Exploring and Learning

Last Thursday B and I were feeling better, we have had colds, so we decided to take the 240 mile drive we had been looking forward to taking. It consisted of going on west to the little town of Kaplan and then heading south on Louisiana 35. This road is marked as a scenic route, but we have since learned that it was built as an evacuation route for those living in the area. Their only other route is the water way.

We thought that maybe we would see an alligator but no such luck. We did see lots of snowy egrets.

Here they don't look very large but they are large. They are pretty to see in flight but we weren't able to get a picture as we were usually driving when we saw some flying and there wasn't a place to stop.

The area consists of many wetlands, swamps, bayou, canals, or what ever else you call them. We took the ferry across at Cameron. There are some beach communities, or maybe I should say were, after we crossed on the ferry. We parked and went down to the beach at one of these. The water was pretty brown. The sand is loaded with tiny pieces of shells, not like the sand we saw in Florida. (I wondered if that was due to the hurricanes that they have had.)

From here we could see out into the gulf. Here we saw many oil platforms. What businesses we did see at Cameron were related to these.

We had hopes of getting lunch at a local eatery along the way, but no luck. (It was Lake Charles before we found anyplace.) In the beach areas the only buildings we saw were fairly new or they were trailers/fifth wheels parked on lots. There were many vacant lots with concrete slabs. There were no businesses of any kind. This is one of the homes.
Note how high up the building is from the ground. We saw nothing lower than this or older. Hurricanes Ike and Reta both came through here. From the looks of things, they wiped out everything. We did see some twisted cars/trucks (it was hard to tell) in a swamp area. We also saw a metal building with nothing below about twelve feet except the metal studs. Above that the walls were there, although the sea side was bent inward. In another area we saw two trailers about ten feet up on stilts with water marks and damage half way up their sides.

As Rita and Ike came ashore, I'm sure that there were sighs of relief that they ONLY came to sparsely populated areas. I'm sure that those with property, etc. in the sparsely populated areas weren't feeling very much relief. After seeing some of this destruction and also learning how the communities where we are currently staying (a good thirty miles from the coast) were flooded, I will never again think, "Oh, it is good that the hurricane is coming in there, a sparsely populated area."