Day 160 New Orleans - Baton Rouge Louisiana
Trip Start
May 07, 2008
1
170
205
Trip End
Nov 22, 2008
Baton Rouge,
Louisiana,
United States
Monday, October 13, 2008
A sleep in day, gee how did that happen? Well we had planned only to travel to Baton Rouge only 70 odd miles away.
We made contact with Bob, and ascertained it would be a 2 hour or 2.5 hour run. We set sail at around 10am.
Well the mistake or learn we had on this pathway, was there had been no allowance for Road works. We ran into Road works!!
The bridges to leave this city or the route is built up over lowlands and swamp. Miles and miles of it.
Coupled with this we ran into roadwork's that had us all converging into one lane. This caused a back up and some times a parking lot on route 10.
Eventually we found our way through the congestions, but certainly it would not be a nice feeling to be in a line similar to, if you were under an evacuation order because of hurricanes were heading that way.
We had a call from Bob, when we were around 20 mins away, and we arrived outside their house roughly in the time frame.
Both Bob and Kathy came out to greet us and inside we trekked. It was established that no one had eaten lunch and we piled in their van to head to a local restaurant.
Without a local taking us to this restaurant, we would not have driven off the road to head in, yet we finished a nice meal we all enjoyed. Also we are indebted to Bob and Kathy, they insisted on paying for the meal, Great Southern Hospitality for sure. BUT we do THANK You for that you guys it was really nice!
We hopped back into the van and were driven into the city centre and given a tour, how good is that?
Bob was born in the city and has lived there all his life, from when the city was small and surrounded by country farms. it has grown to around 300,000 people and is the State Capitol.
We visited the State Capitol building, and this was an amazing structure built in 1932 authorised by the Governor (Long) at the time. The wonderful structure was built in only 14 months, it is an amazing structure with a lift to take us up 26 floors to an outlook, we could walk around and view the city. We were able to view both the House of representative Chambers and the Senate chambers, as well as walk along marble floors and corridors and observe the spot and bullet hole in a marble column where Governor Long was assassinated.
With our hosts pointing out the aspects of the city and also the over view of the Mighty Mississippi and boats and barges plying this river was certainly worth the tour.
The city relies on petroleum and has the 2nd biggest Oil Refinery in the country, as well as the off shoot petro chemical plants for plastic manufacture among other things.
We headed back down and were taken to the old Capitol building, this was another grand old building built similar to a Castle structure on the outside. Walking in we are certainly impressed with the stair case that winds up from the centre of the entrance hall to the second floor. Looking up to the glass ceilings above the spiral stair case is a wonderful huge dome of Stained Glass ceiling above. Truly breath taking! The building is now housing displays of the history of the politics for Louisiana and some wonderful animated speeches made by some of the trail blazing politicians for the State.
Walking up the spiral stairs was also a sensation and a great way to absorb the ambience of the whole building. We viewed the old rooms used by the representatives to create the rules of the state.
An interesting note here, the State of Louisiana use laws based on the Napoleonic law and not the American based laws and so lawyers from interstate will not attempt to practice law in this state simply because it is definitely a different perspective to follow.
A wonderful building and the timber interior would be irreplaceable today!
We headed back to Bob & Kathy's place, (Kathy had a chocolate cake ready for us for morning tea, which we could not waste now could we?)
We sat and enjoyed the tea/coffee and the lovely cake and an enjoyable chat.
It is great to meet people and especially to have met both Kathy and Bob, be welcomed into their home and for them to give us the time and tour, we certainly appreciate the effort and also it really makes our journey worthwhile to share stories of our travels with likeminded people.
The Travellers Three certainly thankyou both! By the way Bob you can have the $1 coin, just don't forget to clean your car to retrieve it!! We certainly reiterate our invitation to visit down under to enable us to return the hospitality.
We set our sights for the nearest KOA about 7 miles away, Mandy directed us there well ,apart from a road being built she hadn't been informed about. We pulled in to see a sign hanging saying "No Vacancies'" oh NO! look out Bob and Kathy we might pull up on your lawn!
But undeterred, Karon headed in to ask, to be told, "no problem" and greeted by a woman that had spent 2 years in Sydney and lived in Gymea.
So here we are and tomorrow our sights are set to travel through Mississippi State towards Memphis Tennessee.
