Day 13: Alvin, TX to Clinton MS

The morning started in Alvin, TX, the home of Nolan Ryan.  They have a super nice YMCA near the Nolan Ryan museum... coincidence?  After a false start due to communication problems between the front desk and Denise about which direction to turn out of the hotel, we found 517 and stayed within a few miles of the Gulf until we hit I 10.  There is a LOT of industrial stuff through here and a lot of fuel cylinders.  Lots of potential energy in those tanks -- hope folks follow the no smoking regulations :-).   The stacks mostly spew steam, so it didn't look or smell so bad.  Environmental regulations do work!

As we crossed into Louisiana (a new state for Denise, and the only new state for Catherine), we noticed a small tanker that had just unloaded at Port Arthur.

We stayed along the beach looking at the treeless fields.  Trees are super picky – in the West there weren’t any because it was too dry.  Here there weren’t any because the fields have standing water.  Cows live on the little rises.  We began to notice that all houses were on serious stilts – not so unusual for East Coast Beach dwellings.

We turned up highway 27 towards Joan Hauser’s hometown, Hackberry!  This is about 15 miles inland in Bayou country.  Now, both Denise and Catherine thought Bayou meant swampy cypress swamp with black water, vines and Spanish Moss.  In Texas, we saw a couple of Bayous that were sort of promising.  It turns out that Bayou means river.  Between the coast and Hackberry, there was marshy grass with tons of Bayous running through.  

We stopped at the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge.  There we saw a great sign.

However, we saw no alligators, no armadillos, nothing exciting.  We saw a bunch of egrets/herons but after yesterday, those weren't exciting.  We waved to Joan's relatives and saw the Family Dollar where her mom works.  (Joan said that if we really missed the armadillos, we should take a shotgun to her sister's house and we could see as many as we wanted up close and personal.)  We noted that all the houses were still on stilts -- even the trailers.  The storm surge from Ike was impressive -- many of the stilted houses flooded.

Just a bit north of Hackberry, Denise was disappointed that Louisiana starts to look like anywhere else in the Southeast.  Even the small towns started to remind us of Mt. Olive in both the names on the store fronts and the architecture.  Outside of town, to the south there were lots of pine plantations (gotta make paper), and further north some more traditional agriculture.

We crossed the Mississippi into Natchez, Mississippi (new state for Denise), a city on a hill.  A hill!  Louisiana is flat.  Really flat.  This is view from the front seat coming up to the big bridge.  This river we can cross at 55 mph, the Rio Grande that we can throw a rock across is a international border.  Weird.

In any case, we found the Natchez Trace Parkway.  This 444 mile long, but extremely skinny National Park follows the route of the NT highway established by President Jefferson in 1801-2.  He thought it necessary to have a good road between  Nashville and the southwest corner of the US – Natchez, Mississippi.  This way when the French or Spanish or Indians attacked, word could get back to Nashville and eventually Washington DC.  They’ve also preserved some artifacts along the way.  For example the Emerald Mound is the second largest Indian mound in the US.  It’s about 770 long, 435 feet wide and 35 feet tall.  The Mississippi and other tribes started building these in about 1300 and continued until the Spanish showed up bringing disease, wiping out the Native Americans.  Catherine thinks it’s all about my tribe’s mound is bigger than yours.  In any case, they were used for ceremonial purposes.

Catherine is standing on top of the little bitty secondary mound that's on top of the primary mound described above.  She's also glad she didn't have to carry the dirt in.

We also stopped at the Locust Mount plantation and inn.  When folks floated goods down the Mississippi, before the advent of steam power, they had to sell their boats for timber and walk home -- at least 445 miles back to Nashville.  The trip took about a month and there were about 50 inns along the way offering food (corn mush) and a lodging for about a quarter.  Catherine notes the similar spacing to the Camino de Santiago (which is still in use in Spain... she walked it).

This part of Mississippi is covered in a 30ish foot layer of soft top soil blown in from the Western part of the US.  In some places, the original road sunk all the way through it.  Catherine figures it would haven been soggy and nasty given the rain and the horses using it.  She thinks she would have walked beside the highway.

After missing several herds of deer as the sun went down, we stopped in Clinton, MS.  Catherine had adventures at 3 gas stations to get gas, milk and a sub.  Now it's off to bed!  Hopefully we'll find cousin Deborah tomorrow for great company, a soft bed and a home cooked meal that hasn't seen an ice chest!