Down the Gulf Coast on the Birding Trail

Our last stop in Louisiana was the town of Sulphur, across from Lake Charles.   We stayed at a campground that was located right on the Creole Nature Trail, a linked set of wildlife refuges and natural areas maintained by Louisiana and the US.  This area of the coast is very low-lying and filled with marshes and wetlands that stretch literally for miles.  Many areas have been set aside for wildlife habitat.  Migratory birds pass through them in great numbers, and although we were a bit early for the migration, we got to see a lot. 

Besides the wildlife, the little towns around the area were fascinating and had a lot to offer.  The town of St Martinville nearby, for example, contains the Evangeline Oak, the tree that is featured in Longfellow's poem of the same name.  The town was part of the original exile of the Acadians from Canada, which is recounted in the poem, and the town has built a small monument to that tree right by the river.  The Acadian/Catholic traditions and culture are still strong here - most of the street signs are in French, with English subtitles.

The food in this area is still very strongly influenced by the French traditions - from the local diner called the Paris Street Cafe to Dupuy's Oyster House in Abbeville, where I had the best combination oyster plate I have ever eaten.  Some wonderful history and some wonderful food.  And along with it, lots of coastal nature and birdwatching. 

The tradition of the Mardi Gras is strong here, as well.  The nearby town of Lake Charles had a charming little costume museum with archived costumes from parades of past years.  It was located in a repurposed school building, and had talking mannequins which kept you informed about the history of the local extravaganzas.  

But this area, along with a lot of the Louisiana coast, is also heavily dominated by oil and gas, which contrasts strongly with the natural wonders.  There are very few areas here that don't sport a large refinery or chemical plant, and the industrial base of the economy in Sulphur and Lake Charles  is an overwhelming presence.  At night these things are dramatic, lit up like an amusement park. 

From here we headed south along the Gulf Coast to the town of Palacios, Texas where we stayed in a lovely little RV park right on the water.  It was home to many Winter Texans, as they are called by the locals, folks from states like Minnesota and Wisconsin who have discovered the joys of wintering down south.  Palacios is the home of the largest shrimp fleet in Texas, and there were lots of shrimp boats in the harbor right next to us.  The harbor also provided some very nice birding, and a very good local Mexican restaurant.  We liked touring the little town, which has some lovely old buildings, some of which have fallen into disuse but are still charming.  

The Aransas National Wildlife Refuge was nearby also, which shelters the largest whooping crane flock left on the planet.  We went there to see them and also saw a lot of other birds, including this magnificent wild turkey that was standing along the road when we took our wildlife drive. 

The stay in Palacios was short, so that we could book some available dates in the Matagorda State Park.  This lovely spot is located out on a barrier island directly across from the town of Matagorda, and provides wonderful access to marshes, rivers, and channels where the shorebirds were gathering.  The shorebird migration was well under way, and we saw lots of new species including American avocets and black skimmers.  The first couple of days were spring break for the local young families, so the park was packed out with kids, but by Monday everyone was gone and the place was as quiet as could be. 

We took walks around the area, Ivy did some painting, and we enjoyed the birding along the canal. 

We moved on to Aransas Pass, where birding was once again a big priority.  A key trip was to the visitor center at South Padre Island, where we joined a half day birding trip headed by a couple who have been there for some years and volunteer to lead birding outings five days a week.  They were enormously helpful, and we learned a lot.  They knew all of the species by heart, and had excellent local knowledge of how to find the more challenging ones.  We got a lot of firsts that day, including this pair of nesting white-tailed hawks, birds which are rare outside the southern borders of the US.

There were several nice discoveries in this area.  We explored the little town of Rockport, with some excellent local art, a colorful waterfront, and some nice shops.  There were two good birding spots, the Fred Jones Natural Reserve out in surrounding country, beautiful with wildflowers galore, many natural paths, and some good birding; and a pier outside Corpus Christi, where the shore birds were plentiful and in full migration.  So it was a very busy time and a lot of fun.  Nowhere near enough time for all the things we wanted to do - like almost everywhere else.

From here, we are headed to the mouth of the Rio Grande.  Here we pay our last visit to the coast, and then head inland for several months of cross-country trekking, ending back in fabulous Seattle.  

Gulf Coast of Alabama and Louisiana, the Mardi Gras Circuit

We left the state of Florida, and headed off to Alabama, aiming for the Gulf Shores State Park.  Alas, we were turned away there, one of the few times we have not been able to get into our chosen RV park.  But it turned out OK.  We were able to locate a terrific city park on Dauphin Island outside of Mobile.  Dauphin is a barrier island outside Mobile Bay and has an Audubon bird sanctuary right next to it, with beaches and bay within walking distance on both sides.  There is also excellent biking and birdwatching.  The park itself is a haven for northerners who come down for the winter, as it allows stays of up to six months.  The sites were almost all taken by folks from the likes of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, who were retired and down for the winter.  They were very sociable and had lots of potlucks and fish-fries, to which we were kindly invited.  The seafood here, by the way, was fabulous, with lots of gulf shrimp and shellfish for sale fresh off the boats.

We spent a day in Mobile, visiting the sights.  It was early Mardi Gras, and the city prides itself on being the "original" Mardi Gras site, before New Orleans.  It turns out that Dauphin Island was the original capital of the French Louisiane territory.  After the first hurricane, the capital was quickly moved inland to Mobile, and later transferred to New Orleans.  But Mobile started the Mardi Gras tradition, which is still very much in evidence.  Theirs is a more family friendly, less touristy, and less drunken version of the New Orleans ceremony.  We also visited the Museum of Mobile, which had some well thought out historical exhibits chronicling the development of the area from the cotton era to the present.  A treat.

Leaving here, we headed to Louisiana, for a stay in New Orleans.  We had located an RV park out along Lake Pontchartrain, in an area that is a bit industrial but much cheaper than the park in the French Quarter, which is hugely expensive, particularly during Mardi Gras.  Our park was quite reasonable and close to the downtown area.  We spent most of our time in the city itself, enjoying the urban world for a change.  We saw a couple of Mardi Gras parades, and visited with a friend from Seattle, who showed us around for a day.  We got acquainted with Magazine Street, a charming local area outside the French Quarter, with a lot of good restaurants, a French bakery, and a New York bagel bakery.  You can see that food was very much a theme in our visit to the Big Easy.


A surprise was the New Orleans Museum of Art, which we liked very much.  They had an excellent collection of paintings and a sculpture garden that was one of the best we've ever seen.  We also visited the Louisiana State Museum, with its extensive exhibit around Hurricane Katrina and the history of severe weather events in New Orleans.  We saw a very nice jazz group down on Frenchmen Street, one of the quieter areas for music right next to the French Quarter.  We found that we had little tolerance for the level of loud and drunken partying in the French Quarter and could only tolerate the area for a short time.

It was sad to see how much damage New Orleans still exhibits, even five years or more after the hurricane.  As you drive around the city outside the French Quarter, there are large areas that are still leveled and show no signs of rebuilding.  There are huge open fields with foundations still showing, and abandoned houses that still show the legendary marks of the triage people who checked them for damage and scrawled figures on the outside.  It's such a shame that more cannot be done to bring this city back from the catastrophe.

We moved on to the town of Breaux Bridge, near Lafayette, in the heart of Cajun country.  We kept our focus on food, but shifted the emphasis to the more Cajun and Creole pleasures of this area.  We sampled a lot of the local boudin sausages, jambalaya and gumbo.  There were cinnamon coated pecans, bread pudding, and lots of local treats.  The folks in this area are justly proud of their cuisine, and they spend a lot of time comparing different versions of their classics.  We did our best to help out.

We visited an Acadian Village nearby.  This is a small, non-profit recreation of an original Acadian community, built after the Acadian (Cajun) people were originally ejected from Canada and settled in the Louisiana area.  It is a faithful recreation of the buildings, with each of the functional areas of the community outlined and documented, and it gives a very nice picture of how these folks lived in the early days of their settlements, and of the history of their culture and its odyssey across the North American continent. 

The previous events and parades that we had seen in other cities were leading up to the actual day, but on Mardi Gras itself we were in Breaux Bridge.  We decided to do something different, and went off to a small town festival held in Iota, Louisiana, which celebrated Mardi Gras with a Cajun twist.   The celebration was quite different, small and manageable, with local folks dressed up in traditional costumes called capuchons, who arrived in a big parade and then danced and demanded quarters thrown from the audience.  There were several bands playing Cajun and Creole music, and lots of dancing in the streets.  There was little or no alcohol and the whole party was over by five in the afternoon.  We loved it. And the food was great, too.  Here's a rather crude video that we took with our little camera, but I think it will give you the flavor. 

From here, we are headed off along the Gulf Coast toward the bottom tip of Texas.  Then we will head back up the Rio Grande and across the southwest.  Home by the Fourth of July!  It's hard to believe.

Traveling the Florida Panhandle

Leaving Blue Spring State Park, we headed to another of Florida's excellent state parks, this one called Manatee Springs.  Oddly, this one didn't have nearly as many manatees as the Blue Spring one did - the count was down this year.  But we did see a few, and some very nice turtles as well as some good birds.  The biggest aggregation was the mass of turkey and black vultures that gathered in the park every night.  The trees were loaded with them at night, and it was hard to imagine what they could feed on, given the size and number of these birds.  But I guess that they forage far and wide.

We were at this park during our anniversary, which we celebrate on Valentine's Day.  For that occasion, we took a side trip to Gainesville, Florida to have dinner and see a performance of the Kingston Trio (as it is now constituted).  It was a blast from the past.  The original members of the trio are now either retired or dead, but there are some younger?! men doing the old songs with the same panache, along with jokes to appeal to the blue-haired audience.  "This is a song from 1963 - it's our most recent hit". 

While we were in Gainesville, we happened upon a exhibition at a museum on the University of Florida campus about cattle ranching in Florida, its history and traditions.  Cattle ranching, it turns out, gave rise to the term "cracker", which refers to the bullwhips used by drivers in Florida.  So there were demos of bullwhip technique, and you could try it out if you wanted (we didn't).  There were some fascinating exhibits of cattle ranch history, along with some regular exhibits at the same museum, one about fossils in Florida, and another about the huge statewide water flows today and the attempts to manage them and correct some of the past abuses. 

Another expedition from this park location was a trip down to Saint Petersburg to see the Dali Museum.  It turns out that the city houses the largest collection of works by Salvador Dali outside of Spain, and the city had just opened a new museum to house the collection in December of 2010.  We had missed that opening for various reasons, but were determined to see the museum and the collection, having viewed an earlier Dali exhibit in Atlanta.  So we made the run down to St Petersburg.

It was a lovely day, warm and sunny, and we got there early and toured the collection with the help of a well-informed and articulate docent, who guided our group around the museum.  He knew a lot about the life of Dali and the themes that were reflected in the paintings and helped us to understand the motifs and images that recur often in Dali's work, and the many stages of his artistic career.  Dali is a fascinating painter, and the collection is so extensive that we got to see how trends developed and matured in his work.

After our visit, Ivy toured a local garden complex while I had an afternoon nap.   The garden is in one of the famous Florida sinkholes, places where the limestone substrate has been eaten away and land has subsided into a huge pit.  These sinkholes are sometimes converted to parks and gardens, as they were here.

Leaving Manatee Springs, we headed off to the St George Island State Park, along the Gulf of Mexico across the Apalachicola Bay.  This is a really lovely state park that takes up one end of a long barrier island, with the rest of it taken up by rather upscale development and beach houses, lots of which are now for sale.  The beaches have some very nice shells to scrounge for, and there is good birding, particularly on the bay side where there are marshes.  There is also a bike trail that runs the length of the island to keep me busy on warm sunny days.  Our stay was rather uneventful, but filled with the kinds of activities we like best.  Ivy painted some, I went bike riding and we both hunted shells on the beach.  Weather was mostly very good, with some cooler times and fog now and then.

While we were there, we went in to the little town of Apalachicola, which is across the causeway on the other side of the bay.  We liked this town very much - it is just the sort of broken down, rather artsy beach town/fishing village that we dreamed about visiting when we started this trip.  This area of Florida, which bills itself as the Forgotten Coast, has  a great feel, not overdeveloped like so much of the state.  It also has some fabulous seafood, a lot of which is pulled out of the water right around here, and we got used to eating Gulf shrimp, a habit which we'll not be able to keep up. 

Our last stop in Florida was the St Andrews State Park, which is located right in the heart of Panama City and Panama City Beach, aka the Redneck Riviera.  It's a place with fabulous beaches and huge condo complexes, but marred by a general tackiness and devotion to T-shirt shops, tattoo parlors and gaudy miniature golf places and entertainment complexes.  The park itself was really lovely and pretty quiet, but with a weekend smattering of noisy young people.  There were some very cute deer in the park and lots of herons and egrets.  We did some shopping and some internet stuff, along with a bit of bird-watching, beach wandering and painting.  I took a couple of long bike rides along the waterfront.  And we got in a couple of movies.  The weather was sunny and nice.

From here we head off to Alabama and Louisiana for the Mardi Gras celebration.   We have been in Florida since around December 1, almost three months.  So the return trip is under way in earnest.  We even crossed a time zone boundary and are now on Central Time - one time zone closer to home.

Beginning the return journey

On January 31st, as my cousin Greg and his wife Linda were leaving for their Australia trip, we too headed off on our return journey to Seattle.  Our car and RV have been worked over and refitted, and our itinerary is generally laid out.  We expect to travel about 5,500 RV miles, arriving in Seattle about the 4th of July.  The map of our itinerary is laid out on a page on this blog which you can look up if you want.  We will be moving along the Gulf Coast for quite awhile, then moving inland up through the Southwest.  Back by the summer.

On the first stage of our trip, we made a short stop at the Corkscrew Swamp Preserve, one of the original Audubon sites set up many years ago.  It was spectacular birding, with a very long boardwalk providing some of the best birding sites we've seen, as well as a visitor center with information on the history of the site and its importance.  

Our first camping stop was the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, a little gem in central Florida about halfway up the peninsula.  It turns out that Florida used to be largely prairie, about three million acres of it.  Almost all of that prairie is gone, converted to agriculture, but this park preserves many acres of the original ecology.  It is home to unusual birds and wildlife, and is very isolated, so far from the cities that it attracts a lot of amateur astronomers, who come there for the clear view of the night sky and the lack of city lights.  The few campers who stop here are very quiet and low-impact folks, and it is one of the quietest and most serene parks we have ever stayed at - definitely a favorite of ours.

Activities there are simple - hiking, birding, biking, and star-gazing.  That suited us very well.  Ivy did some painting and we both took bike rides and hikes.  The main roads are quite passable, but the further out ones can be quite challenging on a bike.  I traveled down one that was flooded a foot deep for over half a mile and then had soft sand for several more miles.  That was not fun and in the heat - did I mention that it was about 80 degrees during the day - and I got quite exhausted before I got back.  But the country is stunning.  Besides the prairie there are local islands of trees - hammocks, they call them - with some of the biggest and most lovely old live oaks that we have seen so far.

Leaving Kissimmee, we headed off to visit my step-mother Alice again on the way out of the state.  We had a great time there, as always, eating and visiting and getting in a little last-minute shopping.  Ivy created her very first chocolate souffle in honor of our visit.  Then it was off to Blue Spring State Park, a large manatee sanctuary north of Orlando.

 The park is very popular and the sites are really lovely.  And there were plenty of manatees.  In the winter they seek out warm springs to keep from freezing, and they stay at these spots for long periods and in large numbers.   They are not very lively, and often hard to see as they rest at the bottom of the warm springs. And pictures don't do them justice much.  But it is great to know that Florida is taking good care of them and providing refuges for their winter survival.  The area near Blue Spring is quite gorgeous, there is a good miles-long bike trail, and a river.  And nearby was the pleasant town of Deland, where we spent a short time looking around.

Next, we will be heading west across the Florida panhandle and on through the Alabama and Mississippi gulf coasts.  We expect to be in New Orleans for part of Mardi Gras, and then off through the Texas Birding Trails.   

January in Florida

We returned to Florida to meet with Steve's cousin Greg, and his wife Linda.  They joined us in Tampa, and we traveled south to stay with them at their winter home in Englewood.  We moved our RV onto their property, hooked it up, and we were pretty much set for the month of January.  The month was divided between enjoying the natural abundance of Florida and repairing and refitting all our various vehicles for the long trip home.  The repairing and refitting was the boring part, but very necessary, and it was great to have a base like Greg's house to work from while we did the work, or had it done.

Greg and Linda are friends of long standing besides being relatives, and we two, as couples, enjoy many of the same outdoor adventures.  Greg and Linda have done a year long camping trip around the US, and their venerable VW camping van with the pop top attracted attention whenever we went somewhere together.  And we went quite a few places.  Wildlife adventures were absolutely the theme of our times together.  Florida is a birder's paradise in the winter, and we took as much advantage as we could.  

We started out on Honeymoon Island where we saw as many osprey as we could shake a stick at.  We stopped off at a Florida Power and Light lagoon where manatees gather and saw quite a few of those.  And a wander in a park near their house yielded a mangrove cuckoo, an unusual bird in the winter.  Bald eagle nests were found here and there, but those eagles are much more common in our own Pacific Northwest, and we didn't find them as exciting as the locals did.  A wander on the local beach brought us a sighting of the black skimmer, a with its dramatic bill that is used to skim small fish out of the water as it flies along the surface. 

There were so many tropical water birds that are very common in Florida yet rarely seen elsewhere, that we were in birder heaven.  There were ibis, egrets, pelicans, storks and herons wherever there was water, and in Florida, water is pretty much everywhere.  And then there were the more exotic critters, like the roseate spoonbill, the anhinga, or the painted bunting.  We snapped so many photos of water birds that we cannot possibly use them all, but the behavior and habits of these critters are fascinating, and we enjoyed them thoroughly.

Greg and Linda were preparing themselves for a six week trip to Australia beginning on February 1st, so they had lots to do as well.  But we managed to schedule a joint trip to the Everglades National Park at the very southern tip of the Florida peninsula.  Unfortunately, my old reliable Canon camera finally gave up the ghost just a couple of days before we left for the Everglades.  So although we could use our cell phone for some photos, most of our adventures went unrecorded.  I ordered a new Nikon before I left, but it would only arrive on our return, so we were restricted to our ever-diminishing memories to record our adventures.

On  our way to the Everglades, we stopped for a few days with Linda's parents, who have a winter home on Pine Island, near Sanibel.  Their property is waterfront, and they have a boat that they use regularly for crabbing and just gadding about.  We were able to take a day trip to Sanibel Island on the boat for some serious shell-searching, and the next day Linda's dad treated us to a home-built crab feed, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

At the Everglades, we enjoyed birding, kayaking and hiking for several days. Greg and Linda  have their own kayaks, and we rented a double to keep them company.  We paddled through ponds and mangrove tunnels and down a canal where manatees kept us company for a bit. 

Upon our return, we joined our friends John and Mary, who had joined us previously in Glacier National Park.  They were down in Florida for a visit, so we took advantage of a gap in their schedule to join them for tours of Sanibel and Captiva Islands, where shells are legendary.  We spent lots of time picking up little treasures along the beach and had some very nice meals in local restaurants as well.  Another highlight was a tour of the "Ding" Darling National Preserve, a magnificent park with even more top quality birding. 

Another great stop was the Myakka State Park, which included the "canopy walk," high up in the canopy of the forest of  live oaks, palms,etc.  You got the sensation of what it looks like, perhaps, being a bird soaring over the terrain.

At the end of their visit, we completed our preparations and launched our official return trip.  The map of our planned route is contained in this blog on a separate page.  We expect to spend the spring along the Texas border and in the Southwest, returning to Seattle around the fourth of July.