The day after I took Jeremy to the airport, I went to Jean Lafitte in the bayou of Louisiana. There, I took another airboat ride through the western bayou. The difference between a bayou and a swamp is that a swamp is usually stagnant water, while a bayou is a very slow moving (almost stagnant) river or creek. The trees seem to hang lower, the grasses and vegetation are different; yet all are still part of the slow water system. There were gators, fish, and turtles. I enjoyed the view of the bayou from underneath the canopy, but the most amazing thing I saw was in the small gift store/visitor center of Captain John’s. It was an albino alligator that they keep in a zoo-like setting. As an albino, this gator would not have survived in the wild. They had found it at a young age, and it is now a fully mature gator. The bayou of Louisiana is such a different culture from most of the rest of the South, and even from New Orleans, the big city nearby.
On Saturday, I prepared to make a departure for the Houston, Texas area. I knew it was likely going to be in two-day trip, and the weather was not looking great, but I went ahead and prepared to leave. Then I carefully studied the weather for Sunday night and Monday. It was supposed to be 17° with snow/ice at St. Charles in Western Louisiana, which was where my first night stop was going to be. Houston was supposed to be that cold or worse, while New Orleans was supposed to be 25 with snow. One of the advantages of being retired is that I was in charge of my own schedule, so I made a few phone calls late Sunday evening and decided to spend an extra week in New Orleans.
My little No Boundaries RV is not really weatherproofed, and it has very little insulation. It is built to be lightweight, not winterized. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do. I looked up YouTube videos. I talked to some of the folks around me. After some consideration, I decided that I would rather not have water than have a poopsicle. Later I learned that I could have done both, but I disconnected the water from the campground connection and I closed the valve on black and grey water tanks. I also pulled in my slide, which gave me virtually no room to walk. On Sunday night into Monday, the snow just whirled by. When it finally stopped snowing on Tuesday, New Orleans had received nine (9!) inches of snow, an all-time record! The last real amount of accumulation that the city had experienced was two-and-a-half (2.5) inches in 1963. That record had been blown right out of the water!
By Wednesday, the snow was melting and temperatures returned to a more normal range. I put my slide back out, but stayed put. Most of the interstate, and many of the main roads in the city, are elevated, so while the snow had melted, the highways stayed ice-covered and remained hazardous. As a result, I couldn’t go anywhere until Friday afternoon. I remained marooned in my 200 square feet. Thank goodness for decent Wi-Fi.
Finally, by Friday, I could get out and do a little more exploring. I checked out the 9th Ward, another local cemetery, and the Tree of Life. There are several trees of life around the world. The picture below shows the one by that name in New Orleans and the one in Bahrain by the same name.
Finally, it was time to go. From New Orleans, I was west bound and down with the quickest possible time to my New Mexico destination.