Category Archives: The Great Adventure

New Orleans

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Anne in the French Quarter

4/26/82 – We made it! New Orleans just like I pictured it. We finally kicked off from La Pace. 61 was the pits as expected. Once we got in the city and figured out our way, things worked out well. Canal (or Carnival) was unexpectedly nice. The French Quarter is nice, but expensive. Lot’s of nice stores, oysters and gumbo. Toured the Saint Louis Cathedral (pictured in the background), with killer oil paintings. Jackson Square is full of hawkers. The room is over priced ($38.50) at half the price. Called home collect. Ate well at Harry’s place and Gumbo Shop.

This post is another blast from the past. We’re still riding Cycle Zydeco in the present day. We’ll not be headed to New Orleans on this trip, but instead plan on driving the Natchez Trace. Check comments for any live updates.

Nottoway Plantation

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Nottoway Plantation

4/25/82 – Thank God for Daylight Savings Time! We spent a lot of time (and money) and enjoyed it. The tour is good, as is the food. Riding the River Road was enjoyable in the early afternoon. Just after the Hermitage it rained briefly, getting us wet and muddy. Late afternoon and evening was press on regardless. It was dark by the time that we made the motel. In Reserve a sheriff’s car, through its loudspeaker, told us to get off the road and ride on the sidewalk, which was the pits! We cut up to 61 and used the shoulder instead. We spent $23.06 for lunch and $23.50 for the motel room. My Coke habit was up to $1.50 a day at this point. Anne always separated out my soda expenses in disapproval.

We are currently riding Cycle Zydeco. I pre-positioned this post in case poor cell coverage prevented me from posting is real time. I may miss a post or two. 

Rain, Rain Go Away

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Tank XING

4/21/82 – Cloudy and Cold with a late start, because of rain and TV, windy too. Fort Polk made me glad that I wasn’t in the army. Kind of a slow day, with no historical roadside markers, which we almost always stopped to read. Yesterday, at the state line, we read one that was about the Burr ferry. It was begun by Arron Burr’s brother. It served as the gateway to Texas and as a Civil War crossroads.

Leesburg County Courthouse

I took the photograph of the tank crossing, because it was unusual and while I’m not interested in being in the army, I am interested in the army. The courthouse photo was part of a series that we did of county courthouses. I’m pretty sure that Anne took the picture of the tree farm. There were a lot of them about in the Kisatchie National Forest. I guess we camped, but it doesn’t explicitly say. There were no camping or motel expenses listed. Maybe we camped for free?

One is not like the others

Bicycling Louisiana

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Antebellum Plantation

37 years ago this month we bicycled across the state of Louisiana. The year was 1982. We were still in the first month of what would become a six month, 5,000 mile, self-supported bicycle tour that would circle the country and that we have subsequently dubbed the Great Adventure. As part of this trip we kept a daily journal. Really Anne did, but I helped. It was too early then to contemplate blogging about it at the time. We also took pictures, but because they were on film, there are only a few photos. This month we plan on revisiting Louisiana by bike as part of the tour, Cycle Zydeco, but that is a story that is not yet written. This post is drawn from that journal, those photos and our fuzzy memories.

We had launched the previous month from the Dallas Fort Worth area. My parents, with some trepidation, saw us off. We headed south to Houston and stayed with friends, Evelyn and Peter. After Houston, we visited Galveston and worked our way east and then north towards Beaumont. On our next to last night in Texas and through no fault of our own, we were accosted by the law. Honest, your Honor. It was all a misunderstanding that was soon cleared up. In another  two days, we crossed the Louisiana state line:

4/20/82 – Today was strange and draggy in the morning. After Jasper, TX, hill after hill after hill, under gray skies, very oppressive and boring. Then it started raining, a couple of miles before Burkeville. Visions of motels danced in our heads, but alas, the response in town to our request for a motel was, “In Burkeville?!?” There was a café, where we waited out the worst of the rain, then “pressed on regardless,” into the rain. Now we felt like martyrs and it made our complaining seem legitimate. It stopped raining about four miles short of Carney, where we found a good dinner ($10.83), laundry ($2) and lodging ($16.97) at the Catfish House Motel.

We mainly camped, except when it rained, like on that day, hauling our tent, the No-Tell Motel, sleeping bags and cook gear on the back of our bikes. Reviewing the seven days that it took us to ride to New Orleans, it rained a lot that week. I hope that this does not portend anything similar for our upcoming trip. We plan on camping for Cycle Zydeco, but they also offer indoor camping too. They will also haul our luggage. Such are a few of the amenities of a supported tour.

Follow the Goat

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Hummingbird Clearwing Moth

Hummingbird Clearwing Moth

The photo shows a Hummingbird Clearwing moth buzzing about Anne’s neck. We were folding the tent’s ground cloth on the back deck, when this insect took a shine to Anne’s green jersey collar. It was buzzing around her head so fast that it was difficult to see what it was. At first, I thought it might be a bee. It turned out to be a pollinator of a different sort. After I snapped this photo, I just flicked it away and we all went inside to get away from it. This event kind of reminded me of that Star Trek – Next Generation episode, “Conspiracy”, where an alien life form attempts to takeover Star Fleet by possessing all of the senior officers with parasitic mind controlling aliens that manifested their infestation, with a little stinger sticking out of the back of the host-officer’s neck. I am pleased to report that this moth caused no heads to explode, unlike the TV show.

Anne is wearing her new follow the goat Kaldi’s jersey, because even though today was a rest day, we rode. We toured Sugar Island, which I had never been on before. We took the ferry across and did a small loop around the northern part of the island. Except for a one mile stretch of gravel, all the rest of the pavement there was like butter. There is almost no heavy truck traffic. In fact, there is almost no traffic at all. Most of the cars that we did see were in the vicinity of the senior luncheon at the community center, which we were invited to join several times. Maybe we should have had lunch there and eschewed Clyde’s, because now my Clyde’s lunch is warring with my Cozy Inn supper.

Tomorrow, we get back on the bikes for real and head southeast to De Tour and then the next day back to Saint Ignace and then we are done. We are sitting at over 200 miles so far and should have well over more than 300 by the end. These next two days will be a bit of a repeat of a similar tour that Anne and I did way back in 1981. It was our dress rehearsal tour, for the next year’s great adventure, our tour around the USA. I’m hoping that tomorrow and the next day go smoother than lo these many years ago went. It should.

A real hummingbird just flitted by the windows. It was probably jealous about all of the attention that the moth received here. As Rey pointed out to me, it is the real article, an actual noun and not just an adjective. Hummingbirds are all high-strung grammar Nazis.