Motorhome News from North America 34

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Motorhome News from North America 34 24th January - 2nd February 2007

‘Oh, when the Saints go marching in.’

Our arrival in New Orleans coincided with the big match - the NFL semi-final, and the flags and signs were flying on every street corner; ‘Go Saints!’ But sadly, the Saints were sent marching out - mauled by the Chicago Bears, and by early evening the city was in shock. The Bears move on to the SuperBowl, leaving the Saints to lick their wounds and regroup before next season. They’ve had a good run, but a win would have offered new hope and confidence to a city still reeling from shock in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Things could have been worse for New Orleans. Much of the hurricane that flattened the coastline to the east passed inland as it approached, but the fierce storm burst the banks of the relief canals from Lake Pontchartrain, flooding thousands upon thousands of homes to the north, south and east of town. Eighteen months on, only 20% of the population have returned to their ruined homes in these areas. Some houses were completely washed away, leaving tangles of flotsam strewn along the fences. Essential services have been slow to recover; here and there a trailer parked beside a house, a few owners fighting back the tears of sorrow as they work to turn back the clock and resume their lives.

An air of despair still hangs over much of New Orleans, the workforce depleted since the populace left town, many never to return, leaving businesses without the means to reopen. Around 65% of New Orleans property was previously rented and the ‘displaced persons’ who have chosen to stay have now moved to higher ground or FEMA (Federal Emergency Management) trailers on redundant car parks and campsites awaiting the refurbishment of damaged homes, condos and other low cost housing initiatives. The development sharks have already moved in with heavy cash to buy up anything worth renovating and secure future higher rentals. Insurance companies have been slow to pay out of course, arguing over whether the breeched levees constitute a flood (which should be insured separately) or not, and State support is under continuous fire for delays and excessive bureaucracy. There are those in town who put the responsibility fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the State Governor, and the original disaster on poor maintenance - or the engineers who said it would never happen.

It seems the influence of New Orleans’ practitioners of black magic, crystals, Tarot cards and bones on Jackson Square were unable to help prevent the diaster. Perchance the numerous vampires and ghosts inhabiting the darker quarters of the city didn't help either and there are those who would point fingers at the large voodoo cult - busily sticking pins in all the wrong places. But none of this has displaced the musical traditions for which this uncared for, but much loved city is justly famous. The sound of a golden trumpet or trombone echos somewhere on the streets day and night, jazz and blues groups and guitarists play on sidewalks and squares, rekindling grand memories of Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Pete Fountain, Chris Owen and the like.

The French Quarter of New Orleans, on the higher ground, sustained little permanent damage from water, though wind took its toll of slate rooftops - and anything else not bolted down. The same could be said for the Business District of high-rise hotels, banks and smart shops where the wealth of ‘Les Americans’ stands in outrageous contrast to the remainder of the city. It is the French Quarter however, that brings the tourists to town, though visitor numbers remain depressingly low since the hurricane, the PR machine failing miserably in all its endeavours to promote ‘open for business as usual’ and recovery.

A young guy plucked old tunes from a new shiny guitar at the Café du Monde whilst we sheltered from yet another shower, enjoying the sweet perfume of freshly- brewed coffee and hot beignets (French doughnut-cakes covered with powdered sugar). Our three days in town were generously punctuated with lunches and dinners of local character: po-boy sandwiches, gumbo, jambalaya - and blackened red snapper at a street-bar named ‘Desire’.

Mark Twain once said, “There is no architecture in New Orleans except in the cemeteries.” That’s not true today by any stretch of the imagination, though the cemeteries of his day are still imposing indeed. The water table here is high as you might imagine, and bodies buried in the shallow soil would float to the surface in time - doubtless the source for numerous local ghost stories! To get over this small problem they built walled cemeteries with family vaults above ground, some of which are still in use, forming narrow winding alleys where ghosts and ghoulies play out the night amongst crumbling brickwork under the watchful eye of winged angels and chipped marble. The architecture of the French Quarter is scintillating, all of it dusted in an almost unloved way, with a web of age, unparalleled anywhere in the USA. The architectural influences of the Cajuns (descendants of C18 French-Canadian refugees) and Creoles (those born in Louisiana to French and Spanish colonists) are imbedded with a richness portraying the wealth of the age of sugar and cotton plantations and French and Spanish occupation. Homes reflect their Spanish Colonial origins, the Victorian age of columns and brackets, Creole cottages and ‘shotgun’ houses, (with completely open interiors where a 'shot' might enter the front and leave at the rear), houses with back-yard slave quarters, houses with boarded sides, tall shuttered doorways and wrought iron balconies under ornately carved eaves. And away from the sleaze of Bourbon Street, beautiful art galleries, silversmiths and antique shops join with elegant homes and shady green courtyards to paint a picture of romance and intrigue.

Brad Pit and Angelina Jolie have a home in the French Quarter they tell us. He was in town for a day while we were there, at Napoleon House doing a film, supported by a massive film-crew parked on a vacant lot by our campsite - but Janice didn’t get to meet him. I didn’t get to meet Raquel Welch either, but that’s not surprising - she’s not in the film and she doesn’t have a home in 'New Orlins' as far as I know.

The Mardi Gras parades of New Orleans are a spectacle not to be missed they tell us - but miss them we will! It’s three weeks before the first of the floats parade the streets and we’ll be somewhere ‘deep in the heart of Texas’ by then. Celebrations actually start on Twelfth Night with masquerade balls and parties, and parades and carnivals (from the French, ‘carnelevare’ - leave off meat, for Lent) run through the week of Shrove Tuesday. To taste the flavour of what makes New Orleans’ Mardi Gras so special, we crossed the river by ferry to Blaine Kerns Mardi Gras World in Algiers. Yes, Algiers! The Kerns family empire produces float sculptures for the parades: of cartoon characters, presidents, and mythological creatures. This Mardi Gras is no amateur affair, but it’s an opportunity for young and old alike to party, dance and sing as if the whole wide world is watching. New Orleans will be forever jealous of. Mobile’s claim to the title of ‘First Mardi Gras Parades in the USA,’ held there way back in 1831.

Were it not for the bursts of lively music from café doorways, the constant waft of Creole cooking clinging to the Mississippi breeze and a mesmerising blend of sculptured architecture and ancient oaks, this sensual old city of dark narrow streets would frighten the hardiest of travellers. Despite the floods and a heavy police presence there are still too many undesirable characters lurking on street corners and too many warnings of ‘where not to go’, for comfort. The local ‘Times’ reported thirteen murders in one recent week. If they were all crooks that would be OK in my book - it would be thirteen more off the streets and thirteen less for the police to worry about, but sadly that’s not always the case. The division between rich and poor - and black and white, remains strikingly marked throughout the city.


‘Is it true what they say about Dixie? Does the sun really shine all the time?’

Well, no, it’s not, and it doesn’t. The locals all told us it’s the worst winter they’ve had for years. It rained most days whilst we were in Louisiana, forcing us into delightful cafés and interesting museums with our worn out one-dollar bills and seniors’ discounts. When are they going to mint a dollar coin to take the paper-load off the wallet and wear holes in our pockets with coins instead? Talking of money; there was a day when French Louisiana had its own currency. Their ten-dollar bill was known as the ‘Dixie’ nowadays but a sentimental pseudonym for Louisiana. I didn’t know that, did you?

‘Ole Man River’

The grand Mississippi, half a mile wide along its outer reaches, evokes for me the stories of Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, of Al Jolson, stern-paddled showboats, ladies in crinolines, hustling gamblers and rowdy cowboys. As part of our preparation for this episode of our travels, I recently re-read Huckleberry Finn (a book undoubtedly now banned from all US school libraries) to rekindle my vision. Our visit to New Orleans reminded us that the term ‘sold down the river’ originated in those dark days when slaves were brought down river to its markets for sale.
Huge freighters and tankers now ply the great Mississippi, through eighty-five miles of treeless marshland and watery fields as far as the port at Baton Rouge. We drove westwards along the banks and high levees, past the vast oil and sugar refineries and huge steaming petrochemical and steel works, out along narrow roads and ruler straight furrows of the plantations, bleak with winter and steamroller-flat to the horizon. Sugar is still the prime crop in southern Louisiana, ideally suited to the lowland marshes and searing summers. And where there’s sugar, there are Plantation Houses, irresistible for their wealth of Creole history. We visited two in one day to get a handle on local history - and camped overnight amongst the ancient oaks at the second.

Beside the road the first green buds of spring brought smiles to our faces with thoughts of sunny days and daffodils, of returning songbirds bringing news from southern climes, and the scent of lilac in the air. Instead, it rained. It rained, rattling on the roof, from the early hours of the morning through most of the following day.
It rained when we visited Abbeville, a town as French as France itself, its Catholic Church standing proudly on the square and shops, restaurants and businesses all stubbornly adorned with French names. Some Creole French is still spoken in the south we’re led to believe, but all education has been in English only for many years. A young man, about my age, told us he would have been slapped at school if caught speaking French! Hurricane Katrina passed them by back in August 2005, but only eight days later Hurricane Rita hit the coast here causing untold damage. Most of the campers on the town’s typically French ‘Municipale’ campsite were workers repairing damaged oil lines.

Louisiana’s Gulf road runs monotonously east to west, dividing watery rice fields and nodding donkeys inland and long rows of gas and oil platforms that dot the off-shore horizon. Huge flocks of snow geese brightened our day, refuelling on winter rice fields ready for their long spring journey, winging their way to their breeding grounds in northern Canada. The coming weeks will hopefully offer us the chance to see some exciting birds as we cross the belt where eastern and western bird species meet - and a narrow corridor through which many birds migrate.


There was no mistaking the Texas horizon. Approached along the coast the huge steaming stacks of Port Arthur’s petrochemical works filled the overcast sky with white clouds of steam, rising high above the panorama of storage tanks, tangled pipe-work and rusting steel. Welcome to Texas; the land of oil and cowboys!

With all of our wonderful experiences you might be surprised to learn that there are some days when nothing seems to go right - or is it ‘days when everything goes wrong’? It depends on one’s point of view. Having planned our first birding day for some weeks, we journeyed along the coast of Louisiana to the Lacassine and Sabine Wildlife Reserves, only to find them both closed through hurricane damage. To further add to the problem, our chosen campground at Holly Beach was nowhere to be seen - just a few slabs of concrete in the sand! A local told us Hurricane Rita had brought a 15ft tidal surge in from the Gulf, washing some 300 homes from their footings and dumping them across the marshes in shattered pieces up to two miles inland. It was still early afternoon and we pressed on, another fifty miles or so across the border into Texas, to the next State Park at Sea Rim. To our dismay, that was also closed, its buildings shattered and roofs torn away as Rita defiantly stormed her way along the coast. Eventually, we did find a campground, a new one, not entirely completed but adequate for a couple of tired and desperate nomads. Thorough planning kept us off the hurricane trail during the season and out of danger, though today’s news reports fourteen killed when a tornado struck just north of Orlando in Florida. We came through there three weeks ago! It might be raining on-and-off right now, but who are we to complain of such a minor inconvenience.

‘Galveston’. Glen Campbell sang a song about Galveston, Texas, our last stop of the week. I don’t remember the words, but this resort on the Gulf of Mexico did remind us of somewhere we had been before. Dropped here in a capsule, you might be forgiven for thinking you were back home in Great Yarmouth on a damp January afternoon. The sea was grey under a grey sky along the promenade, white horses lashed the deserted piers and shops stood silent on the long waterfront awaiting the first customer of the day. Downtown, cast iron shop-fronts of a bygone age looked out on empty streets and empty cafes, dim lights the only hint of life behind the curtain of condensation and Mardi Gras window displays. Palm trees were perhaps a giveaway - and there was no evidence of a bingo hall, a big dipper, the aroma of sizzling doughnuts on the sidewalk or a stick of rock with ‘Yarmouth’ in bright red letters down the middle. Oh, sweet memories of home! (Janice has been teasing me with talk of a ‘pork pie and a pint in the pub’ mentioned in her recent Dick Francis novel and I can smell a good old English sausage in my nightly dreams).

News often travels very slowly in our family, despite our efforts to maintain communications. An urgent message illuminated my computer inbox on the 27th asking me to call Catherine (daughter number one). “Are you sitting down?” she asked, a hint of a smile in her voice. “I have some news for you,” she continued. “Sonia, (daughter number two, living in France) had a baby boy on the 17th. You’re a Granddad again!” Welcome to this world Frederick Marcel. Mother and baby doing well - granddad still in shock. What’s the betting he looks just like me!

With Christmas and New Year Sales over, the shops and houses have turned their attention to Mardi Gras decorations for the home - with the other eye on St Valentines Day just around the corner. Supermarket shelves are laden with purple, green and gold beads, hats, umbrellas and tee shirts, chocolates in heart shaped boxes, red balloons, red silk roses and slushy cards to keep the tills merrily ringing until Easter and St Patrick’s Day! They don’t miss any chance to make a fast buck in this country. One exception might be the cost of petrol. Gas prices have tumbled in recent weeks making life a little more like a bowl of cherries for us. At $2 a US gallon it’s the equivalent of 26p per litre in the UK if my sums are correct. The rest, however much that is back home, goes to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor. Is he still there?



David and Janice. The grey-haired-nomads

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Photos

New Orleans
Jackson Square - in the rain

New Orleans
'Fats' Domino and Pete Fountain at Cafe Beignet

New Orleans
Street corner in the French Quarter

New Orleans
Coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde

New Orleans
Family vaults in the cemetery - but don't go alone

New Orleans
Smart art galleries

New Orleans
Antique shop!

New Orleans
Ornately carved eaves

New Orleans
Mardi Gras decorations everywhere!

New Orleans
Blaine Kerns Mardi Gras world - great on a rainy day

New Orleans
The Natchez on its way down the Mississippi

New Orleans
The seedier side of 'New Orlins'

West along the Mississippi
Oak Alley Plantation

A Texan horizon
Gas, oil and a tangle of steel