Cajun Country

March 26 - March 27, 2013

After we left New Orleans, we headed for Cajun country and Breaux Bridge, LA. We spent the night in an RV campground / fish camp called Poche's Landing. It was a quiet, simple, country setting with several large fishing ponds. It couldn't have been more different than the city "park" we had been in the night before. And this one only cost us $16 with our Passport America discount. SiSi enjoyed chasing the ducks.

We went out looking for an authentic Cajun dinner and had a nice meal at a place called Pont Breaux.We enjoyed the food although, truthfully, the gumbo had been much better at Emeril's the night before. This band was playing Cajun tunes.

New Orleans

March 24 -March 26, 2013

Usually we drive to a campground destination, park the RV, and drive the Hyundai Elantra that we are towing to our sightseeing destination. But sometimes we'll stop along the way and do our sightseeing, leaving SiSi in the RV. On our way to New Orleans we stopped at Bellingrath gardens in Alabama. This is our third visit to Bellingrath in a year. Bellingrath began as a fishing camp in 1917 for Walter Bellingrath. Walter was Mobile's first Coca-Cola bottler and he had been advised by his physician that he needed to relax. By 1927, Mrs. Bellingrath began to beautify the property with gardens, and later they built a lovely 15 room "country estate." While the home is quite beautiful, the gardens are extensive and spectacular. While we missed their peak by about a week, the azaleas were in bloom, and we enjoyed a walk in the gardens and lunch in the tea room.

I've had a lot of compliments about this photo. I stole it from the Bellingrath website!

We arrived in New Orleans on Sunday evening. During our many previous visits to NOLA, we have always stayed at a campground called Ponchartrain Landing. We have never had a problem getting a reservation and it has never been anywhere close to full. When we called for a reservation this time there was no room at the inn. We managed to score the very last campsite at an RV park near the French Quarter. Seems the women's basketball tournament was in town and everything was full. This meant that none of our usual discounts were available. We paid top dollar ($89 plus tax!) for a parking place that was behind walls topped with razor wire and that was, literally, under I-10. The traffic noise was crazy. We were so close that we could have given traffic reports.

The upside to the trip was that Abby and I met with her wedding planner, toured the venue where she wants to hold the reception, and ironed out some of the details for her wedding. And Abby and her fianace, Joe, joined us for dinner at one of Emeril's restaurants called Delmonico. The gumbo was heavenly.

We're off!

March 20 - March 23, 2013

Our first stop was an RV rally in Orlando, FL, about an hour's drive from home. We spent 3 nights at the rally which was being held at the State Fairgrounds. While we enjoyed our time there, we were anxious to get going, so we left the rally a day early and headed out for New Orleans.

The trip to New Orleans is too long to make in one day, so we had to find a place to stop along the way. Since our youngest daughter, Abby, lives in New Orleans, we have made this trip a number of times, and are familiar with many of the campgrounds around the halfway point. Instead of taking the time to set up camp at a campground, we elected to "camp" in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant near Pensacola, FL.

There are a number of businesses that welcome RVers to stay overnight in their parking lots. It's win/win for everyone because the RVers get a free place to stay while the businesses get customers. Besides Cracker Barrel, some of the other places that welcome RVs are Walmart, Cabella's, and Flying J gas stations. We prefer Cracker Barrels because they tend to be quieter and because we can get a tasty inexpensive dinner there as well as breakfast the next morning. Beacuse we are "self-contained" we are able to heat and air condition our rig, take a hot shower, cook, watch TV, and have all the comforts of home right there in the restaurant parking lot. 

After a restful night and a tasty breakfast, we headed for New Orleans. Our sweet girl, SiSi thinks that when I climb into the passenger seat, her rightful place is in my lap. She is the biggest lap dog I have ever seen!

Getting Ready

Wednesday March 20 

Rick and I are back on the road. We're heading west with Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona as our primary destinations. I just re-read my last entry from the end of our last trip and realized how much our plans have changed. Because of family commitments and events, we don't expect to be away for more than 4 or 5 months tops and we'll be covering much less ground. Nonetheless, we're excited and ready to get on with it.

A lot of planning goes into a trip of this length. The house needs to be readied: storm shutters put up, pool and lawn service in place, neighbors help enlisted to "keep an eye out", etc. The mail has to be forwarded to our mail forwarding service, the newspaper cancelled, the house cleaned, water turned off, refrigerator and freezer emptied. 

Brevard County has many "snow birds" who come south for the winter where they stay at their second homes or condos before returning north when the weather warms. The local cable company, Brighthouse, has a wonderful program where folks who will be gone for more that 3 months can suspend their service during that time without having to return the equipment. For a onetime fee of $30 and $15 per month, we lose our cable, phone, and internet bills. That should pay for a few tanks of gas!

Florida summers are humid and hot, so the air conditioner needs to be left on to keep the mold at bay. Our energy provider suggests an ingenious program for our programmable thermostat. During the day the temperature is set for 88 degrees. But at midnight the program reduces the temperature to 70, raising the thermostat back to 88 at 4:00 am. This results in the air conditioner usually only running for 4 hours a day and then only during the 4 coolest hours of the day. We tried it last summer and it worked well.

We left home at around 1:00 pm. While preparing to leave I caught our mail lady putting mail that was supposed to be forwarded into our box. I reminded her about the forwarding order and she put a post-it note inside the box to remind the person who works on her off days that the mail was to be forwarded. After we drove the short distance to our first stop,  Orlando, I received a call from my good friend and neighbor, Betty. Betty wanted to know if we were missing a set of keys. Sure enough, I had dropped a set of keys in the driveway while loading the RV. Great security...leave keys to the house in the driveway and a note in the mailbox saying "we're out of town"!