North by Northwest

Today we left Baton Rouge on I-10 and drove west to I-49 where we headed north.   We arrived at Barksdale AFB outside of Shreveport, LA around 3:30p and will be here tonight only.  Tomorrow we catch I-20 and head west towards Dallas and have plans to stay in a town east of Dallas called Terrell.  We will stay there two nights to give Roger a down day.  We will have been on the road for three days straight.  Even though we are only going about 250 miles a day and driving for 3-4 hours, depending on traffic, it is tiring for Roger dealing with the RV.  

There are a lot of casinos in Louisiana!  I don’t think I realized there was so much.  I knew there were casinos in Mississippi on the Gulf Coast of the Biloxi area, and some in New Orleans.  Here in Louisiana almost every town has at least one small one.  Just down the street from us tonight is a huge Harrah’s and a Horseshoe Club.  They are near the Louisiana Downs Racetrack.  

Rice paddies, pecan orchards, bayous, horse farms, some cattle ranches, logging, and oil wells are what dot the Louisiana landscape.  Lots of water everywhere in the southern part of the state, but the further north we came the farmland seem to take over from the swamps. 

Driving north on I-49 is like driving through a tunnel of trees.  Nothing to see.  Just a long straight road ahead and tall trees on the sides with an occasional opening to spot the above mentioned sights.  BORING! 

We had little to no traffic once we crossed the Mississippi until we were 4 miles from our exit!  Traffic backed up for an accident.  Figures, huh?

Our Air Force Fam Camp is one of the worst we’ve been in.  Usually the Air Force has the primo campgrounds, but this one - not so much.  We are in a site where the utility hook ups are on the wrong side of the RV!  About half of them are this way.  Evidently, you’re supposed to pull IN to what is a back-in site, unhook  from the RV and then drive across a grassy field full of little hills, valleys, and ruts to get your tow vehicle back to your site.  The really ridiculous part is when you prepare to leave, you have to back up to the RV, hook-up, and then try to drag a 13,000 pound RV back across that same grassy field to get out of the park.   We elected to go ahead and back in.  Fortunately, we have a long enough water hose and power cord, but the sewer hose just wasn’t long enough to stretch under the RV and over to the dump hole.  Bizzare.  We had planned on a two night stay, but will move on tomorrow. 

Last night Roger and I discovered that Maggie thinks the couch belongs to her and her alone.   We threw her “day” bed onto the floor so we could sit side by side to look at maps and do some Google searches for routes and RV parks for the next couple of days.  Maggie kept jumping up on our lap, giving us kisses, walking across the atlas in Roger’s lap and then traipsing across the computer.  After about three times Roger got up and moved to his chair, throwing the bed up on the couch.  Maggs hopped up, curled up in the bed and crashed for the evening.  I guess she wasn’t too happy with us taking her sleeping spot.  She’s going to have to get used to her bed being on the floor between our chairs at home because the couch at home is off limits to dogs no matter how cute they are.  

More tomorrow from Texas!