Sun up at Sherburne.  A Chuck-will’s-widow singing. A member of the Goatsucker family (Caprimulgidae). I love saying goatsucker.

A  muggy, buggy, seventy-degree day,

We head west on I-10. Cross the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, the third longest bridge in the United States. Cyprus trees on either side. We cross the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel and the mighty Atchafalaya River. At 18.2 miles. At Lafayette we head southwest on route 167 through Maurice and Abbeville where we pick up route 14 west to Kaplan, then turned south on route 35 to Cow Island, then route 82 to Pecan Island, past the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge a sprawling seventy-one thousand acre Gulf of Mexico coastal ecosystem donated to Louisiana by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1919. Ecologists around the world recognize this refuge for its wildlife, fisheries, and wetlands research.

On to Creole, where we pick up route 27 to Cameron, LA, our home for the night, where we take a ferry (cost one buck) to our campsite in the ferry landing parking lot on the west side of the two-hundred-mile-long Calcasieu River, which rises in Vernon Parish, Louisiana then flows into Lake Calcasieu, the “Big Lake”. The river spills out of Big Lake and makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico. To the west of the river, engineers built a straight channel from the lake to the Gulf to accommodate oil tankers and freighters, lots of them. We are in the land of the oil refinery. Lots of them. The towns spring up around the refineries. Everyone either works in a refinery or supports them with services. In this land, petroleum is king. Petrochemical waste fills the river and estuarine environment. Remember that when you bite into your next jumbo-sized Gulf shrimp. Who am I to judge? I’m driving all over America buying a tank of gas every other day.

On a positive note, commercial crayfish farms fill the land through which we drive today. Not crawdads. Not crayfish. Crawfish. The ponds are vast areas of shallow water. Intrepid Louisiana watermen farm the ponds for crawfish in the winter and grow rice in the same areas in the summer. Pretty smart. They collect the crawfish in small pots in the same way that Chesapeake Bay crabbers catch the famous Chesapeake Bay blue. Let me tell you there are lots of crawfish farms in Louisiana. Which tells me people eat lots of them. As before mentioned, crawfish stew is an essential ingredient in the staging a Louisiana hoedown.

Crawfish farmers harvest several distinct species of crawfish. But why split hairs when you’re eating a crustacean. A crustacean is a crustacean is a crustacean. Put them all on the table. After all, a lobster is a crustacean. The good news is that crawfish do not tolerate polluted water.

We set up in the parking lot across the canal from Cameron in the late afternoon and watched big, big tankers come and go. A weather check tells us that severe storms are coming and in this country, severe storms generally bring strong winds and can spawn tornadoes.

Apparently, it is not a good idea to be in a tornado.   Alli, our camper trailer, is a hard-sided pop-up. The four “sides” are rigid and light. Easy to deploy but not so much to put up or take down in high winds. They act like sails. A stout wind can rip the sides right off the frame.

By we time we have dinner and check the weather again, and again the storms are moving in. The wind begins to pick up slowly and steadily. Should we take the sides down and batten down the hatches? Then, no place to sleep. The evening wears on. We decide to chance it and stay where we are.

Two o’clock in the morning, April 18. In bed now, winds picking up steadily. We get nervous. The rain starts light then picks up in intensity. It’s now or never. If we wait too long we will never be able to get the sides down. We decide to pack it in. The current radar report not good. Storms bearing down. Feverishly we prepare the trailer, secure our stuff and wake Tom Sawyer up from a deep sleep. He’s not happy. In the car he goes. With the wind whipping up I’m able to get the sides down and secured. Touch and go!

It’s 0245 in the morning. I suppose the positive way to look at this is that we’re just getting our day started early. So, we drive into the storm. At least we are not living in a fragile camper now. With tornadoes about maybe it is a good idea to be on the move. If one is to touch down nearby maybe we can evade it. Of course, it’s dark, which throws in an extra reason to be afraid. But we are lucky and make it through the storm front.

Port Arthur, TX. A refinery town for sure. Lit up at night like a Christmas tree. Next to Port Bolivar, another refinery. Rain and wind. Next, we take a free ferry over Galveston Bay, the seventh largest estuary in the United States. With major inflows from the Trinity and the Jacinto Rivers. Pulled into Galveston at 0800. A beautiful and wealthy city. Oil money no doubt. We continue on route 3005 to just north of Surfside City Texas, where we set up camp on a beautiful deserted beach. Nice way to start an otherwise tumultuous day.

Eat rice, be nice, and let the good times roll.