Arriving in New Orleans

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Saturday was a beautiful day. We packed up early and took the back road back to Lake Coleman to look once again for the elusive Red Cockaded woodpecker and Red Crossbill. Using the Merlin app on our phone we could tell that these birds were nearby and David swears he saw the both birds fly. No photographs, so we face the deep philosophical question of do we count birds in this second of our “Big Year of birding” by hearing only, which evidently is a very recognized and respected way of counting your species.

The other very exciting thing that’s happening is that every time we stop at a Circle K we get $.25 off a gallon and free goodies like a soda every time. This only works on the club member Circle K’s, but they are abundant in this area.

We avoided the main highway and took very straight 2 lane roads. The hills are long gone. We saw lots of black Angus, and then dairy cows. People here have less strong accents than back in Bremen it seems. Of course as we drive south we’ve seen more and more flowering trees – first white ones (pears?) and then pale lavender. Forsythia, and something called “Chinese fringe,” a bright hot pink bush. We saw our first dogwood trees in bloom by Alabama, and lots of azaleas.

Because we were too early to check in at the hotel in Saraland, we drove maybe 20 minutes to Chickasaw Ponds, because a great horned owl, and two chicks were reported with a photograph. The challenge was to find the nest, which was obviously on a man-made structure with a turning handle and some other colored wires. We searched and searched for at least an hour and a half, and found out that there really is a port in this area with lots of water although we couldn’t get close by. Coming back from our last try there they were, high on what looked like a gas holding tank about 60 feet up.

Saturday night was the Comfort Inn and suites in Saraland, just north of Mobile. It’s a little bit more upscale than the Bremen hotel was although the bed was a lot more firm, and I woke up with a stiff back today. We drove into Mobile for dinner, and it was not crowded at all. It has a lot of the look of New Orleans about it with wrought iron terraces and narrow streets (we were not in the business district, which had a few skyscrapers). We went to the Noble South restaurant, which was featured on Guy Fieri’s Triple-D show. This is a farm to table restaurant. I had some sort of red kuri squash pasta with fancy oyster mushrooms, radicchio and pumpkin seeds. David had crispy duck comfit, with apricots and dirty rice. For starters, we had cheese straws, which were just cheddar cheese extrusions into hot oil and covered with some sort of bit of space and crispiness, and you dipped it in fig jam. Wow.

So now it’s Sunday, and we drove out of Saraland to a nearby birding place to hopefully see a Mississippi Sandhill crane before it bucketed with rain. We were lucky – there was ONE. They are a subspecies of the ones that migrate, and were down to 5 breeding pairs in the 60s to at least 30 today in this one area of savanna. Interesting wildflowers and pitcher plants.

Then it did rain terribly. We could hardly see the road. Fortunately it stopped by the time we entered New Orleans. We get to stay for 3 days at this Blue Green facility. We had agreed to have an “update” meeting – the dreaded hard sell – because recently Blue Green was acquired by Hilton Vacation Club and we wanted to know how that was going to affect us. Sadly no one knows what will change yet, so it was just a review of everything we already knew, which was – if you want to get all the new neat features you just need to buy another 10000 points. Which we don’t need. So, 2 hours later we parted company as friends, richer by a nice $125 gift.

This a lovely place indeed, huge bed, full kitchen, laundry, large living room with pull out sofabed. We drove about 20 mins to deliver some boxes to Emily Guynn Barlow, and then took her recommendation for dinner – see these lovely plates, Lucy? Charbroiled oysters; crabmeat crepe (potato flower), black drum with potatoes and spinach. Had to bring leftovers home, along with a take out order of crawfish etouffee we’ll have tomorrow.

Observations: they drive crazy down here, and the overpasses and underpasses are like spaghetti noodles. We came back from dinner taking the normal street roads. All that 3-dimensional map following is challenging.

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