Author Archives: Jill and Bud

We’re spending two weeks here in Hot Springs to celebrate the holidays with Jamie and the family.

Here we are in their kitchen on Christmas Eve. Sean, Bud and I are on the right side of the kitchen island. Their friends the Brashears are on the left, except for Tia, who is nearest on the left.

This is a long time Christmas tradition for Sean and his girls. Now Jamie and Adler are part of that, and for the last three years Bud and I have joined them. (Adler is across from me, that’s Tia with her head down and Jacey is at the far end of the table.)

I love being part of that and being there on Christmas morning to take their annual Christmas photo in their new Christmas Eve pajamas. Jamie and Sean are in back. In front are Tia, Bria the dog, Jacey and Adler. (Beth Ann had the flu and wasn’t there.)

But we only plan to stay two weeks, because it can get pretty cold in Hot Springs. Nights have been in the 30’s, days in the 40’s this week.

I’m surprised at how many other people are out camping in this weather. On Wednesday Bud, Adler, Matey and I went out to play disc golf. The only one enjoying the cold was Matey. We cut our game short.

Last night we made plans to bundle up and try it again. We woke up to a forecast of snow flurries with a high of 43.

We wore our warmest clothes and went out there anyway. We actually had a good time even though the temperature stayed at 39.

Bud and I were supposed to leave Tuesday for southern New Mexico and Arizona, but now we have to come back here by the end of January. Bud did a Cologuard test and it came back positive. It may be nothing, but he has to follow up with a colonoscopy and Dr. Jamie says he should have that done as soon as we can get it scheduled. That is January 29th. So now we will get as far as central Texas and then head back. I have us booked for 11 more days in Hot Springs starting January 27th. Brrr. I may need some more warm clothes!

Merry Christmas to all,

and to all…

a good night.

I’m having a good time on my birthday today. Earlier we went out and played disc golf. I thought it was great that I could be playing on my 74th birthday, so I asked Bud to take a picture of me. I opened the camera app and handed him the phone. “Don’t take me from behind,” I said.

Here’s the picture he took.

So I handed him the phone again and had him take another. These are the “live” photos that iPhones take, where there are a number of exposures and the camera chooses the best as the “key” photo.

Here’s the second photo he took. Not bad, but I don’t really look like I’m moving. So I hit edit to see if I could select a frame where I was moving more.

Oh.

Now you know why I do the blog.

But he’s making me gluten free lasagna, so all is good.

We are back in Arkansas at White Oak Lake State Park. As I was walking with Matey this morning I found myself thinking once again about “forest bathing”.

We encountered this term on signs on a short hike in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. They encouraged you to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds and smells of the woods. At the time I thought it was a bit hokey, but the idea has come back to me on many of my walks.

I think this is something that is important to me. While I appreciate a campground with level sites and good amenities,

and I like privacy and nice views,

what I like most in a park is good walking trails.

I love being with family and friends, but I need to get out in the woods…

and I crave the company of trees.

We’re back on the west side of the Mississippi River again, in northern Louisiana.

We’re staying at yet another Louisiana State Park, Poverty Point Reservoir State Park.

The weather has been gorgeous, clear blue skies with temperatures in the mid to upper sixties during the day. Yesterday we spent the day outdoors; first playing disc golf and then visiting Poverty Point World Heritage Site.

We’d seen the signs for this site as we came into the state park. There are a couple of small Indian mounds in the park, and when we asked about them we found out that the Poverty Point Site was also Indian mounds.

What makes this site so special is the age and the complexity of the earthworks. This map is of the driving tour we took.

Our first stop was just to view the central plaza. This area is 43 acres. It was made about 3600 years ago. The people who made it brought in soil to fill any depressions, some as deep as 6 feet. The plaza is still almost perfectly flat.

Surrounding the plaza are six “C” shaped ridges. They are so large they are hard to see from the ground but they show up in aerial photographs.

You can see them on the map. This picture is looking across several of them. They were about 6 feet above the plaza and wide enough to have houses built on them. You can see from the map how evenly and precisely placed they are. The outer ridge is about three quarters of a mile from side to side. Archaeological evidence shows cooking and household activities on them which are dated from 1530 BCE to 1150 BCE.

In the center behind the ridges is what is now called Mound A. Dated to 1350 BCE, Mound A is the largest mound built to that point in history in what is now the U.S. No larger structure will be built for 2000 years! This was a hunter, fisher, gatherer society, with no evidence of agriculture, making the organization and long term occupation of this site required for such an undertaking remarkable.

The mound is shaped somewhat like a bird in flight, with a long ramp up along the bird’s tail.

The highest point would be at the center of the bird’s body, between the outstretched wings and today is 72 feet above the surrounding land.

There is no evidence that any structure was ever built on this mound and there are no remains of any activity. The evidence there is shows this mound, like all these earthworks, was built hauling soil by hand in baskets, about 50 pounds in a load. It took something like 15,500,000 basket loads of soil to make it! It does not seem to have been made over a long period of time, but rather all at once, perhaps in a matter of months!

What you don’t see in any of these pictures is rocks. There are none here. The museum on site had artifacts and chips from local rock, brought from 18 to 25 miles away, as well as rocks from the Appalachian Mountains, the Midwest and even north of the Great Lakes. This site now sits on Macon Bayou, but at the time it was occupied this might have been a lake connected to the Mississippi River. Obviously the people here traded with others for goods that traveled hundreds of miles.

There are three other mounds that are part of this site. The site was abandoned more than 3,000 years ago, but for 600 years this must have been a thriving community.

Natchez is quite a beautiful little city. Early in the Civil War the Union Army occupied Natchez without a fight. It became a Union headquarters and was not destroyed during the war, so is filled with 18th and 19th century homes that are still in use and well kept up. This is the street leading down from the bluff where the majority of the city sits. This area is called Natchez-Under-the-Hill.

It is here that the steamboats docked and it is here where the Union army landed. There are several National Historic Sites in the city, and they, along with some private mansions, are part of a self-guided driving tour that we attempted today.

Just at the top of the bluff is the Rosalie Mansion. It became the headquarters building. It is now open for tours and is privately owned.

This mansion is named “The Gardens”. It is located near the now torn down Marine Hospital and the old city cemetery and was used by Federal troops as a medical facility. About here in the tour we were running into problems. These streets were narrow and our truck is large. There was nowhere to park. I shot this out the open window.

Continuing our tour we came to “The Wigwam”. Bud was able to pull to the side at a wide place in the street so I could get out and take this photo.

The house, which was used as officer quarters and offices during the Civil War, is now for sale if anyone is interested.

Shields Town House was the last place we saw. I couldn’t get a picture because there was traffic on this narrow street and the house was on the left. Bud couldn’t even slow up.

This is an excerpt from the auto tour guide. The directions to the next stop are below the description of the house. As we passed this house I started trying to direct Bud, who was driving. We were both looking around. These are narrow streets and very short blocks, the distances in this set of directions are .02, .07, .14 and .15 miles. Bud pulled over into another wide spot after missing the turn onto Monroe Street. There was no way we could turn around. With one person reading and one person diving we were missing all the sights and were an accident waiting to happen. We gave up.

But our sightseeing wasn’t over. I had noticed a couple of small signs along US Highway 61 on the way back to the park designating a Mississippi Mound Trail Site. We followed the second one and came upon the Emerald Mound.

This terraformed hill was built and used by the ancestors of the Natchez around 1300, and was still visited by the Natchez at the time of European occupation. (Their main village was by then located closer to the present city of Natchez, I suspect where the first Mississippi Mound Site sign was.)

It is the second largest mound in the United States. The flat top, which is 35 feet above the surrounding area, is eight acres, with a smaller mound on one end raised another 30 feet. Archaeological investigations have shown that the Mississippians leveled the top of an existing hill and used that and other earth to build the platform.

It was quite an impressive sight rising up from the woods around it. It is a sacred place to Native Americans, and members of the Choctaw, Creek and reorganized Natchez Nations still visit here.

There’s more to see here, both in and around the city. Next time.

Right now I am sitting in our trailer at Natchez State Park while a front and a thunderstorm roll through. We are the blue dot on the My Radar app on my iPad. The red and yellow is the strongest part of the storm and it’s crossing from west to east.

This is our site and earlier today it was quite mild.

This is actually our second site in the park. At the first one we couldn’t get satellite TV. No problem, because we now have Verizon home internet and YouTube TV. Well the internet works fine, but for some reason the YouTube TV said it needed to update our location, but wouldn’t do it on the smart TV, so we couldn’t get that to work. This whole TV thing is driving us crazy. The park personnel are very nice here and we moved to this site.

As a bonus, there’s a view of the lake from here. It’s especially nice because most of the campsites are empty. A definite plus about being full time RVers is that a lot of the year the campgrounds are fairly empty. You have just enough neighbors to keep it from feeling eerily isolated.

After taking care of that business we drove to town (Natchez, Mississippi) and treated ourselves to a game of disc golf in lovely Duncan Park.

It was a very warm afternoon and there were clouds scurrying across the blue sky.

We were surprised when the course took us up and around an old mansion.

Apparently Natchez has plenty of them, and this one belongs to the city and is part of the park. It’s being renovated now and according to the sign will have billiards, restrooms and a pavilion.

There were also some spectacular old live oaks. To get a sense of the size of this one note my golf disc near the roots. I played right under its branches.

There was also this old steam engine. Though I didn’t see a plaque near it so don’t know its history,

Bud noticed that it had huge, external pistons,

and its wheels were driven by gears, rather than rods.

We have a couple of more days here and intend to delve more into the history of this interesting place.

We are now at Tickfaw State Park, the sixth Louisiana State Park we’ve stayed at in a row. I must say, they’ve all been pretty nice, with 50 amp electrical service and water. We seem to have left the mosquitoes behind and are back in armadillo country. Notice the beautiful red sweet gum tree behind our site.

I also came across this bicentennial cypress tree “live in 1812”. There is some hurricane damage here, but happily this tree survived.

But the main reason I’m happy to be here is that it got a bit dicey getting here. The trailer got a flat tire on this state highway. Our TyMate tire monitor worked perfectly, so we knew immediate we had a flat.

But this road, like many here in Louisiana, had no shoulder. The best Bud could do was find a straight patch. Fortunately there were enough curves that folk’s weren’t going fast and everyone saw us in plenty of time to make their way safely around. Two people stopped to make sure we didn’t need any help. In about a half hour the spare was mounted and we were on our way.

We didn’t see any obvious reason for the flat, but today when we looked more closely, we found the two inch slit on the inside sidewall. No repair for that so we got to replace our three and a half week old tire. Ah the joys of the road.

We stayed four more days around New Orleans, on the southeast side of the city at St. Bernard State Park. Matey was enthralled by the armadillos, which as you can see were pretty fearless.

Yesterday we drove on south along a lot of causeways…

to here, Grand Isle State Park. Unfortunately, the only critters here are mosquitoes, and there are so many of them I suspect they have driven the other creatures out.

Some of those causeways were so rough that this cupboard door came open. It’s hidden by the main slide, so I didn’t know it had come open until I put the slide out and had to stop at the crunching noise to remove the broken door.

A new one is on order and the old one is now glued and taped, but there was no way to straighten the bent handle. Fortunately the slide was not hurt.

On the way down we stopped at a Dodge dealer because Bud keeps finding fluid seeping from the transmission housing and when we went to check the level it didn’t register on the dip stick. But the dip stick was a replacement due to a safety recall. The original came loose on some trucks and let fluid splash onto the turbocharger where it ignited. This replacement was stamped “not for use to check oil”. Huh? The service guy at our dealership told Bud on the phone that it seemed logical that we should add fluid until it came up to the dipstick. Glad we checked at another dealership. They brought out an actual calibrated dipstick, which was at least 14” longer than ours. The fluid level was fine. Evidently there is a second replacement that clips in and is useful for reading the fluid level. In the three weeks our dealer had the truck to fix the transmission leak they didn’t think to give us the newer replacement.

This morning to escape the mosquitoes we took Matey walking on the beach in town. It’s a nice wide beach.

But the view is somewhat spoiled by the oil platforms dotting the horizon.

This isn’t the crystal sand of the Florida panhandle. This sand is awash with the silt that has built this delta.

We went to buy some seafood, but the seafood company still seems to be reeling from hurricane Ida which hit here in 2021. It’s the larger building in the background but wasn’t open and may not be doing retail sales at all now.

There were still a few houses around that hadn’t been repaired.

This was an interesting place to come and they are trying to come back, but we are glad we decided to only stay one day.

Yesterday we went with Jim and Goody to tour Oak Alley Plantation, about 45 miles up river from New Orleans. You can see how the plantation got its name. Interestingly, these oaks were about 50 years old when they were dug up and transplanted to form the allee.

You can do that sort of thing when you have 220 enslaved people at your bidding. There are six of the twenty slave cabins left at the plantation. You can see some of them at the edges of this photo. In the distance is the back of the “big house”.

220 people lived in 20 cabins to support the five members of the Jacques Roman family, a creole family who lived in the big house. This was a sugar plantation so the work for the field hands was brutal.

While we were waiting for our tour of the mansion Goody and I walked up the allee for photos of the front of the house. That’s Goody taking her picture.

This is my picture. That’s Jim in front of the door and Bud is in the red cap just to the left of the pillar.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the house, but I took one of the second floor gallery.

From the second floor you can almost see the levee and the Mississippi River at the far end of the allee. The plantation was 1100 acres, but it was fairly narrow and deep. Every plantation fronted the river as that was the main transportation for people and goods.

To either side they have recreated gardens.

One of these would have been a kitchen garden The slaves had their own gardens and at night, after they had done their days work, they would work in those. They grew and sold corn to the Roman family so they could buy chickens and pigs to supplement their diets along with the vegetables they could grow. Fortunately the Romans left detailed records so we know quite a lot about their lives.

This beautiful magnolia tree is only about a hundred years old and was planted long past the time of the Romans. Jacques built the big house when the plantation was earning good money in 1839. Unfortunately, he died young of tuberculosis. His son, Henri, was only nine. The plantation fell into arrears under overseers as Jacques’ wife Celine had no interest in the business. Ten years later Henri came back after graduating from college and tried to get the business going. That was 1860. In 1861 the civil war started. In 1863 came the end of the war and the emancipation of the slaves. As our tour guide put it, the enslaved people could now leave if they chose, and they left. Henri did not have the resources to keep the place going. So this beautiful mansion was an operational plantation for only 22 years. After that it went through a lot of owners, fortunately the last one had plenty of money to renovate and modernize the house and then set it up as a museum for us to share.

After our beautiful and informative tour we all came back to the trailer and Bud made a tasty lunch of fish tacos, using up the last of the whitefish he bought in northern Michigan. Jim and Goody left in the afternoon for one last night in the Big Easy and then home to Florida.

It was hard to see Jim and Goody go but we distracted ourselves today with a round of disc golf.

The course we found was gorgeous and challenging.

And it had armadillos, so Matey was rewarded for the two days he spent waiting for us while we toured. (The armadillo is in the grass, you can see its tail sticking out.)

Matey, at least, was happy to have things back to “normal”.