Category: Louisiana

Once again our incredible luck has come through. We are in a private home in Oak Grove, getting closer to the Texas border all the time. We have Verizon Wireless signal, both cell phone and data, for the time since early last July. I haven’t used Internet since February 28 – it’s been so long I’ve forgotten how to use it!

The house we’re in is wonderful – it’s up on stilts – it survived both Rita and Ike, though Rita broke windows upstairs, causing an almost total loss upstairs of the contents; completely destroyed the downstairs living quarters; and Ike’s storm surge rose up dangerously high, washing away anything that was remaining downstairs.
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For our first day back on the road in quite a while – actually, for any day on the road – today was just about perfect. We did have a fairly stiff headwind, which slowed us down a lot, and we are out of shape for pulling the trailers, but the weather was gorgeous, the traffic was minimal, and the scenery was wonderful.

Nolan came out to watch us off – he seemed really sad we were leaving, and kept trying to talk us into staying. He was fascinated by our setup, and watched every move we made really carefully. He was especially fascinated by the shifting system and the way the trailers are hitched. We gave him a big hug, and promised we’d call him as often as we can until we hit Mexico. What an incredibly kind man he is!
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Day 4

We didn’t get much sleep last night. I worked until well after nine, so we didn’t feel we had time to watch a movie. We wanted to get lots of sleep and feel really rested, so we read for awhile and turned out the lights. The wind had already been whipping around, and we started seeing lightning, but sitting in the living room everything seemed pretty quiet.

It wasn’t until we got into the bedroom that we realized the storm was just hitting us at midnight. We lasted in bed about a half hour, lying quietly in the dark, but we finally couldn’t stand it any longer. The storm came from the northwest, and our bedroom is on the furthest northwest corner of the trailer, so we were getting the full brunt of it.
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We’ve now been at Nolan’s since Monday morning. It’s been quite an experience. Nolan starts drinking beer at about nine in the morning, and continues steadily throughout the day until he goes to bed. As he says, he doesn’t drink to get drunk, never has. At 71 years of age, retired from active duty in the oil fields, he’s still active and in great shape, though he no longer works full time anywhere.

He lives right on Hwy 82 in the center of Pecan Island surrounded by camps, other trailers, and the family homes of his mother (now deceased) and his younger sister. Born and raised in Pecan Island, he moved to Abbeville, about forty-five minutes up the road, for a number of years, but he’s been back here in Pecan Island for over twenty-five years now.
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It’s hard to believe that it’s been only four days since I’ve written, because it feels like we’ve been plunged into a radically different world overnight. Nothing seems the same except the fact that Chelsea and I are together and we still have our bikes and gear.

We worked steadily on Friday and Saturday getting our gear ready and organized. We re-packaged our food, Chelsea did the maintenance on the bicycles, and I finished writing the current blogs for both sites. I finished off all the photo albums as well, bringing us completely current.
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Rain and other weather

Rain kept us another week in Lake Arthur, so our leaving date is now Sunday morning. We are so glad we stayed! A cold front came through and stalled out, and it rained more from Thursday through Monday than we have seen the whole eight months we’ve been here.

When we arrived, we could see daylight under each section of the pier in front of the cottage. After three days of steady rain, the lake level rose enough to be lapping at the edge of the top of the pier.
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One big advantage of the rainstorm was that we got to stay and have one last sailing trip with Paul Cassity. The weather was absolutely gorgeous on Wednesday, with the winds almost totally calm – not good for sailing, but great for motoring.

We’d had a slow and easy start, motoring out of the Yacht Club around the Narrows, when we spotted a huge number of great egrets in one section of shoreline on a small point out into the lake. Paul got us really close, and we realized that we’d discovered a nesting area for blue herons and great egrets.
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We’d gone sailing with Paul early in January, but he left shortly after for a three-week tour of Cambodia and Thailand, so we didn’t have another opportunity to see him till late February.

Not only do we love the time on the water, we also thoroughly enjoy our time with Paul. He’s a really relaxed and well-balanced guy, with lots to talk about, and he’s a willing listener. He asks great questions, and really thinks about what we say. He’s got a great sense of humor, he’s traveled a lot, and he’s easy-going. It all adds up to us having a great time when we’re with him.
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We’ve been working on several major projects since Thanksgiving, and things always seem to take longer than expected, so we’d asked if we could stay at the house in Gueydan until the middle of March. We’ve been working on launching two new websites, I’m well underway with our first book, and we’ve been restructuring our site, as well as working on the blogs and photos. It’s been a huge amount of work.

We hadn’t heard anything, though we knew that several groups of church volunteers were planning on arriving in the area to work on homes damaged by Gustav and Ike. The group scheduled to arrive in February was canceled at the last minute, and as far as we knew, we had until mid March.
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We’ve been struck with what a unique part beads play in the life of south Louisiana. It’s a longstanding tradition to throw beads from floats at every parade, and there are many, many parades. Just in our time here, we’ve been at the Duck Festival Parade, the Gueydan High School Homecoming Parade, Festival Acadiens in Lafayette, the Christmas Parade, the Mardi Gras Ball, the Mardi Gras Run, and three Mardi Gras parades in Lafayette.

Beads have been an integral part of each event.
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