A Luziana Ferry Tale

Our first week on the road has provided some delightful and unexpected surprises!

Starting with...our campground in Mt Hermon.  No longer is it a campground, but a ...hmmm..what is the politically-correct term...a FEMA community.  It was raining buckets as we arrived at the little guard shack at the campground entrance--it was a welcome sight!  Except, it was empty and there were tiny white trailers as far as the eye could see.  The campground, which is Home to the Cajun Redneck Olympics, had been transformed into a refugee camp following Katrina.   You can see the white trailers in the background.

Even though they had no operational RV sites, we were welcomed by the owner who arranged to activate a pre-wired site.  We carefully straddled a small pond to pull sideways into a future back-in site.  The owner had "his boys" put a 4 inch thick solid wood platforms under our jacks so we wouldn't sink our hydraulic jacks down into the Louisiana muck.    

The "boys" had the electric hooked up within 20 minutes.  The water, however, had not yet been flushed through the newly-laid pipes and contained gunklidytes ( def: primitive, unnamed matter living under grass) so we used our own tank water supply.

The next travel day dawned golden and glistening for the early morning ride to our next destination, Paragon Casino in Marksville, LA where we planned a 2-day rest and modest donation to the casino.   We traveled the back country roads and it soon became apparent that we were almost "out of road" since, according to road signs, the only thing at the end of the road was a waterbody and a ferry.

In the tiny ferry town, Frank put the Muthaship on "Pause" while I got out and chased down a resident who informed me that the only other way "out" was to go back to Baton Rouge--about 150 miles.  There was no other reasonable choice but to check out the ferry and see if it could float carrying a vehicle of our size.

And so we did--and it could--and it was an unexpected pleasure!  We were halted by a friendly ferry tender who, in a lovely Cajun drawl said "Y'all too big with the car on" so we just took it off!  

I drove the car on ahead and got a nice angle of Frank driving the the rig onto the ferry.  You can see that there is "just enough room" for the RV and caddy (but not the car attached).

Frank paying the Toll.  Cost:  $1 per vehicle.  You know what came next--Frank exclaimed "Whatta Country!"


The moral of this little saga is "when you buy a new GPS mapping program, CHECK YOUR SETTINGS before you make your route.  Frank had not done this so the program thought it was OK to take us on a ferry.