Tripometer – 14,652 mi
Gas Gauge – 1135.024 gal
Location – Grand Isle State Park, Grand Isle, LA
Lodging – $25 ($100 total)
Cans of OFF – 4
RV Shut Ins
It has been unseasonably cold over the past few weeks across the entire southwest. Pulling into Grand Isle the weather forecast was calling for temperatures in the 40s-50s with rain for 3 out of the four days of our stay. The sun woke us on Monday morning, heating the trailer up to un-sleepable temperatures by 7:30am, and burned bright until mid afternoon whereupon we didn’t see again until Thursday morning. We set ourselves up early on Monday to become RV shut ins for the next few days. Our most valuable piece of equipment this week has got to be the trailer heater. With as little as we moved for the three days it rained and given the outside temperature, the authorities could well have had to remove our frozen corpses from the RV if we had not had a furnace on board.
Kelly is planning on taking some vacation the week of Thanksgiving in New Orleans, so her work schedule this week has been more intense than usual. Paul decided to spend most of his time stuck in the trailer re-reading the novel that first piqued his interest in New Orleans nearly 30 years ago, Anne Rice’s ‘The Witching Hour’. Ranger enjoyed a few trips to the beach during our stay here. We have been trying to find places for him to be off-leash and run or swim hard as we travel, but it has been hard for the past week as we’ve been moving from place to place. Most nights this week he fell asleep hard and early.
As we settled into our state park and the little island community, we reacquainted ourselves with life in more humid environments. It was a strange sensation moving from almost two months in the desert to a barrier island setting. Ranger was ecstatic to see so much water and he spent a full 15 minutes simply rolling in the grass when we first arrived. Every evening before we went to bed we had to towel condensation off the ceiling of each sleeping bunk, lest it begin to rain inside in the middle of the night.
On Thursday evening Kelly took Ranger for a swim and run along the public beach a mile or so down from the campground. While walking the shore waiting for Ranger’s energy to sap away, she passed her time gathering lovely little snail shells from the tide line. She brought her favorite three shells home with her and placed them on the dinette table where we quickly forgot about them. Several hours later, while reading and being relatively quiet in the trailer Paul heard a faint knocking sound that he could not explain (Kelly was under headphones). After 15-20 minutes of hearing a small sound and staring blankly in the direction of the sound (it’s a small place, an errant sound is generally easily identifiable, this one took forever to solve) he saw one of the shells making its way slowly across the table in Kelly’s direction. Kelly had inadvertently brought home a hermit crab friend for the evening.
Our only real complaint about Grand Isle is a marked lack of restaurants. We’re sure it has to do with the time of year and the fact that we’re here mid-week, but the food options on the island are extremely limited and the nearest off-island options are an hour away over a toll road. Especially considering our seaside location and spectacular introduction to Cajun food at Rabideaux’s on Sunday, we were also fairly disgusted at the food options available at the restaurants that were open. Almost all of the food available on the island was typical American fare (burgers, fries, pizza) and fried seafood (which Paul suspects was mostly frozen instead of fresh from the boats a mile and a half away). Neither of our stomachs can wait until we get into New Orleans.
The memorial at the top of the post was erected for the 11 people who died in the Deepwater Horizons disaster in 2013 very close to this site (relatively speaking).