Day 88 - A Grilling By The Black Widow

Trip Start May 19, 2008
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Trip End Nov 08, 2008


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Where I stayed
Gum Springs Campground, Kisatchie National Forest, Louisiana
(Winnfield hotels)

Flag of United States  , Louisiana,
Thursday, August 14, 2008

We left the site around 10.30 and drove the short distance to the city of Texarkana. An odd place in that half the city is in Texas and half is in Arkansas. (You're getting the hang of these imaginative place names aren't you?) The plan was to find the library and do what we had tried to do yesterday. Well finding the library proved to be really straight forward, the only problem was, it was closed! At 11am on a Thursday morning! Don't ask why, we don't know. As we carried on through the city we noticed how quiet it was, there was hardly anyone around, and it's a fairly big city. It has to be said though, it does look to have seen better days.

So we now found ourselves in Arkansas (no welcome sign we might add) but only for a short time, as we took Highway 71 south and soon crossed the state line into Louisiana. It was quite noticeable that we were now in the deep south, the vegetation was very lush everywhere you looked. And it was hot and sticky with absolutely no breeze.

We began to notice a crop in the fields which looked like maize, but brown and dead Texarkana, Texas
Texarkana, Texas
 . We thought at first that maybe it had become diseased and allowed to die, but as we drove further the amount we saw made us doubt that.

As we drove through the city of Shreveport we crossed the Red River and saw our first paddle steamer. We needed a Wal-Mart but Shreveport is a huge place so when we stopped for fuel on the southern outskirts we asked for directions. We were directed to Bossier City (pronounced bo-sher) which effectively meant that we had done a loop back north. Whilst we were at the checkout in Wal-Mart we were amazed to hear an English voice in front of us. The young lady in question was from Thetford in Norfolk and her husband was based at Barksdale Air Force Base on the outskirts of Bossier City.

After a couple more hours drive south-east we arrived at our camp site for tonight, Gum Springs Campground, in the Kisatchie National Forest. It's quite a bizarre place in that the grounds and pitches are all immaculate with nice fairly new grills and tables, but the toilets are locked shut. It's a self-pay station and there's no camp host so we don't know the reason for it, but at least they're only charging $3 a night so we really can't complain. The other really odd thing is that there's no-on else here except us. We think they may have had some heavy rain in these parts the last week or so, so maybe people are avoiding the area for that reason Texarkana, Arkansas
Texarkana, Arkansas
 .

Neil had the fright of his life earlier, when after standing over the grill for around 20 minutes cooking our burgers, suddenly noticed a big spider and it's web by his foot. Upon bending down to get a closer look he realised it was a Black Widow, whose venom is 15 times more deadly than that of a rattlesnake!

Miles travelled: 195

Total miles travelled: 8559

Days on road: 68

States visited: 15

National Parks visited: 11
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