After being founded in 1565 St Augustine was attacked and burned by English privateer Sir Francis Drake. Then it was plundered by English privateer Robert Searle and most of the inhabitants were killed. However it was also USA's first legally sanctioned free community of ex-slaves. However nowadays it is a holiday town selling stuff to tourists.
The picture says it all.
We have started the boat hunt and it has been pretty depressing so far, junk interspersed with dirty junk and some really dirty, worn out, rusty and rotten junk.
This picture shows rot, dirt and clutter. This not untypical of the boats we have looked at.
We have only seen 2 boats so far where the owners have made any real attempt to finish the necessary repairs and clean the boat to make it presentable.
I had had high hopes of one particular boatyard in the centre of Florida but even the boat broker was a little ashamed of the standard of the boats he had on his books. Some have been lying in the open for years with little or no attention yet the owners are asking high prices. Mind you they may owe that amount of money on the boat. Still there are plenty of boatyards to go and brokers to visit.
We were able to sit outside tonight in cool comfort which is a pleasant change from the hot and muggy nights we have endured recently.
Temperatures have been over a 100F in the shade and the “feels like figure” has been over 110F.
I had originally been thinking about getting something around 44 feet but so many people of our sort of years with 44 footers seem to be downsizing saying that it is too much boat to handle anymore so perhaps it is time to get realistic and look at something smaller.
The best bet we have seen so far is an a boat called an Endeavour 40.
We visited the Laura Plantation just outside New Orleans. The plantation was established in 1755
By this family
and like almost every other major plantation was built on the banks of the Mississippi and continued functioning as a plantation into the 20th century.
This was the plant that it was all about, sugar cane. It made the Duparcs and many other growers incredibly wealthy as the demand for sugar in Europe soared.
It was a patois used by slaves and planters alike. It continues to be used to some extent today and is similar in some respects to the everyday language spoken in parts of the Caribbean.
The house has been repainted in traditional creole colours. It was built on brick pillars to cope with the flooding
and the timbers were old growth bald cyprus from the bayou, a hard wearing long lasting wood that is resistant to insect attack.
This is an original timber with the marks used by the skilled slave carpenter still visible.
The plantation was run by Laura Locoul Gore for 30 years and when she sold it part of the deal was that it be called "Laura" forever.
The interior of the "big house" is furnished with original antiques. Some pieces were donated to the plantation by families of the original owners and some areas inside the home are unrestored.
The slaves lived in a much simpler style without protection from the yearly floods or systems to catch the cooling breezes.
One story from the early days of plantation life bought home to me how slaves were thought of. Realising that the most valuable slaves were young men, women being much less costly, they purchased some young girls and proceeded to raise a crop of young men, keeping the females as breeding stock.
At it's peak the plantation supported around 200 slaves. This was the maximum that most slave owners would allow as the risk of an uprising was ever present in their minds.
We are heading East now towards Jacksonville in Florida and it is HOT HOT HOT. 100 degrees yesterday with high humidity and the same conditions are forecast for the next few days. Air conditioning, fans and lots of rehydration therapy are the order of the day. I just wish I could get access to my favoured therapy, Theakstons Old Peculiar.
We head down into Louisiana and the first stop was Baton Rouge, but not much of the old town stil exists so we looked in on the rural museum.
The small exhibits were displayed pretty haphazardly,
in some cases just in piles of similar items with no signs giving any information. They may be building a new museum and just warehousing their stock.
The outside exhibits were better organized. We saw some slave quarters, overseers quarters, a smiths shop and the plantation commissary. When we looked around it I was reminded of the line from the song “I owe my soul to the company store.”
This building was initially puzzling to me, why apply boards on the diagonal. However all was explained; it was the jail and by overlapping boards in opposite directions with lots of nails it was possible to make a wall that could not be cut through with an axe.
There were some coffle chains left over from the days of the chain gangs and I could not resist seeing what it would have felt like.
We headed south from Baton Rouge into the delta bayou and stayed in a lovely little RV park The sites were laid out around a pond full of duck and frogs with dragonflies everywhere. The owners have lots of space and are working on the next phase. This was somewhere we were reluctant to leave but the swamps were calling.
BAYOU and SWAMP TOUR with BLACK GUIDRY the CAJUN MAN
This is quite a famous tour with an ex military guy as our guide. The tour had 20 or so people on a well used pontoon boat, this was in contrast to the very new looking big aluminum airboat which blasted off before us with only three on board.
We were soon pootling along canals [ dug artificially ] and bayous [ natural waterways ] learning about Bald Cyprus knees and oil company pipelines. He turned into a dead end stopped the engine and let out a weird rumbling roar. Within seconds a dead log started moving towards us
and soon was begging for his dinner.
He stopped again announcing that he was lost and pulled out is Cajun squeezebox. He gave us a few bars of Zydeco but stopped claiming this was not his forte and swapped to his guitar for a rendition of the Cajun national anthem “Jolie Blon”.
After entertaining us he “remembered the way home” and we were off again. He was very scathing about the locals who fished this area for pleasure on their metalflake bass boats with giant outboards who set off in the morning with a cooler full of beer. He said the accident rate on the water was so bad that they have a special boating while impaired law to deal with it. As he said that we were overtaken on the outside of a blind bend by a couple of good old boys doing at least 30 knots.
New Orleans or “The Big [Sl]easy” was next.
We decided to stay at an expensive campground in the centre and use their shuttle bus but befroe we committed ourselves we stopped at the Bayou Segnette State Park and did a recce. As I am writing this we are still there. The park is delightful with swimming pools free laundry and free WiFi plus it is 1/3 of the price of the city park and very quiet at night with no “WOO WOO” train whistles.
To get in to New Orleans we drive to the Algiers ferry which drops us off by the French quarter.
Every one has heard of Mardis Gras in New Orleans so we toured the factory responsible for many of the floats. We learned of the history behind todays krewes and why they throw stuff like beads and plastic coins to the watchers.
Some of the big figures are over 40 years old and have appeared every year with a new coat of paint and sometimes a new head or face to fit the current theme.
But this bird was brand new, carved from plywood and styrofoam before being sprayed with a platic coating then painted.
Nowadays motors move the dragons jaws but only a few years ago sweating floar riders would be inside the "props" doing it by hand and there are still a few old floats where they do it this way.
The oldest established krewe is Rex who have been going since 1872. The all-male krewe is responsible for the concept of day parades, for the official Mardi Gras flag and colors – green for faith, gold for power, purple for justice – and for the anthem of Carnival, “If I Ever Cease to Love,” as well as for one of the most popular throws, the doubloon.
Our guide told us that the individuals who ride the floats are responsible for buying their own "throws" and on average they spend 400 to 500 dollars a year on plastic junk to throw away. ??WHY??
There are so many krewes with floats and riders desparate to throw stuff away that there are many separate parades during the Mardi Gras season.
We learned that while it is illegal to smoke on a float drinking is OK. As long as you can stand and throw you can parade. However the law also says that everone must be tied to the floats and we saw the harnesses and ropes they use for this.
RIVERBOAT NATCHEZ
We took a trip on the Natchez. This is the last steam driven paddle wheeler running out of New Orleans.
Built to a traditional design and using engines from a much older boat it keeps tradition afloat.
She was pretty special but it was a pity that the guide doing the commentary was not up to the same standard. YOU WILL NEED BROADBAND FOR THIS
We were greeted by a Calliope recital before departure then learned more than we wanted to know about the oil terminals, grain terminals, sugar terminals and [ we both fell asleep at this point and missed the next bit]
We did get a look into the part of New Orleans flooded to a depth of 15 feet when Katrina broke through the levees.
Back at the dock we headed into the French quarter with its lovely old ironwork and found out why it is called "the big sleasey" when we hit the end of Bourbon Street.
Strip clubs, hookers and cheap boooze were everywhere but behind and beside the sleaze were muscicians belting out Jolie Blon and Delta Blues.
I liked the one called
" I got the Fuzzy Dummy Empty Sippy Cup Lost Blanky Dirty Diaper Delta blues "
We got to tour a lovely old house filled with original furnishings
from the time of the civil war.
It had been hit several times during the siege of Vicksburg and one of the cannon balls is still in the wall.
It came through the door here
and finished up here.
We also took the National Park Service tour of the battlefield which was a waste of time, just lots of monuments. The only interesting stop was a museum dedicated to the ironclad gunboat Cairo
which was sunk by an early mine
and recently recovered and restored.
This is the damage that the mine did.
It was built like a catamaran at the back to protect the paddle wheel.
The North built 7 of these in 6 months. This is the only one to survive and as it went down in a few minutes it was a time capsule as the Mississippi mud preserved most of it.
The Park is also the site of a big military cemetery
used from the civil war until the 1960s.
DOWN THE NATCHEZ TRACE
Getting off the main road we followed part of the 444-mile Natchez Trace Parkway which commemorates an ancient trail used by animals and people that connected southern portions of the Mississippi River, through Alabama, to salt licks in today's central Tennessee.
It was also used briefly by riverboatmen who, having floated down the Mississippi would walk or ride on horseback North back up the trace.
This is one of the old stops on the way. They used to sell the travellers a meal for 25 cents and space to sleep on the porch.
We will look in on one of the mound building peoples sites today and then head on down to Baton Rouge in Cajun Country for some Zydeco!
Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississipi was the scene of a pivotal battle during the American civil war.
It was also the start of another battle which is still going on across most of the world today.
In 1894, a Vicksburg businessman named Joseph Biedenharn became the first to put Coca-Cola in bottles and sell it by the case in surrounding areas. His soda factory is now a museum and we looked around the original facilities.
DUE TO THE VERY SLOW WIFI CONNECTION AT THE MAGNOLIA RV PARK WE WILL FINISH THIS BLOG WHEN WE GET SOMETHING FASTER!
