Never Get Out Of The Boat
You don’t need to know how stunning the roads are between today’s locations. Find out for yourselves, we decide to go off-piste again and follow the levees into Louisiana. Mentioning the rain, once again, seems unnecessarily repetitive but unavoidable. Running out of ways to describe the downpour now, so… we are between Frisco and Livonia and the rain boils down, it is a wank-tornado of black vicious warm water, it hurts the car. We have no choice, as visibility is not even beyond the dashboard, but to stop the vehicle. In ten minutes the sun is out and it’s like it never happened. That’s the miracle of The Deep South – forget it and move on.
We detour again (that’s what to do on an easy day) to follow the Atchafalaya river near a place called Krotz Springs…
The Inevitable Deliverance Moment
Suddenly the tarmac ends and we are on gravel, we’ve trusted the Sat Nav for thousands of miles and now we think it must be wrong, it tells us to carry on regardless but in our wisdom we make a decision; we turn right down “Hillbilly Psycho Lane” (our naming rights). Bugger. The once-luxurious semi-gravelled highway now becomes a narrow dirt tree-covered darkening track which is leading to what looks suspiciously like a circled group of downmarket shotgun-trailers. “Keep going” we telepathically tell each other before the beginning of a mild, silent freak-out as we have passed the fantastically forbidding shacks to reach a sodden clearing leading to – a Louisiana swamp. End of the road. Nowhere to go but back. The shacks now loom like huge killing-barns and every rusting truck is a huge torture weapon that I will be tied to and forced to watch them rape my wife before buggering me senseless. Turn the huge posh rental car around! Drive nonchalantly through the compound like you do this every day. Don’t run any of the dogs over. We can’t see anyone but know they’re watching. Don’t drive like a twat and deck the car in the mud. Glide. We make it back to tarmac and wonder what we were ever worried about. We don’t speak until we’ve seen a Dairy Queen sign.
I’m sure they were mighty friendly folk… Ashly somehow kept it together to take a few shaky ones.
Crossing the great river once again, I wonder how many times we’ve now crossed it; how many memorial bridges, how many county roads, state lines and riverside diners – even riverside taxidermy establishments. We eat peaches and look forward to reaching Breaux Bridge, the self-styled “Crawfish Capital Of The World”. It’s closed. Rats-tits, this was a vital part of The Schedule. Never mind, there’s a swamp tour at Lake Martin, it’s a bit inclement but surely… no, it’s cancelled. The weather could only be described as ferociously dangerous.
Stop for a two-dayer now and I am extremely tired. The ‘cottage’ on the small Louisiana lake is beyond idyllic, no alligators but ducks and terrapins and we’re more than alone. I sit in a chair and immediately fall asleep for what seems like days while Ashly seems delighted to cook in 90 degree heat on the Bayou. The ducks are now her friends. This two day stop is essential (see tips). The rain is as brutal as usual – we don’t really notice it anymore. It’s water off a ducks back. The only sound is that of Ashly doing her Dr Dolittle with the ducks and some basic terrapin training. I’m far too exhausted to get drunk…
