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Saturday 16 May 2009

Down on the Bayou

Sam Houston Jones State Park, Louisiana

The good news about this Louisiana park is that Louisiana cuts your camping fee in half if you have a federal Golden Age card so we only pay $8 a night instead of $16. The bad news is that they are not currently renting boats, as advertised, to cruise the bayous and swamps, which is one reason we came.

We cooked the de-boned chicken stuffed with crawfish and rice on the grill last night. The leftovers went into a crock pot of gumbo today and I added brown rice, vegetables, a jar of spaghetti sauce and a liberal dollop of Chipotle Tabasco sauce.


I finished reading “The Devil in the White City” which was about the 1892 Chicago Worlds Fair architects and a psychopath named Mudgett who may have efficiently murdered as many as 200 visitors to the fair. Great read,… to me it explains a lot about the fantastic architecture of modern day Chicago.

Last night we drove to Lake Charles and listened to a free concert by Boom-A-Rang, a great group. Lake. Charles reminds me a little of Tampa back in 1954. They have one tall glass building built by Capital One. I think of it as the house that credit cards built. It reminds me of how offended I was when a bank built the first tall building in Tampa in the early 1970s. “They’re just finance“, I thought. “They don’t really do anything useful or produce anything. Why should they have so much money?”

As we wander the small downtown, we see sidewalk paintings, perhaps done by children.



Today we drove a small Louisiana town called Starks. They were having their annual Mayhaw jelly festival. We’ve never heard of Mayhaw berries before. We bought some Mayhaw berry jelly from a man whose wife makes it in the kitchen. You can also buy frog legs, gator-on-a-stick, red rice and beans, crawfish and other delicacies there. It’s a very modest fair with artificial bull rides and some other attractions.




During the hour and a half we were there, they we having sack races. They slowly work up from kindergarten to adults. I’m waiting for the senior, over 65, sack race, but it doesn’t happen. I ask about it and they say that the hospital is too far away for that.



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