Galveston - Harbor / Fish

A few days ago we spent an interesting day in the Galveston harbor area. We were on the hunt for a place to buy good fresh seafood, and in locating that also identified some other interesting things to explore.  

First, the seafood: amazingly fresh locally caught fish along with some frozen seafood from other areas, but since our travel focus has been on experiencing the LOCAL environment, food, music, and entertainment, we've purchased and feasted on local fish: redfish and red snapper. Coming from Michigan, where the fish we purchase "fresh" all has a rather "fishy" odor, walking into the harbor-side  seafood shops here is a totally different experience - the fragrance is sweet, light, very pleasant.
In our favorite place, the display of

whole fish on beds of ice is done with an eye to humor; redfish (red drum) and red snapper are lined up like little soldiers on their beds of ice; the head of the  shark from which we can select a cut, is displayed just above the shark body with a red snapper grasped in its toothy mouth; next to that are beds of various sizes of shrimp nested in ice.  The rest looks like a great seafood display - the shark head with red snapper is a check on whether the visitors are paying attention.  The next day that area is taken over by a large ling cod.  The display changes daily, and as we stand there waiting our turn to place an order, one of the workers keeps replenishing the ice around the displayed fish.

We had lunch at a local seafood restaurant overlooking the harbor, sharing a pot of mixed seafood.  This was SO good, and we were eating it overlooking the fishing boats that probably brought in some of the catch that we were eating.

We've had some wonderful, simple seafood meals from the fish we purchased in Galveston and prepared in our little Silver Stream Airstream.

Galveston Island State Park

We've been camping at Galveston Island State Park for the last 8 days and have enjoyed it so much that I've not made time to write about our experiences, but today is so windy that being outdoors is difficult, so I'm determined to catch up the blog and write a few entries about the things we have been doing since arriving here.  This first piece is about the park itself; subsequent entries will be about some of the things we have been enjoying about the town of Galveston.

This park was hard-hit by Hurricane Ike in 2008, as was the entire island and the city of Galveston, as 8 feet of seawater overwhelmed the island.  As a result, the beaches, the marshes, the buildings and shelters, and the dunes were irrevocably changed.  This affected all those living and visiting here (human and animal).  Massive efforts to renew and reclaim have created a beautiful area for beach camping, beach walking, shelling, and birdwatching both on the beach and in the surrounding wetland areas.  For those of us used to the plentiful trees of the Midwest, this area seems at first glance pretty barren; some shrubs, grasses, smaller palms, but no large trees, all of which have succumbed to the series of hurricanes that have sent ocean waves over the land, with the result that saltwater has killed nearly all of the larger trees.  Although we seem to have arrived at a time when shells are less prevalent than we had expected based on what we had read prior to our trip, just walking this beautiful beach at all times of day and early evening is enjoyable.  Since the beach faces north-east, sunsets involve beautiful colors in the sky over the ocean, but no direct view of the sun, so one morning I set my alarm to ensure I would be up in time for the sunrise and sat on the beach in my chair with camera in hand for nearly an hour recording the day begin - it was beautiful on several fronts (the sky, the water, the quiet of the beach shared with no one but the shore-birds). I've also been able to capture the moonrise reflected on a section of the water nearest the dunes, although I've yet to gain sufficient control of my camera to take a really good moonlight photo.  Still, here are my attempts at portraying "our" beach at various times of the day.

Sunrise:

Sunset:

Moonrise:

Galveston

Remember these words sung by Glenn Campbell: "Galveston, oh Galveston, I still hear your sea winds blowing.......sea waves crashing"?   We've just settled in at Galveston Island State Park, and are listening to the the sea waves crashing and feeling the sea winds blowing on our skin; absolutely lovely!   The beach is natural, with normal beach flotsam and jetsam as washed up by the tides: seaweed, shells, driftwood; dead fish and crabs serve as a feast for the seagulls, live ones a feast for the pelicans and seagulls fishing in the water near the beach. This beach is also CLEAN - little to no man-made debris, unlike the beach I kvetched about in yesterday's posting.  There are few people, and those who are here appear to treat this area with the respect it deserves.  I'll leave it at that for now, and just share some photos from today.

What a beautiful beach!

Katie Miervaldis - this one's for you!  Missing you.

What Man Has Wrought...

We've spent the last two nights at the Quintana Beach county park, near Galveston, TX.  I love, love, love ocean, beaches, seashells, sand, sun, water, nature.  Because we prefer smaller campgrounds with more nature and fewer crowds, we do research before traveling so that we can identify campgrounds that meet those needs. (KOA's, Good Sam's, other private campgrounds generally need not apply, although they are fine for a night while passing through an area to our final destination).

So here we are in Quintana Beach County Park, near Galveston, TX, which according to pre-trip research met our requirements for a prolonged, enjoyable stay. We arrived ready to spend a week or more, but limited our stay to two nights while we used the day between for traveling to other campgrounds in the area to find a place we really wanted to stay.  We found that, and we'll be moving to Galveston State Park in the morning for an extended stay.  But here's the thing: our expectations and those of other travelers are often SO very different that to make destination decisions based on reviews we read on the net, or photos posted on the web are nearly impossible.  That's why it's a good thing that we are able to be flexible in our travel plans.  So why are we moving?

The beach here is natural, which we wanted.

The campground is not crowded, which we wanted.

The site is a dune away from the beach, which we wanted.













The problem?  Looking toward the ocean is picturesque; looking in any other direction you see nothing but man-mad edifices related to the oil or natural gas industry - NOT picturesque.

The beach here was just cleaned up the weekend before we arrived by a group of Boy Scouts, so the park's section of the beach is very nice; walk further up the beach away from park-owned land, and the beach is filthy with man-made-debris: beer bottles, potato chip bags, old coolers, bottle-tops, broken glass....this DESPITE the fact that there are very visible blue trash barrels every 100 feet or so along this entire stretch.   Even Murphy found this insulting; as we walked the beach, it seemed to become his personal goal to leave no man-made detritus unmarked (poor dog was exhausted and dehydrated by his efforts when we returned to the camper).  

Eventually nature wins out, but why are so many so destructive of the bounty that nature offers us?

Of Sugar Cane, Rice Fields, and Country Music

Jan 20:  We spent most of this day traveling, much of it on freeways or divided highways, so no photos to share, although it has been an interesting drive.  Thanks to my iPhone and a pretty strong signal, we could look up information and learn about the countryside we were passing through, as questions occurred to us.  As a result, we've learned a bit about sugar cane and how it's grown, about rice fields and the fact that the areas we were passing through have a rich history of rice-production, and when we began to wonder what the egrets were finding so fascinating in the rice fields, discovered that many of the former rice fields have been converted to crayfish (called crawfish here) farms.  Why?  Because, as with other grain crops, the cost of producing rice is high compared to price earned, but there is a growing market for the crayfish, which naturally like to live in the rice fields, so many former rice farmers have become crayfish farmers and are making really good money doing that.  It's also a way for those with less land to still make a decent living.  Who knew?

When we were traveling the blues highway, we listened to the blues to more thoroughly experience the atmosphere of the area.  While traveling in Louisiana and Texas, we've been listening to country music for the same reason, and because that's what most radio stations here play.  When we first heard a station announce they would be playing "If I Could Have a Beer With Jesus", we thought it was a parody of country music, similar to John Denver's "You Dun Stomped On My Heart" or "Forest Lawn", but to our surprise, it's a real song, and YOU too can listen to it here.  I guess it's a reflection of how easily people in the south so easily integrate everyday life and occurrences with their religious  beliefs; therefore, why not sing about kickin' back and having a brew with The Man?  

Life is never-ending learning!

Houmas House Plantation & Gardens

January 19: There are many lovely old plantation mansions available to visit in the area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that we missed seeing on our trip to New Orleans a few years ago, so we decided to spend a couple of nights in a campground in Baton Rouge and spend the day visiting two of those plantations.  It was a tough choice, but we narrowed it down to Houmas House (also known as the Sugar Palace) and Laura Plantation ( a Creole plantation), but once we reached Houmas House it proved to be such a rich environment to that we decided to just spend the day there, leisurely exploring and experiencing this beautiful home and gardens.

Houmas House built its fortune on sugar cane, a major crop in this area. At one time the property encompassed 300,000 acres, with 98,000 of it planted in sugar cane; at that time the plantations contained a slave population of around 1000, both to work the fields and maintain the plantation buildings and families. In 1857, the plantation was sold for $1million to a self-made Irish immigrant, and subsequently became one of the wealthiest plantations in  the country. The website for this plantation contains an intriguing history page, including a film clip, which together do a much better job of describing the history of this amazing place than I can do in a brief blog entry, so I've provided a link here to that page for those who might want to know more, and will focus the rest of this blog entry on photos and on impressions during our visit.

One of the significant advantages to being able to travel during this "off-season" is the dearth of tourists at the various places that are prime tourist destinations during other seasons.  Houmas House Plantation was no exception to this; we were able to enjoy a leisurely tour of the house in a group of just 4. Our tour guide was personable, enthusiastic,  knowledgable, and humorous - it doesn't get better than that!

 Unlike most such homes that are open for tours, nothing here was cordoned off, nothing had plate-glass blocking visitors from entering. 



We were invited to sit on the furniture and imagine ourselves visiting or living there as the tour guide spun her tale of this magnificent house and property.


She invited photo-taking, handed us artifacts to touch and handle, invited us to try out the pool table in the gentlemen's smoking room, briefly played the piano and treated us to a chorus from the theme song from the Bette Davis  1964 film "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" which was filmed on location here.  

The current owner, Kevin Kelly, actually lives in this home with his two Labrador Retrievers, and makes the place available for weddings and other special events.  The property has also, not surprisingly, been the location for a number of movies in addition to the Bette Davis one, all of which are listed on the web site for Houmas House.  There is a magnificent self-supporting circular staircase in the center of the home, which was featured in the Davis film (which I am now determined to see someday) and is the dream staircase for showcasing many a bride's wedding gown, according to the guide.  

Several rooms in the home are used  for special dinners, which are served by the on-site restaurant (also described on the website).  We had a delicious lunch at the main restaurant building, oyster and shrimp "po boy" sandwiches.

The old live oaks surrounding the home are magnificent, as are the various gardens.

Interestingly, the man who has been head gardner for the past 20 years is also an artist, with an interesting and unique style, who has his studio in one of the outbuildings on the property, so it is not surprising that in addition to the historical and traditional statues dotting the grounds, gardens, and fountains, there are also modern and whimsical pieces of garden art, along with strange pairings of plants (Swiss chard among the roses in the rose garden, for example) creating an eclectic and altogether delightful atmosphere.

John and his new friends

One of the traditional ponds & statues

This little fellow is 'holding up' one of the massive branches of  a live-oak

This flying pig guards the kitchen garden

At the end of the tour, my camera said "battery exhausted", and I couldn't blame it

Frogmore Plantation

January 18:  The area around Vicksburg and Natchez is home to many former and current cotton plantations.  We drove by a few fields that had not been picked, but most of the fields were in their winter dormancy.
Given the choice of many historic homes to visit in this area, we read about a number of them and chose to visit Frogmore Plantation, which is of both historic and current interest; it is also across the Mississippi from Natchez, located near Vidalia, LA.

Frogmore (the family name of the original owners), is unique in that it is still a very large active cotton farm (now called Frogmore Farm), but also because the owners have a very strong interest in preserving and sharing the history of this region and specifically Frogmore Plantation.  To that end, they have worked hard to both salvage existing buildings on the original site and to locate, purchase and move other structures from the appropriate time period (pre-Civil War) to the site to recreate the appearance of the original plantation outbuildings.  At Frogmore, the plantation house itself is not available to tour - the owners still live in that home - but the reconstructed slave quarters, commissary, and old cotton gin and cotton storage buildings are available to visit.


When we called to inquire about tour times, we discovered that the facility was closed for the winter and available for tours only by special advance arrangement.  Hearing that we were traveling through the area from Michigan and not likely to return in the spring, they arranged for a guide to meet us at the plantation for a private tour. That's Southern hospitality at it's best!

This one's for you Mick and Katie Kish!

We met our guide for an interesting, albeit soggy tour of the quarters and explanation of the workings of the old gin, followed by a film showing the modern gin.  It was a beautiful, blue-sky day, following almost two weeks of non-stop rain, so the ground literally squished beneath our feet, but the guide took us around the buildings, sharing information about the lives of the slaves, overseers, and subsequent sharecroppers who inhabited these buildings, and to the edge of field where cotton had been allowed to remain standing so visitors can get an up-close and personal experience with a cotton field and pick some cotton if desired. The tour guide emphasized the necessity and value of the slave labor for maintaining an active and thriving cotton plantation in the years leading to the Civil War, when the entire process of cotton production was manually extremely labor intensive, and then compared it to the present day mechanized approach to the growing cotton.

Having seen similar buildings in other tours of historic places, the old beds, ragged quilts, open-fire cooking was not new to us, although always interesting to see and compare to our modern conveniences. We were, however, surprised to learn that the term 'cotton gin' is short for 'cotton engine' (did a teacher somewhere in our youth point that out to us?) and also somewhat surprised to learn of the wide variety of products made from cotton plants in addition to the cloth that we typically envision when hearing the term 'cotton'.  The plants actually produce two different crops: fiber, and seed.  Only 5% of the seed from any harvest is returned to the field as seed for new plants; the remainder is all sold to the cottonseed processing industry, which in turn provides raw materials to food, pharmaceutical, agricultural and cosmetics industries.  Cotton fiber is still sold and moved in huge 600-800 lb. bales.

I'll leave you with a final fascinating factoid about the value of cotton seed: the current owners of Frogmore Farm, George and Lynnette Tanner, operate a gin that processes the cotton from 50 other farms for free; in exchange, they get to keep the seed, which they in turn sell. That seed is how they make a living, and through which they have become recognized as leaders in the cotton industry in the US.

Blues Highway

Jan 17:  US Route 61 is also known as the Blues Highway. "As the major route northward out of Mississippi, U. S. Highway 61 has been of particular inspiration to blues artists."   

In keeping with the spirit of the road, we were listening to the B.B. King channel on Sirius radio as we drove I61 south from Memphis, TN.  This is not a musical genre with which either of us is very familiar, but it certainly is intriguing and now we both want to hear more and learn more about the blues.  We stopped in Clarksdale to visit the Delta Blues Museum; while interesting, this museum is more of a memorial to blues greats than an institution that educates attendees about the blues genre and its artists.  We'll have to learn more about this music before we can truly appreciate the artists celebrated in this museum.  

Driving this historic road however reinforced how/why the musicians from this area gave birth to the blues; this is a very poor region by and large, with huge farms field interspersed with small, run-down towns - hardly towns really, collections of shabby, small residences with a small church and an occasional "juke joint" along the road or a hard-up auto-repair shop.   Hard to know where (or if) children who live here go to school; we saw a few boarded up school buildings, but the active ones were few and far between.   Life certainly is far from easy here for the majority of the residents.

When we travel like this, periodically we like to stop at a small local cafe both for the local atmosphere and also for what are inevitably simple and good meals.  Along this stretch of 61, there were no such places, no grocery stores, no gas stations, no stores - period.  It would be a bad place to run low on gas, that's for sure.  We finally stopped in a larger town at a Subway store; while there, a fellow came in and asked us if the Airstream parked out front was ours, then asked a few questions about it, ending with "Would you be interested in sellin' it?  I've been lookin' for something like that."  We turned down his offer, finished our sandwiches, and headed back down the road, heading toward Vicksburg, our destination for the day.

Day 2

It was a long day traveling between Louisville, KY and Memphis, TN.  Due to the slick roads caused by the night's sleet and snow, we held off leaving Louisville until after the morning rush-hour traffic and associated minor accidents had been cleared, so we got a really late start.

We encountered no bad roads, but instead really large stretches of beautiful iced landscape in both Kentucky and Tennessee all through the day's drive; large conifers hanging heavy with iced needles, small trees leaning over sideways from the weight of the ice, tall-grass areas and roadside shrubs with each stem, each leaf, each tiny hair covered with frosty white.  Rivers in these states are overflowing, flooding huge areas of forest and field, belying the supposed drought conditions that this country as a whole has been experiencing. I tried to take some photos of this beautiful frosted landscape "on the fly", but they just don't do justice to the reality, so I have nothing to post here that reflects the beauty we passed through earlier today.

There was a lovely sunset as we approached Memphis, TN, which is reflected in the photo at the left.  Today was a really long, tiring day of driving, with traffic slowed by some major road construction and a few accident scenes being cleared, as well as an unusually high number of traffic stops by police causing slow-downs as the traffic flowed around the unlucky drivers having been pulled aside.  We've decided to avoid other days of driving this long if if can possibly be avoided; we didn't pull into the campground until early evening when it was already dark, and we were all tired from driving/riding/supervising (see photo below to see who was supervising).

Tomorrow is another day, and we'll try to make it one in which we begin our exploration of interesting places, rather than just pushing forward to reach a final destination.  Weather forecast looks good for the next few days in the areas where we hope to be.

On our way again!

We left home around 9:30 this morning, starting our next travel adventure.  Michigan weather since Christmas has been relatively mild, but of course we got hit with some sleet once we got the camper pulled up to the house to pack for the trip.  Still, once we got off our own road (which was fairly icy), the rest of the roads have been dry and good so far.
Leaving Michigan:

We're spending tonight (hopefully ONLY tonight) in a small KOA campground just outside Louisville, Kentucky.  That was about a 7 hour drive with a couple of stops, so enough for one day.  We've been tracking road reports and weather fairly diligently the last few days, so thought we had a good window of travel opportunity lined up.  Once we arrived here, however, we found that the local news is calling a winter weather advisory, with sleet and snow predicted starting this evening and lasting until tomorrow morning, which is why I made the comment at the beginning of this paragraph that I hoped we would only be spending one night here.  Our decision to move on as planned or stay and wait for roads to clear will be totally based on road conditions and safety considerations, so no worries.  We've come in from a bit of a walk to stretch our legs after being in the car all day, we have heat, light, food and wine, so we are fine.  More tomorrow....