This morning was spent exploring the Fairview-Riverside State Park in the Louisiana Bayou. It was also warm enough to finally de-winterize the Van of Discovery. Yeah! I have running water once again.
I was able to leave the park at 10:00. Why is it I cannot get out any earlier than that? The drive through Louisiana was uneventful. Man, is Louisiana a long state. It took four hours to get to the Texas border. What began as a rather cool, raw, wet day turned into a beautiful one. Just after the LA/TX border, I pulled into a rest area. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the temps reached into the 60’s. The wind, though, was fierce. I had a lot of trouble keeping the van on the road.
Before leaving the park, I checked the air pressure in the tires and found that all four were at least five lbs over-inflated. I let the air out to their normal 50 front/65 rear and then I had trouble keeping the van on the road. I will probably never know if it was just the wind conditions or if the tire air pressure had something to do with it, too. I may just inflate the tires back to 55/70 and hope for as windy a day somewhere to see if the added air in the tires makes any difference.
I neglected to look at a map to see where I was going, instead, relying on my GPS. For some reason, my brain insists that Houston is located in TX further north. Every time I come this way, I think that once I hit the TX border, I have to drive north. Unfortunately, the true reality is that I-10 comes into Houston from the due East. My destination was Spring, which is north of Houston. If I had looked at a map earlier, I could have gotten off I-10 in Beaumont and taken Route 90 across.
Just after I realized my mistake, I decided to take Rt 61 north and hit Rt 90 a few miles west of Beaumont. I got off the highway and apparently missed a turn that was not marked. I ended up driving along side I-10 for five miles. Just as I reached FM 563, which would also take me north to Rt 90, I saw that I-10 was at a dead stop and half of the traffic got off onto FM 563 with me.
It was 13 miles from the I-10/FM 563 intersection to the FM 563/Rt 90 intersection. That 13 miles took 90 minutes with the average driving speed of 5 mph. To make matters worse, there is NOTHING between those two intersections. After an hour, I was finally able to pull into the parking lot of a Baptist Church so I could relieve my poor bladder and make something to eat. It certainly is nice to have your own traveling bathroom, but you still have to find a place to pull off the road if you are both pilot and co-pilot. I really need to teach Hope to run to the back of the van and grab me food whenever I am hungry.
It was getting dark as I hit the Rt 90 intersection and I still had 45 miles to go. What caused the 13 mile/90 minute back-up? Two traffic officers who seemed like they were not communicating with each other. I think the traffic would have flowed much better if they just let the traffic light do its job.
As I reached the intersection, cop #1 was just standing in the middle of the road. Cop #2 had his hand up in the air and was turned looking at traffic coming from my right. I didn’t know if I was supposed to go or stop as he wasn’t looking in my direction nor was his arm doing anything but hanging high over his head. When he finally did turn around to look at me, he gave a filthy look and yelled at me to move. Cop #1 turned around to look at Cop #2 and just shook his head.
I turned onto Rt 90 and miraculously traffic was flowing. In fact, most of the traffic completely disappeared for five whole minutes – then WHAM! Dead stop again. My stupid GPS had me zigzag through tight residential streets, but as I looked up the road back toward Rt 90, at every intersection, there was a police cruiser with its lights flashing.
When I finally reached FM1960, where I had a good 30 mile drive in front of me, the sun set. I felt like all of Houston was on this horrid road. It was dark, the area was congested, the road had three lanes then two lanes then four lanes then two lanes then three lanes and inevitably, as much as I tried to stay in the middle lane, I’d end up in a right lane that was ending. The congestion of stores and lights and weaving traffic and idiots trying to cross six lanes of highway got my stress level to full-blown panic. Once off FM1960, the GPS, which I forgot to reset back to “fastest, most popular route,” had me again zigzagging through one tight neighborhood after another.
At one point I came out of a residential area to another major highway. The angle of the road made visibility of on-coming traffic to the right difficult and I was to make a left-hand turn onto a busy road. Instead, I turned right, crossed the highway, and turned into a parking lot, at which point I started screaming at the top of my lungs at the stupid GPS. I wanted so bad to rip the damned thing off the dashboard and throw it down the length of the van, but I needed it and I needed my back windshield intact. It was now 7:30. I had been on the road 9 ½ hours. I was tired, hungry, totally stressed and blind. I had one more mile to go when Shirley called to find out where I was.
Shirley and George waited until I got there to have dinner. We went out to a Mexican restaurant. The food was very good. It wasn’t Tex-Mex; it was true southern Mexican cuisine which isn’t as hot as your traditional northern Mexican or Tex-Mex food.
Shirley and George finally got to meet Olly. They have four LaPerms: Silver, Tyler, Sir Charles, and Red. Olly is an orange LaPerm like Red is, except Red has a large lion mane around his neck. Tyler is a brown tabby as is Sir Charles, except that the only thing long and curly on Sir Charles is his tail – and I don’t mean the fur – I mean the tail itself. Sir Charles curls his tail around body. Silver is black and white with a pure white mane and white toes. They also have two other cats: Tex, who is plain ol’ red tabby and Boss, a 31 lb black & white tuxedo. Yes, you read that right; Boss is a 31 lb cat. I tried to take a picture of him, but it didn’t come out too good because he wouldn’t stay still.
Tomorrow I will be having lunch with an old work mate and then will be meeting my fellow Connecticut traveler, Sandy, in San Antonio.
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