We woke up in Cameron LA, very much a working area, and 379.8 miles later, most of it off the Interstate, we went to bed in a Super 8 near the circuit of the Americas in Austin TX. In between the land changed from flat, flat, bayou country to gently rolling Oak covered hills in the middle of Texas, all of it beautiful. We started after breakfast at Anchors Up Grill and drove a couple of miles to a ferry across a channel to the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge. While waiting for the ferry, we watched a pod of dolphins hunt – or, maybe, just playing, either way they were hard to photograph –  and more birdlife than we would see in a week at the Don Edwards San Francisco Wildlife Refuge near home and, it turned out, more than we would see at the Sabin Refuge. And that is what makes this area distinctive, Cameron is a working area but it is also filled with wildlife; the locals, including the oil companies, have a more intimate relationship with nature than any place I can remember.   
After we left the gulf, we headed inland, crossing from Eastern Louisiana to Western Texas as we crossed the inconsequential Sabine River near Deweyville TX. We wanted to both stay off the Interstate and get north of Houston to avoid, as much as possible, the devastation of  Hurricane Harvey.  But even well north of Houston, we ran into piles of flood damage debris by the side of the road. The land was still flat and we crossed and passed lots of small streams and ponds, but the vegetation slowly changed. When we stopped for a mediocre lunch, we were well into Texas.
Driving on back roads with trees on both sides it was hard to know where we were. We drove through country that didn’t seem to change, with the occasional towns all looking pretty much the same except for the FEMA signs. One thing that surprised me is that, although this is poor country, there is a sprinkling of big, new, houses, much like we would find in the Gold Rush Country. Slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the flat land began to change to low rolling hills. Just after sunset, we rolled into Austin.

This morning, Wednesday, we said Goodby to Gina and Courtney, after a great three days in, mostly, New Orleans, Louisana and tonight we are in Cameron, Louisana, 275.9 miles away, a good part of which was on back roads. New Orleans was too much of everything good – too much good food, too much good music, too much good fun – even try to include here so I’ll do a separate post when I get a few minutes. We started our trip to Cameron thinking we were going to spend the night in Lake Charles, population 76, 848 with lots of motels and restaurants and only six and a half hours from Austin but we enjoyed the backroads so much that we only got to Cameron LA. We started on Interstate 10 and then cut towards the Gulf on Highway 18 and then 90, crossing the Mississippi, very much a working river, near Boutte. For a while we ran along a causeway skimming above the swamps and crossing working bayous, then we switched to smaller, local roads. This is oil country, as one local said, “The oil companies own everything.”. But this is also an area where nature is everywhere and people are both entwined and enmeshed in it.



As the light got long, we got closer to the water and the bugs, We stopped in the deep twilight at a Cajun Restaurant that was recommended on Yelp and I ordered Gumbo which was just OK but the fried shrimps, served in a hot pan, were great. The problem of the gumbo may have been that I have been ruined for gumbo for the rest of my life after having an extraordinary gumbo at Peche with Gina and Courtney several days before in the Art District of New Orleans. We ended the day at Cameron.   

We woke up at Dataw Island SC and got to New Orleans 695.3 miles and 14 hours later. In between, we drove through rural Georgia on back roads, mostly on two-lane state highways, then through the northern Florida panhandle, southern Alabama, southern Mississippi, and the south-eastern corner of Louisiana, the last three in the dark on Interstate 10.  Almost all the following pictures were taken by Michele from the car.

For some reason, completely unfathomable to me, every time I type in the caption and hit update, both the picture and the caption disappear. The caption should read something like Crossing the Perdido River and crossing from Florida to Alabama. 

Same caption problem. Crossing from Alabama into Mississippi in the dark with a camera that insists on focusing on the windshield.

And finally, we cross into Louisiana having crossed the entire State of Mississippi in the dark. Driving into New Orleans, we are in the first big city on our trip. We are staying with Gina and Courtney in a four-story home in the French Quarter. On Sunday morning, Michele sleeps in. 

Now that we are at Dataw Island ensconced with Michele’s cousins, busy with familial activities, our impressions of Chattanooga are starting to fade even though we left it less than a week ago so I’m just going to post a couple of comments and pictures and let it go. Chattanooga was an almost complete unknown to us; it is on a bend in the Tennessee River, it was listed as one of 45 Places to go in 2012 by the New York Times, and it was the site of General U.S. Grant’s luckiest battle, other than that, it is a blank. Now I can add that it is a lovely small city – I guess it can be called a small city, it has a population of a little less than 178 thousand souls – in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with the Hunter Museum of American Art at the center of an Art District. When we first got to Chattanooga for our two-night layover, we really liked it, by the second night, we felt it was a little too polished with not enough rough edges for it to be interesting for an extended period, but, by the time we left, we were starting to come around to our first position.

In September 1863, the Confederates, under General Braxton Bragg, soundly beat the Union Army at Chickamauga and then drove the defeated, disorganized, and despondent Army into Chattanooga where the Confederates laid siege from the surrounding mountains. The Union Army, under by General William Rosecrans, who Lincoln said was “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head with a rubber mallet”, was pinned down and floundering, cut off from their supply lines, starting to starve. General Grant, who had been convalescing in New Orleans was given command and ordered to Chattanooga by Lincoln. Two days after he arrived in October, Grant established a new supply line, started bringing in food and ammunition, and then additional troops. In November, Grant went on the attack. First by taking the high ground on the Union right, under Major General Joseph Hooker. As an aside, folk etymology says that the term hooker came from calling the Washington prostitutes Hooker’s Battalions while Hooker was the general in charge of the Army of the Potomac but this is not true, people who know those kinds of things say that the term hooker had been around for 30 years before the Civil War. End aside. However, the Union troops were still pinned down from Missionary Ridge and Grant sent his friend, General William Tecumseh Sherman, on a flanking movement to roll up the Confederates from the Union left. Sherman bogged down, so Grant ordered the pinned down troops, now led by General George Thomas, to distract the Confederates by making “a demonstration”. But as the pinned down troops made their demonstration they started taking even more intense fire; one by one, then small group by small group, and finally the entire of Thomas’s Army, completely on their own, charged up Missionary Ridge to get away from the fire raining down on them. They had been humiliated at Chickamauga and now they got their revenge, The Confederates were driven back to Georgia and Grant went to Washington to become the commander of the entire Union Army.         

Meanwhile, we were still in Chattanooga and it was First Friday Art Walk so we visited the Chattanooga WorkSpace to see some local artists. The next day we visited the Hunter Museum of American Art and saw a nice show of a local artist. Then it was back on the road with some nice memories.      

Our drive to Dataw Island started with a long drive through Georgia. We got on the Freeway in Chattanooga and drove about two miles to George where we stopped to get gas. Then ran almost all the way Dataw Island in a sort of tunnel formed by trees on both sides of the road relieved only by a stop at the High Museum to get lunch and a surprisingly nice rest stop to, uhh, rest. Shortly after crossing the Georgia/South Carolina border, we reached Dataw Island, had a late dinner at Michele’s cousin’s home, and went to bed. The next morning we woke to a view of the Harbor River, near where it joins the Atlantic.