benches that have probably seen and heard thousands of musicians, drinking a local beer was just about perfect. We wandered back through some of the historic parts of the French Quarter and along the mighty Mississip! It was a very short jaunt into New Orleans but we hit the highlights perfectly.
The new experience we had with this life in the city was having to park Hobbes in a surface lot overnight. There was zero doubt that the valet would not be parking it in the parking garage next door or even at the surface lot across the street because it used the car-elevator dealios. We had already put the bikes inside the van, packed up all the valuables and a nights worth of clothes and Rooney’s food and nervously walked away from this honking van parked amongst the sedans of the office workers nearby that would soon leave Hobbes under a street light for the night. Such a sad story, I know!
Alls well that ends well though, right? No issues and we loaded everything back up in the morning for a trip northward. On our way we purposefully crossed over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway bridge which is the longest bridge in the world. Well, okay, there is some debate but Guiness World Records does classify it as the “longest continuous over water bridge” in the world. Apparently a few bridges in Asia are hundreds of miles long for the use of the bullet trains. New Orleans still claims its title though. Either way, it was impressive; almost 24 miles of arrow-straight asphalt. Screws with your head really.
We pointed north to end up in Arkansas, another state we had never visited and needed to get a run in. This was slightly out of the way and a little unnecessary but since I was only down to 4 states left, I figured this was a perfect time. Lara was happy to oblige and check off another state for her too. It turned out to be a gorgeous drive through some really remote parts of Mississippi. We very clearly dropped into the huge Mississippi delta and had tiny “highways” along massive farms. We even made a stop at a mound. Exciting, no? It actually is part of the Mississippi Mounds Trail, a stretch of a few hundred miles with ancient mounds built by Native Americans for somewhat unknown reasons, either meeting places, potentially burials grounds or places of rituals. It was a great random, brown-sign, stop.
We crossed over the Mississippi and up to Lake Chicot in the far southeastern corner of Arkansas. The lake is the largest natural lake in AR and is one of many that was formed when the Mississippi decided to take a tangent rather than a huge meandering curve. Eventually the new banks filled in an what was left was a massive 20-30 mile long “C” of a lake. At the far north end was Lake Chicot State Park and a campground of maybe 100-150 sites, of which we were the 4th site occupied for the night. The next morning we awoke and did a run around some of the quiet roads adjoining the park and THE mile long nature trail as part of the park. We relaxed and stretched for a while longer and late morning pointed southwest with our eyes set on Texas.
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