Denham Springs → Fountainebleau → Buccaneer (state park) → Gautier → Gulf (state park)
Today i took it easy in the morning. I posted my Texas food pictures and futzed around till almost 11. I continued down 190 to Hammond, which proved to be more grueling than expected for the first half of the ride because it was a busy road with no shoulder. Louisiana drivers barely make an effort to give cyclists room. I guess they're just used to narrow roads because they blast past at top speed with mere inches to spare. That's how people drove in China too, and you really have to steel your nerves and concentrate to stay in a very straight line.
In Hammond my quest for soul food was thwarted again. Another restaurant i was hoping to try was either unexpectedly closed or closed down. Instead i went to a local BBQ place known for their messy sandwiches, and got a po' boy. It was messy, but fun to eat.
Then i popped into Walmart for supplies and headed east on 22, expecting it to be a quieter drive than 190. It was not. In fact, it might be the busiest road i have cycled on this whole journey. There was a stupid amount of stop-start traffic at the school in Ponchatoula and the marina in Madisonville.
In between those two towns it was the weirdest fucking thing. There were dozens of gated communities. Like, one after the next after the next, for 30km straight. There was no downtown. There was no shopping center. There was no nothing except for a gas station or two, and more gated communities. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, in China there were also dozens of gated communities side by side, but those were highrise communities, so you'd cycle 10 minutes and then it was over, time for a shopping mall. This was an hour and a half of private cul-de-sacs with flowery names.
I can't fathom why anyone would want to live out there. Half these communities are still new development, the houses aren't even sold yet, but the traffic is already terrible. There's no room to convert the road to dual carriageway. Any time someone living there needs anything, they will have to drive because it's too far to walk. Even cycling would be a stretch for most people. And it's all drained swamp land, so when the storms come the land will surely flood. And if you need to evacuate for a hurricane, well good luck taking the literal one road out of there along with everyone else in all the other gated communities. It just seems like such terrible urban planning, i could hardly believe it was happening in 2021.
After hitting Mandeville it opened right up to wide, vast roads and sunny strip mall development that reminded me of California. It's what i hope Florida will be like too. It's still fairly pedestrian unfriendly, but there's something holidayish and cheerful about palm trees and pastel colored buildings and so on. I would've stopped to check out some of the businesses along there, but i had dawdled so much in the morning that i needed to push hard to make it to the campsite by 5pm.
I checked in, got my tent set up and ate just in time to get to the beach for sunset over Lake Pontchartrain. I was really hoping Fountainebleau would be closer to the causeway so i could take some epic Miami Vice shots, but the causeway was way off in the distance, small twinkling lights going back and forth to New Orleans. Sunset was still awesome, though, looking through the mangroves. I don't even care i got bit by a million mosquitoes. It was gorgeous.
One odd thing is there was some kind of Christian youth group playing amplified praise music. I feel like it should be illegal to do that in a state park because separation of church and state, but this is America, land of hypocrisy, so my nice sunset featured a soundtrack of singing and drumming and manic preaching about the Lord filling you up, God is love, the only true love, and we love Him so, and we accept the Holy Spirit into ourselves, oh Hallelujah, how He deserves all the glory and all the grace, we are but servants to you, my Lord, and man oh man. It's like Stockholm syndrome, expressing adoration for an all-powerful entity you must also obey. I had no idea people were really like this, i thought it was just something that cults did. Like, this isn't the church i remember, where you read passages from King James edition or get some highbrow treatise about the life of Jesus, like a history lesson. No, this is turning Christ into some kind of mystical, transcendental experience. It's almost like shamanic ritual, the drums, the call and response, the dancing. It feels like the same kinda woo that the most far out hippies are into. These guys were praying for the Lord to deliver them - not from evil - but from anxiety and depression and pornography addiction. And to help other young people see the light. Oh, and also to make the local college football team win!? It's so bizarre. I mean, more power to them i suppose, but it just seems like such an unhealthy fixation to give your whole life over to Jesus and put Him at the center of everything. It comes across as obsessive.
Anywho, this wasn't a bad day, all things considered. I am considering going to a nearby state park in Mississippi tomorrow, which is close enough that i'll have time to do some hiking or explore a back road. I missed all the blues stuff in Mississippi, which is much further north, but maybe i will bump into something by accident. Maybe i'll finally get that soul food. I am craving some really good cornbread.
-o-
I finally got that soul food!
Today feels like the day i finally arrived at my destination. Or the home stretch, at least. I wrote a text message to my friend R, "this is my snowbird dream i cycled all the way through fucking shit ass conservative boring and sometimes interesting america to get to". It was a little bit of hyperbole, but not a lot.
I woke up with a very wet tent. It is the double-whammy of cold and humid in the mornings here. Plus there were a bunch of trees in the way of the sunrise. But i dried off and then jumped on my bike to a donut shop in the nearby town of Lacombe and got a boudin kolache. Two things i should mention: one is that i have found that "kolache" is the name a lot of donut shops use down here to refer to that larger pig-in-a-blanket that shares a lot in common with a Chinese hotdog bun - soft, sweet pastry with a sausage inside it. Second thing is boudin. What is a boudin? I have seen "boudin balls" all over the menus here but didn't order them because i always wanted something else. But this was my last chance! So i got the boudin, and turns out it is a sort of sausage made out of rice and pork. It reminds me a bit of Dutch junk food like kroket/bitterballen, and it is delicious. I wish i had started ordering them earlier.
After the snack i took a lazy detour around the bayou trying to get some photos. It turns out it's very difficult to take good photos of the swamp, even when you aren't on a viaduct or a busy highway, because it's so dense. There is nothing for the camera to focus on, you just get a bunch of trees trunks and that's it. Same problem as a forest. There's no contrast. I'm sure a good photographer could do something with it, but i am not that. Still, i enjoyed the detour even if no good photos come out.
I think i also learned the difference between a marsh and a swamp. A marsh seems to be an environment of shallow water over boggy peat where only reeds and lilies grow. A swamp is the same thing, but with better soil so trees also grow in it. At some point the hurricanes and/or floods displace the soil so marshes become swamps or vice versa. And bayous are the slow-moving waters near a bigger river that look like rivers of their own but they are more like boggy, brackish branches of the delta. I'm not sure when something changes from a pond to a marsh, or when a creek becomes a bayou, or how swamps are different from "normal" riparian landscapes and mangroves, but the point is it is all very wet, very muddy, occasionally stinky, not drinkable, and full of horrifying critters.
After my bayouducation i sidled on to Slidell, where i finally found a soul food place that was open. I didn't get cornbread, but i did get a fish dinner with yam and greens, and it was the best thing i have eaten in Louisiana. Exactly the sort of food i was hoping to find in the south.
The last stretch across to Mississippi was also pretty breezy. After the busy roads on the Baton Rouge to New Orleans(ish) stretch, i was expecting that to continue, but it seems nobody wants to drive on to Mississippi. I had the roads largely to myself and took it really easy, even hopping off here and there to take a photo and eat the apple fritter i also picked up at the donut shop for bland but necessary calories. When i got into Mississippi i stopped at a gas station on a crossroads, where there was no blues music, or any demons waiting to buy my soul, but there were a couple locals drinking booze who asked me if i smoked a joint before heading out each morning. (It took a few tries for me to understand what they were saying, the accent was so thick.) I guess when people read me as male, they also read me as a hippie because of the long hair. And, well, the bicycle i suppose. I picked up a drink and headed south to the coast.
Boom.
I finally fucking made it. The bit of Gulf Coast i saw in Louisiana didn't exactly feel like the real coast, because it was so marshy and hurricane-battered that it didn't quite have that holiday feeling. The Gulf Coast of Mississippi is also hurricane-battered - whole sections of what i think could've once been beach are just water lapping at the side of the road, and other parts of the road are smashed to bits. The cars have to share one lane here and there. But there are a few sad little palm trees and a handful of RVers camped out, sitting on deck chairs. I'm staying at a pirate-themed state park that is basically just a waterpark for the kids and a parking lot-style RV park for the snowbirds. It's off-season, the waterpark is closed and there are hardly any RVers. But it feels like i finally made it. I finally got my tacky beachfront holiday that i was looking for. Well, not quite, because the camping isn't beachfront, but the beach is just a few hundred meters down the access road. And then the road goes all the way into Gulfport, then Biloxi. White sand. Palm trees. Boarded up nightclubs and seafood shacks. Fuck yes. All of the struggle has been worthwhile and this is the reward.
Well, the real reward will be when i have a daiquiri in Key West. But this feels like a preview. Tomorrow i am going to try find a cheezy beachside bar that's actually open and get a cocktail, and it better come with a tiny umbrella in it.
Then i will keep cycling.
-o-
Today was my favorite day yet. Almost the entire route was along the beachfront boardwalk/seawall. There is something like 40km of white sand beach between Pass Christian and Biloxi. It's been badly eroded, and parts of the (concrete) boardwalk have collapsed, but that made it better. Because there was hardly anyone there.
I don't know what it is about empty resort towns that i find so charming. There is this hint of a party, a notion that if only i was here at another time it might've been going off. But with the tourists gone it's got a shabby peacefulness, and a dream of what could be. It's like how the suggestion or the idea of something is actually better than the thing itself. The anticipation is everything.
Also why i enjoy psytrance music and other trippy, acidy, techy minimal stuff, because it keeps teasing at some big release, but it never quite gets there.
Before i hit the beach, though, i cycled through Waveland and Bay Saint Louis. Bay Saint Louis is a lovely little seaside town with a bunch of artsy shops and - get this - a bakery where they bake bread! Who knew i'd find such a place in America. I have to say one of the things i most miss about Europe is having bakeries everywhere where you can buy a full loaf of bread, half loaf of bread, bread rolls one-by-one and so on. My meals on this trip would have been much nicer, cheaper and healthier if i could pick up a few fresh bread rolls every day and some bits and bobs to make a sandwich.
Well that's what i did this morning. I got a loaf of sourdough and asked them to slice it thick, and a tub of fresh hummus. And a scone. Then kicked off on that wonderful beachfront ride, with hardly a soul in sight. (Well, plenty of cars, but i didn't care, because i was on the boardwalk.)
Since this is likely to be my only full day in Mississippi, i went to a blues-themed BBQ joint in Gulfport. It was a bit more touristy than the kinds of places i normally like to go, but probably the best i could hope for in the middle of the week in this part of the state. Disappointingly, they played classic rock by white men and what i would consider "pop" blues at best. No delta blues. No crying and wailing. Nothing slow. Oh well. I got fried chicken, baked beans and collard greens, and it was fantastic.
I made another touristy stop at a beach shack on stilts in Biloxi. Biloxi is far less interesting than Gulfport. It's mostly casinos and exactly the sort of crowd you would expect to see at casinos. Gulfport felt like it had a bit more character, more diversity, more local stuff going on. But it did not have as many cheezy beach shacks. So i got my tropical cocktail in Biloxi next door to a Margaritaville resort. Unfortunately it did not have an umbrella in it, but it made me happy.
Then i crossed the bridge to Ocean Springs, which had the same kind of holiday homes for cashed up folks feel that parts of the Lake Pontchartrain north shore had. Gave me that North Vancouver feeling. No matter, i just put my head down and zoomed on to Gautier, which has a small former state park that is now run by the city. It's in a marshy bayou surrounded by trees. Tomorrow i'ma have another wet tent.
I met another bike tourer here. Not only was he another bike tourer, he was a Canadian. And had cycled from Portland, Oregon, so he's basically doing the same northwest to southeast trip as me. But - get this - he is doing it with his wife and two young daughters! He said they go about 50km a day, sometimes less, rarely more. They must have been going for months. And now, to everyone who says i must be so fit and tough for doing this, i can respond that even kids can do it. You don't need to be fit to cycle tour. You just start pedaling, and only go as far as you want. Work up to longer distances if you like, or don't. He said they take break days too, where they don't cycle at all. It's totally doable.
We exchanged some war stories of getting lost and getting flat tires. He had a Louisiana story too, where an off-duty cop found them fixing a flat on the side of the road after sunset, and the cop took them back to his place to camp in his yard. They're camping in an RV spot with water and electric tonight. I am camping in a clearing in the woods that is a stone's throw from the bayou with not a single other camper in sight. Some of the noises coming from the undergrowth are worrying, but i am hanging tough. I gotta remember that even though this feels like the wilderness, it's pretty much in the middle of a leafy suburb. Likelihood of an alligator or wild hog is pretty much zero.
I have had a quick look at the prices of accommodations in Florida and i wish i hadn't. It is insanely, horrifyingly expensive. Obviously i always knew snowbirding in the US (vs Mexico) was for rich people, but somehow i hoped tenting would be different. Yeah, nah. Tenting in Key West is twice the price of staying in a motel in other parts of the US. The one campsite is probably fully booked too. But i'll worry about that when i get back to a place with electric and internet. This park is a dead zone. I can't keep a signal on my phone.
So, off to sleep. Tomorrow, Dauphin Island.
-o-
Oof, fuck Alabama.
I woke up with a surprisingly dry tent. Not sure how, but maybe it didn't get cold enough to soak everything. Since it was dry i thought i'd skip my lazy breakfast waiting for the sun to come up and just packed up and was out of there by 8. I crossed the bridge to Pascagoula and stopped in at a little Mexican diner.
It turned out to be exactly the kind of diner i have always wanted to run. Typical American food on one hand, so a traveler can just walk in, immediately get a coffee put in front of them, then order "two eggs over-easy with sausage" and not even look at the menu. But on the other hand, special food for people who want something a bit more interesting. In this case, there was a whole Mexican breakfast menu, so i ordered an horchata to drink and a chilaquiles for eats. Chilaquiles is something i first ate in Mexico, nursing a bad hangover, and it is excellent. They use leftover tortillas from the night before, slice them into triangles, then fry them and add a salsa. It ends up being something similar to nachos, i suppose, if you tend to make your nachos by stir-frying them in a pan with salsa instead of dropping cheese on top of raw corn chips then nuking it. This chilaquiles came with a soft fried egg, queso fresco and frijoles (refried beans). Nice. I also found another donut place that did the boudin-in-a-bun, so took advantage before getting out of the Boudin Belt.
Then i continued on to Alabama. The road makes a funny inverted V shape for some reason, so i cycled north for a while, then back south again, and decided to stop in Bayou La Batre for lunch, because i knew i might not have a chance on Dauphin Island. Bayou La Batre was a depressing place with depressing lunch options. Half the stores seem to be closed up, and it seemed like a place that was kinda poor, but also all the houses nearby were mansions. It was almost as if they were mansions with nobody living there, which might be the case because this whole section of the Gulf Coast seems to have a lot of holiday homes.
On a side note, there is this weird design in the south where people build their houses right at the backmost corner of their plot, and then just have a vast, empty - but perfectly manicured - front lawn. I don't understand it at all. There are no flowers, no trees, no hedgerows. There is never anyone on the front lawn doing anything except mowing it. Nobody playing catch, nobody having a BBQ. It just seems like a giant, useless, green penis in front of the house. I really hope there is a logical reason for it to be there, like perhaps it's for flood control and grass absorbs the water better than other plants, but i dunno man. It's really bizarre. At least you'd think a back garden would be better for privacy?
Anyway, i ended up getting a pork sandwich at the local BBQ shack, and i have come to the conclusion that BBQ is basically just the burger of the south. You can get it everywhere. Everybody raves about their local place, even though it tastes the same as the next place down the road, which is bland. They all have their own toppings, which you get if you ask for it "fully dressed", and that costs more than just getting the meat. This place put lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, pickles, olives and pickled jalapeño. It was okay, i suppose.
The next leg took me along a long spit where people were catching (?) oysters, then an oddly epic bridge in the middle of nowhere to Dauphin Island, where i planned to spend the night before taking the ferry across the bay. Except i couldn't spend the night because the campsite was fucking RVs only. "No tents, no car camping". What a fucking bullshit policy for a campsite that's literally across the road from a roro ferry. What do people do if they missed the last ferry? I guess it's designed to keep riff-raff off their pretty little resort island with bike paths and a beach and bird sanctuary, none of which i got to enjoy because i now needed to immediately jump on the ferry and hope to hell a campsite on the other side would accept tents.
I am thinking back to the Canadian family who are only doing 50km a day, and they are going to be fucked if they decide to come this route. When i talked to them, it turned out we had stayed at several of the same campsites along our route, simply because they were the only ones that allowed tents.
I got on the ferry and it was awesome. Fantastic. For the first time i was out in the proper ocean with proper swell. Waves crashing over the bow, soaking the kid who had decided to stand right up there. Wind in my hair. God, i miss the sea.
We passed a half dozen oil platforms along the way. Then i got off the ferry and spent half an hour cycling past hundreds of beach houses on stilts, many of them for sale. It's like, you're sitting there in a beach house, on stilts, and your view is of exactly the fossil fuel industry that's causing the climate change that is making these houses a poor long-term investment. It must be a weird feeling living (or holidaying) out there.
The next campsite didn't allow tents either. Shit. I searched and eventually found a single tent spot that was free in a state park past the town of Gulf Shores, which is the heart of the Alabama beachfront resort strip. Thank God i made it, but it was a much longer ride than i planned, and now i'm only 10km from the Florida border, and the infamous Flora-Bama bar where i kinda wanted to have lunch and a few drinks, but now will probably pass by first thing in the morning.
I really, really hate this no tent camping bullshit they have going on in the south. I paid 30 bucks for a campsite with no water or electric. It's absurd. This state park has something like 500 RV spots and 9 (count 'em) tent spots.
At least the tent spots are in their own little copse of trees. The RVers are all smooshed in next to other RVs, but i feel like i'm really camping on a secluded beach.
Bad news is i checked the situation in the Florida panhandle and i will have no such luck tomorrow. It's the weekend, so the handful of tent spots in the next national park along are fully booked.
I miss camping in the west, lordy.
-o-
Woke up, showered, made a (cold) coffee, and i'm trying to figure out what next. Weekends are my most hated periods of this trip, because they tend to be when there are no spots available at campsites, when motels jack up their prices, and when (Sundays especially) lots of restaurants aren't open. Now i have a dilemma. What is one of the apparently most beautiful national parks in America only has a camping spot available Saturday night and nothing tonight. Meanwhile, a Florida state park has a spot tonight and not tomorrow. I could go from state park to national park, but there's only like 20km in between each place. So at the end of the weekend, i'll still basically be in Pensacola where i started.
Perhaps that's okay. It'll be like taking two motel rest days, but without the comfort and wifi and electric of a motel. And Pensacola is on my Florida bucket list.
Why Pensacola, you might ask. Well, despite my politically anarchistic tendencies, i was an army brat, and i still have a soft spot for the military. I love silly military shows, especially comedies (Bluestone 42 is a recent-ish fave) but also cheeseball action and soap opera. One of those shows was called Pensacola: Wings of Gold, a hooyah, jingoistic, Top Gun type thing that was part of my late night routine back in the days when people still had televisions and watched whatever was broadcast at the time it was on. Anyway, even though it was filmed in San Diego, watching the show made me want to visit Pensacola, a place where i imagined long beaches, cool bars and impossibly attractive Navy men and women hanging out. It probably will not be that, but i have to go anyway.
I suspect the fact that pretty much the whole of Florida is a vacation destination for a good chunk of Canada and the US is going to make it harder for me to find affordable places to camp and good places to eat. It'd probably be better to come here during the hot and humid hurricane season, but here i am, snowbirding like the rest of them. Let's post this now so the next update can be all Florida, all the time.
In Hammond my quest for soul food was thwarted again. Another restaurant i was hoping to try was either unexpectedly closed or closed down. Instead i went to a local BBQ place known for their messy sandwiches, and got a po' boy. It was messy, but fun to eat.
Then i popped into Walmart for supplies and headed east on 22, expecting it to be a quieter drive than 190. It was not. In fact, it might be the busiest road i have cycled on this whole journey. There was a stupid amount of stop-start traffic at the school in Ponchatoula and the marina in Madisonville.
In between those two towns it was the weirdest fucking thing. There were dozens of gated communities. Like, one after the next after the next, for 30km straight. There was no downtown. There was no shopping center. There was no nothing except for a gas station or two, and more gated communities. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, in China there were also dozens of gated communities side by side, but those were highrise communities, so you'd cycle 10 minutes and then it was over, time for a shopping mall. This was an hour and a half of private cul-de-sacs with flowery names.
I can't fathom why anyone would want to live out there. Half these communities are still new development, the houses aren't even sold yet, but the traffic is already terrible. There's no room to convert the road to dual carriageway. Any time someone living there needs anything, they will have to drive because it's too far to walk. Even cycling would be a stretch for most people. And it's all drained swamp land, so when the storms come the land will surely flood. And if you need to evacuate for a hurricane, well good luck taking the literal one road out of there along with everyone else in all the other gated communities. It just seems like such terrible urban planning, i could hardly believe it was happening in 2021.
After hitting Mandeville it opened right up to wide, vast roads and sunny strip mall development that reminded me of California. It's what i hope Florida will be like too. It's still fairly pedestrian unfriendly, but there's something holidayish and cheerful about palm trees and pastel colored buildings and so on. I would've stopped to check out some of the businesses along there, but i had dawdled so much in the morning that i needed to push hard to make it to the campsite by 5pm.
I checked in, got my tent set up and ate just in time to get to the beach for sunset over Lake Pontchartrain. I was really hoping Fountainebleau would be closer to the causeway so i could take some epic Miami Vice shots, but the causeway was way off in the distance, small twinkling lights going back and forth to New Orleans. Sunset was still awesome, though, looking through the mangroves. I don't even care i got bit by a million mosquitoes. It was gorgeous.
One odd thing is there was some kind of Christian youth group playing amplified praise music. I feel like it should be illegal to do that in a state park because separation of church and state, but this is America, land of hypocrisy, so my nice sunset featured a soundtrack of singing and drumming and manic preaching about the Lord filling you up, God is love, the only true love, and we love Him so, and we accept the Holy Spirit into ourselves, oh Hallelujah, how He deserves all the glory and all the grace, we are but servants to you, my Lord, and man oh man. It's like Stockholm syndrome, expressing adoration for an all-powerful entity you must also obey. I had no idea people were really like this, i thought it was just something that cults did. Like, this isn't the church i remember, where you read passages from King James edition or get some highbrow treatise about the life of Jesus, like a history lesson. No, this is turning Christ into some kind of mystical, transcendental experience. It's almost like shamanic ritual, the drums, the call and response, the dancing. It feels like the same kinda woo that the most far out hippies are into. These guys were praying for the Lord to deliver them - not from evil - but from anxiety and depression and pornography addiction. And to help other young people see the light. Oh, and also to make the local college football team win!? It's so bizarre. I mean, more power to them i suppose, but it just seems like such an unhealthy fixation to give your whole life over to Jesus and put Him at the center of everything. It comes across as obsessive.
Anywho, this wasn't a bad day, all things considered. I am considering going to a nearby state park in Mississippi tomorrow, which is close enough that i'll have time to do some hiking or explore a back road. I missed all the blues stuff in Mississippi, which is much further north, but maybe i will bump into something by accident. Maybe i'll finally get that soul food. I am craving some really good cornbread.
-o-
I finally got that soul food!
Today feels like the day i finally arrived at my destination. Or the home stretch, at least. I wrote a text message to my friend R, "this is my snowbird dream i cycled all the way through fucking shit ass conservative boring and sometimes interesting america to get to". It was a little bit of hyperbole, but not a lot.
I woke up with a very wet tent. It is the double-whammy of cold and humid in the mornings here. Plus there were a bunch of trees in the way of the sunrise. But i dried off and then jumped on my bike to a donut shop in the nearby town of Lacombe and got a boudin kolache. Two things i should mention: one is that i have found that "kolache" is the name a lot of donut shops use down here to refer to that larger pig-in-a-blanket that shares a lot in common with a Chinese hotdog bun - soft, sweet pastry with a sausage inside it. Second thing is boudin. What is a boudin? I have seen "boudin balls" all over the menus here but didn't order them because i always wanted something else. But this was my last chance! So i got the boudin, and turns out it is a sort of sausage made out of rice and pork. It reminds me a bit of Dutch junk food like kroket/bitterballen, and it is delicious. I wish i had started ordering them earlier.
After the snack i took a lazy detour around the bayou trying to get some photos. It turns out it's very difficult to take good photos of the swamp, even when you aren't on a viaduct or a busy highway, because it's so dense. There is nothing for the camera to focus on, you just get a bunch of trees trunks and that's it. Same problem as a forest. There's no contrast. I'm sure a good photographer could do something with it, but i am not that. Still, i enjoyed the detour even if no good photos come out.
I think i also learned the difference between a marsh and a swamp. A marsh seems to be an environment of shallow water over boggy peat where only reeds and lilies grow. A swamp is the same thing, but with better soil so trees also grow in it. At some point the hurricanes and/or floods displace the soil so marshes become swamps or vice versa. And bayous are the slow-moving waters near a bigger river that look like rivers of their own but they are more like boggy, brackish branches of the delta. I'm not sure when something changes from a pond to a marsh, or when a creek becomes a bayou, or how swamps are different from "normal" riparian landscapes and mangroves, but the point is it is all very wet, very muddy, occasionally stinky, not drinkable, and full of horrifying critters.
After my bayouducation i sidled on to Slidell, where i finally found a soul food place that was open. I didn't get cornbread, but i did get a fish dinner with yam and greens, and it was the best thing i have eaten in Louisiana. Exactly the sort of food i was hoping to find in the south.
The last stretch across to Mississippi was also pretty breezy. After the busy roads on the Baton Rouge to New Orleans(ish) stretch, i was expecting that to continue, but it seems nobody wants to drive on to Mississippi. I had the roads largely to myself and took it really easy, even hopping off here and there to take a photo and eat the apple fritter i also picked up at the donut shop for bland but necessary calories. When i got into Mississippi i stopped at a gas station on a crossroads, where there was no blues music, or any demons waiting to buy my soul, but there were a couple locals drinking booze who asked me if i smoked a joint before heading out each morning. (It took a few tries for me to understand what they were saying, the accent was so thick.) I guess when people read me as male, they also read me as a hippie because of the long hair. And, well, the bicycle i suppose. I picked up a drink and headed south to the coast.
Boom.
I finally fucking made it. The bit of Gulf Coast i saw in Louisiana didn't exactly feel like the real coast, because it was so marshy and hurricane-battered that it didn't quite have that holiday feeling. The Gulf Coast of Mississippi is also hurricane-battered - whole sections of what i think could've once been beach are just water lapping at the side of the road, and other parts of the road are smashed to bits. The cars have to share one lane here and there. But there are a few sad little palm trees and a handful of RVers camped out, sitting on deck chairs. I'm staying at a pirate-themed state park that is basically just a waterpark for the kids and a parking lot-style RV park for the snowbirds. It's off-season, the waterpark is closed and there are hardly any RVers. But it feels like i finally made it. I finally got my tacky beachfront holiday that i was looking for. Well, not quite, because the camping isn't beachfront, but the beach is just a few hundred meters down the access road. And then the road goes all the way into Gulfport, then Biloxi. White sand. Palm trees. Boarded up nightclubs and seafood shacks. Fuck yes. All of the struggle has been worthwhile and this is the reward.
Well, the real reward will be when i have a daiquiri in Key West. But this feels like a preview. Tomorrow i am going to try find a cheezy beachside bar that's actually open and get a cocktail, and it better come with a tiny umbrella in it.
Then i will keep cycling.
-o-
Today was my favorite day yet. Almost the entire route was along the beachfront boardwalk/seawall. There is something like 40km of white sand beach between Pass Christian and Biloxi. It's been badly eroded, and parts of the (concrete) boardwalk have collapsed, but that made it better. Because there was hardly anyone there.
I don't know what it is about empty resort towns that i find so charming. There is this hint of a party, a notion that if only i was here at another time it might've been going off. But with the tourists gone it's got a shabby peacefulness, and a dream of what could be. It's like how the suggestion or the idea of something is actually better than the thing itself. The anticipation is everything.
Also why i enjoy psytrance music and other trippy, acidy, techy minimal stuff, because it keeps teasing at some big release, but it never quite gets there.
Before i hit the beach, though, i cycled through Waveland and Bay Saint Louis. Bay Saint Louis is a lovely little seaside town with a bunch of artsy shops and - get this - a bakery where they bake bread! Who knew i'd find such a place in America. I have to say one of the things i most miss about Europe is having bakeries everywhere where you can buy a full loaf of bread, half loaf of bread, bread rolls one-by-one and so on. My meals on this trip would have been much nicer, cheaper and healthier if i could pick up a few fresh bread rolls every day and some bits and bobs to make a sandwich.
Well that's what i did this morning. I got a loaf of sourdough and asked them to slice it thick, and a tub of fresh hummus. And a scone. Then kicked off on that wonderful beachfront ride, with hardly a soul in sight. (Well, plenty of cars, but i didn't care, because i was on the boardwalk.)
Since this is likely to be my only full day in Mississippi, i went to a blues-themed BBQ joint in Gulfport. It was a bit more touristy than the kinds of places i normally like to go, but probably the best i could hope for in the middle of the week in this part of the state. Disappointingly, they played classic rock by white men and what i would consider "pop" blues at best. No delta blues. No crying and wailing. Nothing slow. Oh well. I got fried chicken, baked beans and collard greens, and it was fantastic.
I made another touristy stop at a beach shack on stilts in Biloxi. Biloxi is far less interesting than Gulfport. It's mostly casinos and exactly the sort of crowd you would expect to see at casinos. Gulfport felt like it had a bit more character, more diversity, more local stuff going on. But it did not have as many cheezy beach shacks. So i got my tropical cocktail in Biloxi next door to a Margaritaville resort. Unfortunately it did not have an umbrella in it, but it made me happy.
Then i crossed the bridge to Ocean Springs, which had the same kind of holiday homes for cashed up folks feel that parts of the Lake Pontchartrain north shore had. Gave me that North Vancouver feeling. No matter, i just put my head down and zoomed on to Gautier, which has a small former state park that is now run by the city. It's in a marshy bayou surrounded by trees. Tomorrow i'ma have another wet tent.
I met another bike tourer here. Not only was he another bike tourer, he was a Canadian. And had cycled from Portland, Oregon, so he's basically doing the same northwest to southeast trip as me. But - get this - he is doing it with his wife and two young daughters! He said they go about 50km a day, sometimes less, rarely more. They must have been going for months. And now, to everyone who says i must be so fit and tough for doing this, i can respond that even kids can do it. You don't need to be fit to cycle tour. You just start pedaling, and only go as far as you want. Work up to longer distances if you like, or don't. He said they take break days too, where they don't cycle at all. It's totally doable.
We exchanged some war stories of getting lost and getting flat tires. He had a Louisiana story too, where an off-duty cop found them fixing a flat on the side of the road after sunset, and the cop took them back to his place to camp in his yard. They're camping in an RV spot with water and electric tonight. I am camping in a clearing in the woods that is a stone's throw from the bayou with not a single other camper in sight. Some of the noises coming from the undergrowth are worrying, but i am hanging tough. I gotta remember that even though this feels like the wilderness, it's pretty much in the middle of a leafy suburb. Likelihood of an alligator or wild hog is pretty much zero.
I have had a quick look at the prices of accommodations in Florida and i wish i hadn't. It is insanely, horrifyingly expensive. Obviously i always knew snowbirding in the US (vs Mexico) was for rich people, but somehow i hoped tenting would be different. Yeah, nah. Tenting in Key West is twice the price of staying in a motel in other parts of the US. The one campsite is probably fully booked too. But i'll worry about that when i get back to a place with electric and internet. This park is a dead zone. I can't keep a signal on my phone.
So, off to sleep. Tomorrow, Dauphin Island.
-o-
Oof, fuck Alabama.
I woke up with a surprisingly dry tent. Not sure how, but maybe it didn't get cold enough to soak everything. Since it was dry i thought i'd skip my lazy breakfast waiting for the sun to come up and just packed up and was out of there by 8. I crossed the bridge to Pascagoula and stopped in at a little Mexican diner.
It turned out to be exactly the kind of diner i have always wanted to run. Typical American food on one hand, so a traveler can just walk in, immediately get a coffee put in front of them, then order "two eggs over-easy with sausage" and not even look at the menu. But on the other hand, special food for people who want something a bit more interesting. In this case, there was a whole Mexican breakfast menu, so i ordered an horchata to drink and a chilaquiles for eats. Chilaquiles is something i first ate in Mexico, nursing a bad hangover, and it is excellent. They use leftover tortillas from the night before, slice them into triangles, then fry them and add a salsa. It ends up being something similar to nachos, i suppose, if you tend to make your nachos by stir-frying them in a pan with salsa instead of dropping cheese on top of raw corn chips then nuking it. This chilaquiles came with a soft fried egg, queso fresco and frijoles (refried beans). Nice. I also found another donut place that did the boudin-in-a-bun, so took advantage before getting out of the Boudin Belt.
Then i continued on to Alabama. The road makes a funny inverted V shape for some reason, so i cycled north for a while, then back south again, and decided to stop in Bayou La Batre for lunch, because i knew i might not have a chance on Dauphin Island. Bayou La Batre was a depressing place with depressing lunch options. Half the stores seem to be closed up, and it seemed like a place that was kinda poor, but also all the houses nearby were mansions. It was almost as if they were mansions with nobody living there, which might be the case because this whole section of the Gulf Coast seems to have a lot of holiday homes.
On a side note, there is this weird design in the south where people build their houses right at the backmost corner of their plot, and then just have a vast, empty - but perfectly manicured - front lawn. I don't understand it at all. There are no flowers, no trees, no hedgerows. There is never anyone on the front lawn doing anything except mowing it. Nobody playing catch, nobody having a BBQ. It just seems like a giant, useless, green penis in front of the house. I really hope there is a logical reason for it to be there, like perhaps it's for flood control and grass absorbs the water better than other plants, but i dunno man. It's really bizarre. At least you'd think a back garden would be better for privacy?
Anyway, i ended up getting a pork sandwich at the local BBQ shack, and i have come to the conclusion that BBQ is basically just the burger of the south. You can get it everywhere. Everybody raves about their local place, even though it tastes the same as the next place down the road, which is bland. They all have their own toppings, which you get if you ask for it "fully dressed", and that costs more than just getting the meat. This place put lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, pickles, olives and pickled jalapeño. It was okay, i suppose.
The next leg took me along a long spit where people were catching (?) oysters, then an oddly epic bridge in the middle of nowhere to Dauphin Island, where i planned to spend the night before taking the ferry across the bay. Except i couldn't spend the night because the campsite was fucking RVs only. "No tents, no car camping". What a fucking bullshit policy for a campsite that's literally across the road from a roro ferry. What do people do if they missed the last ferry? I guess it's designed to keep riff-raff off their pretty little resort island with bike paths and a beach and bird sanctuary, none of which i got to enjoy because i now needed to immediately jump on the ferry and hope to hell a campsite on the other side would accept tents.
I am thinking back to the Canadian family who are only doing 50km a day, and they are going to be fucked if they decide to come this route. When i talked to them, it turned out we had stayed at several of the same campsites along our route, simply because they were the only ones that allowed tents.
I got on the ferry and it was awesome. Fantastic. For the first time i was out in the proper ocean with proper swell. Waves crashing over the bow, soaking the kid who had decided to stand right up there. Wind in my hair. God, i miss the sea.
We passed a half dozen oil platforms along the way. Then i got off the ferry and spent half an hour cycling past hundreds of beach houses on stilts, many of them for sale. It's like, you're sitting there in a beach house, on stilts, and your view is of exactly the fossil fuel industry that's causing the climate change that is making these houses a poor long-term investment. It must be a weird feeling living (or holidaying) out there.
The next campsite didn't allow tents either. Shit. I searched and eventually found a single tent spot that was free in a state park past the town of Gulf Shores, which is the heart of the Alabama beachfront resort strip. Thank God i made it, but it was a much longer ride than i planned, and now i'm only 10km from the Florida border, and the infamous Flora-Bama bar where i kinda wanted to have lunch and a few drinks, but now will probably pass by first thing in the morning.
I really, really hate this no tent camping bullshit they have going on in the south. I paid 30 bucks for a campsite with no water or electric. It's absurd. This state park has something like 500 RV spots and 9 (count 'em) tent spots.
At least the tent spots are in their own little copse of trees. The RVers are all smooshed in next to other RVs, but i feel like i'm really camping on a secluded beach.
Bad news is i checked the situation in the Florida panhandle and i will have no such luck tomorrow. It's the weekend, so the handful of tent spots in the next national park along are fully booked.
I miss camping in the west, lordy.
-o-
Woke up, showered, made a (cold) coffee, and i'm trying to figure out what next. Weekends are my most hated periods of this trip, because they tend to be when there are no spots available at campsites, when motels jack up their prices, and when (Sundays especially) lots of restaurants aren't open. Now i have a dilemma. What is one of the apparently most beautiful national parks in America only has a camping spot available Saturday night and nothing tonight. Meanwhile, a Florida state park has a spot tonight and not tomorrow. I could go from state park to national park, but there's only like 20km in between each place. So at the end of the weekend, i'll still basically be in Pensacola where i started.
Perhaps that's okay. It'll be like taking two motel rest days, but without the comfort and wifi and electric of a motel. And Pensacola is on my Florida bucket list.
Why Pensacola, you might ask. Well, despite my politically anarchistic tendencies, i was an army brat, and i still have a soft spot for the military. I love silly military shows, especially comedies (Bluestone 42 is a recent-ish fave) but also cheeseball action and soap opera. One of those shows was called Pensacola: Wings of Gold, a hooyah, jingoistic, Top Gun type thing that was part of my late night routine back in the days when people still had televisions and watched whatever was broadcast at the time it was on. Anyway, even though it was filmed in San Diego, watching the show made me want to visit Pensacola, a place where i imagined long beaches, cool bars and impossibly attractive Navy men and women hanging out. It probably will not be that, but i have to go anyway.
I suspect the fact that pretty much the whole of Florida is a vacation destination for a good chunk of Canada and the US is going to make it harder for me to find affordable places to camp and good places to eat. It'd probably be better to come here during the hot and humid hurricane season, but here i am, snowbirding like the rest of them. Let's post this now so the next update can be all Florida, all the time.