Zachary, Louisiana

We made it through Baton Rouge Wednesday afternoon, but it was not pretty. We missed our turn onto I-10 and headed south down into New Orleans. Traffic was instantly a mess--worse than what we left behind on I-12. That will teach Terry to nap while I am driving through unfamiliar territory. I was careful to be in the lane marked with the proper shield, but somewhere in the next few feet, I missed a curve or something because I instantly regretted it.

It was not a real big problem and I just drove a couple miles down to the next interchange where we exited, crossed under the bridge, and headed north again. Terry said he would have just had me drive down through New Orleans, but we needed to go to the Camping World at Hammond. So we did the loop-d-loop and got back on the right track.

We made it to Dixie RV and got what we needed. They are a Tiffin dealer and the night before we had a switch go bad on the bathroom light. So when in the "john" we had to use a flashlight at night. Something about that inconvenience put that at the top of our list to fix. Fortunately, they had the switch, albeit the wrong color, but it is fixed and it works. That is more important than having the perfect color. When at Tiffin for our appointment next spring, we will pick up a couple of switches in the correct color.

We then headed west toward Baton Rouge and what a mess that was. We got into road construction before we got there and it continued on through the city. It was stop and wait and go the entire time until we got onto I-110 and headed north out of the city. We could see traffic backed up over the bridge to the west and suspected more road construction, but we've been told there isn't any going on over there, so there might have been a wreck that was tying up traffic.

We finally got rolling again and pulled into the Harp Camp at about 3:30 Wednesday. Plenty of time to setup, visit, and get my food dishes ready for dinner on Thursday. We just saw Gary and Jo at the wedding, but we didn't get much of a chance to visit, so this is always a good stop.

Thursday, Thanksgiving day, dawned colder than we have been experiencing. We will be glad to get into warmer weather down in the valley. We had dinner over at Jo's sister's place and had deep fried turkey, cornbread dressing, another dressing with rice, green bean casserole, corn salad, broccoli cheese casserole, peas, corn casserole, turnips, carrot suffle, cornbread, fruitcake cranberry salad, and crawfish pie. I wasn't brave enough to try the crawfish pie, I must admit. There was pie for dessert, but I was too stuffed to eat any.

When we got back, Gary took us on a ride in the 4-wheel cart out to check the camera at his deer feeder. He didn't have any pictures on the camera which is set up for motion detection. But he took us around the fields behind the house and showed us other homesteads that were once lived in by other family members. An interesting trip back in time. We mingled in the fields with the cows. We saw four new calves which is a little unusual for this time of the year. They were fiesty and cute. Last evening we roasted hot dogs outside which was a big hit with Gary and Jo's grandkids.

We aren't sure what we are doing today. Gary talked about going down to New Orleans, but Jo thinks the traffic would be too horrendous, being Black Friday and all. So we may just hang out here. Tomorrow we will be leaving and heading toward Houston. We will make a couple stops along the way before we get there, hopefully on December 1st.

Till next time. . .

Dale