Saturday
We awoke Saturday really feeling happy, and very proud of ourselves. The air temperature had cooled down a lot during the night, and the morning dawned clear and beautiful. We hopped up on the bikes and took off for a short ride around the campground, to get ourselves oriented. We planned on getting food, cash, water, and doing laundry. We sat by the lake for awhile where Chelsea fixed my handlebars and a couple of other things, and just enjoyed the peace and quiet. We finally wandered over to the concession stand, hoping that they’d accept a debit card, as we had no cash, and we were quite hungry, and really didn’t feel like the several mile bike ride over to the store. After perusing the menu a bit, we wandered around in back, trying to decide what to do. Then the woman who worked at the stand came out for a short break, and we got to talking. What a love she was! She goes by the name Grannie, and was a native Louisiana girl who had spent 28 of her adult years in the Middle East with her husband. Now in her late 60’s , she’s been back in Louisiana about 10 years. Having been a waitress in a wide variety of locations over the years, and loving it, she decided to open this concession stand. Not only does she have this one, but she also has another one that her husband works (while she works this one). At one time she had five of them!
We covered a lot of ground in a few minutes with Grannie, and I had a chance to ask her what the various menu items were that I didn’t know, like something called boudin. I couldn’t even pronounce it! (It sounds like boo’ denh – the “n” at the end is nasal and is cut off a bit.) We found out that Grannie was actually open for business right then when customers showed up, so we got in line and ordered bread pudding (we’d never had any) and a drink (we had about $2 to our name). When we picked up our order, Grannie had included a gift of two boudins! We were so happy! A boudin is a rice dish, stuffed into a skin, like a sausage. They can come in a variety of types, plain like we had, or with crawfish, and other things. We very much liked our boudins, and the bread pudding was delicious.
We finally took off and did our campground tour, then slowly got ready for riding to the store. With very sore calves and quads, and sore bums from so many hours in the saddle on Friday, we weren’t too thrilled about getting back on the bikes to ride in traffic and heat. I’m afraid to say that we really dragged our feet, and then it just kept getting hotter. If we hadn’t been so desperate for food and water, we would have abandoned the idea. We wore our regular clothes, but wore our cycling shoes and helmets, and our high visibility vests. We brought the backpack we use for buying groceries, I made sure we had a lock, and we took off. It was truly hot, but it was only a little over 2 miles. I had been given great directions – go out the main road, take a left at the red light, and look for the “tar shop” on the right. It’s right on the other side of the tar shop. I was puzzled about what the tar shop was, thinking it was some kind of roofing place, but they assured me I couldn’t miss it. The first part went great, but I couldn’t figure out where we were supposed to turn in, when Chelsea spotted the store. Still puzzled , I looked around for the tar shop, but couldn’t find it. All I could see was a Michelin tire place. Then it hit me – in the South, the Michelin tire place WAS the “tar shop”. Tire? Taahr? Tar? We really laughed.
We carefully locked our bikes, and gratefully escaped into the store. We had a wonderful time wandering around the store in the air conditioning, deciding what to buy. We finally opted for things that needed no preparation and were easy to eat in the heat, and then headed out the bikes, really looking forward to getting back and eating. Guess what? I had brought the lock, but hadn’t brought the key. Embarrassing, but true. We ended up getting a ride back to the campground with Wendy, who works at the store, and who got off work right then. We grabbed the key quickly and dropped the groceries at the campsite, then came with Wendy back to the store so we could unlock the bikes and ride them back to the campground.
After all this, we discovered that we had new neighbors at the campsite. They had set up right smack next to us, with no “breathing space”, so we ended up sharing a table with them (the only place in the shade for us). One of them was a 16 year old 8th grader, and the other was a guy in his fifties. They had met at the park about a year earlier, hanging out together occasionally, and had decided on a moment’s notice to spend the night at the campground. Both of them lived right there in Morgan City. We were entertained by the younger one’s constant phone calls on his cellphone, several of them from his mother. They came and went on their own little jaunts, and we kept to ourselves, noticing how full the campground was getting, and watching the action from our front row site – retiring early to the tent again to read.
Sunday
What a night we had last night! The noise and the music from the campers was extraordinary, until about 11 p.m. and we had several tents put up on our already crowded site about midnight (we could hear all the action). Then we heard some other folks setting up tents right nearby (on our site!), and it seemed to go on for hours, at about 1 or 2 in the morning. In the midst of all this, someone decided to do a few drive-bys, honking to wake everybody up. The new folks got fussed about that, along with someone else, so we heard all that commotion. Then, after what seemed like only a few minutes, we heard lots of talking from our 16 yr old friend’s tent, and so help me, at 3 am. they turned on one of those hair dryer attachments to pump up their deflating air mattress!! We had just gotten to sleep after that, when someone’s cellphone started ringing. After 4 or 5 rings, our young friend answered his phone, and it was obviously his mom. We could hear his emphatic protests “But Mom, you SAID I could…!” So we were awake again of course, and almost immediately he awakened his older buddy and at about 5 a.m. they proceeded to take down their tent and leave camp. Sigh… We awakened about 8 a.m. with swollen eyes and totally exhausted, feeling like things couldn’t get any worse.
We ate our breakfast and wandered over to the concession stand to chat with Grannie. She laughed at our stories, and we ended up helping her out in the concession stand for an hour or so till her first employee got to work. It was quite fun. We volunteered our services for later in the afternoon, and she said yes, so we headed off to the boat races.
We don’t know much about the boat races, except that there’s a lot of money in these things! They are 3 and 4 liter hydrofoils and they look like something from the future. And wow, can they move! Check out our photos to see pictures of these boats. We could only see them through a chain link fence, with no shade anywhere in sight, so we limited our viewing to only a few minutes, then headed back. Mind you, it was a about a half mile ride over very graveled roads, in very hot sun, so that didn’t help our attitudes any.
We walked over to help Grannie, and what an afternoon we had! I specialized in doing the hamburgers, hot dogs and cheeseburgers, along with staying on top of the dishes, and Chelsea poured the fountain drinks, got the pickles, ice cream sandwiches, and handed the ice cream cones off to Grannie to prepare. Thinking we’d be there only an hour or two, we worked our bums off for nearly five hours, with only a few minutes here and there to get off our feet. Grannie was indefatigable – she just kept going like the energizer bunny. When we finished at nearly 8 pm, we were so tired that we ate the to-go meal Grannie prepared for us, managed to stagger over to the bathroom to brush our teeth, and collapsed onto our sleeping pads.
The People and The Action
As we came to discover, the Memorial Day weekend was the first running of the hydrofoil boat races in several years, especially since before Katrina. Katrina and Rita still continue to haunt the area down here, and the signs of progress are many. There’s a real spirit of rebirth evident. Some of that is spilling over to things like this weekend, when people are more than ready to let the stress go and get out and have fun. As a result, the campground was filled to capacity by Friday night – they actually posted a huge No Vacancy sign – but trucks and cars and RVs continued to roll in for the boat races and for the day use picnic area (which was huge!), each of the three days we were there. The noise and the commotion of several thousand people all in the same place, and determined to have fun, was enormous. Add to that the drinking and the heat and humidity, and things got dicey at times. There were many police patrols in clear evidence at all times; it was hard to go as much as 15 minutes without seeing a pair of them. They were on ATVs, in little Jeeps, in regular cars – you name it. Because of where we were located, we had a front row seat to most of it. Everyone had to roll right past us to get to the boat races, and we were at one end of the main day use area, so it got absolutely ridiculous at times, with the traffic. Talk about prime people watching!
We got pretty overwhelmed because the third set of people who set up tents near us the first night turned out to have issues. The two 20-something guys were fine, but when the girlfriend arrived early on Saturday, things disintegrated. I haven’t heard the f-word so many times in one sentence in many years, mostly from her! It was distinctly unpleasant being near them, and we couldn’t escape at night or in the morning, from either the language or their music, played at loud volume. And wouldn’t you know, they stayed until the bitter end on Monday. We saw quite a few around who were pretty similar – respect and dignity are two words I would NOT associate with much of this crowd. We did meet some nice people – there was Grannie and Paw Paw, her husband, there was Wendy who brought us home from the market when we forgot the keys, and there were Shane and Terry and Elaine with whom we spent a peaceful time talking on Sunday night. All in all, this kind of gathering is not our favorite, and I think we will do a lot to avoid it in the future.
Monday
We were so tired on Sunday night that we opted to stay another day, hoping to sleep in. It didn’t work too well, but it was a lot more peaceful, just way too hot. We spent most of the day just hanging around the campsite, watching the action as everyone packed up and left, after doing some computer work early in the day. We packed up pretty much everything, ready to head out early on Tuesday. We were very much looking forward to being with our new couchsurfing hosts on Tuesday night.
Signing off for now from Lake End Campground, Morgan City LA