January 8, 2005 - Drive to New Orleans, Louisiana

After a leisurely breakfast we all prepared our RVs for the trip down to New Orleans and hit the road. Lloyd and Sandy had a much higher top speed in their motor home, about 70 mph compared to my lowly 55, so we drove separately with the understanding that whoever reached the Pinecrest Campground first would use the cell phone to check in with the other. We trundled along on Interstate 55 south to the Louisiana welcome center where I gathered a fair sized pile of brochures about things to see and do, including tours of plantations or swamps, as well as maps for New Orleans, where we all wanted to see the French Quarter.

The drive down through Louisiana to Slidell where our campground was located had pleasant rural scenery of consisting of forests, pastures, and the occasional town, but the road was surprisingly rough in places. The worst pavement I have found for an RV is the pattern where there are regular dips or swales in the pavement-the RV gets into reinforced oscillations and can become almost unmanageable. This happened once in Wisconsin and again in Louisiana, and the common element seemed to be old concrete pavement that rises slightly near the joints between sections. Lloyd told me some of the pavement in Arkansas was so bad that he had to slow down from 70 to as low as 50 mph. Although this section wasn't as bad as that, Lloyd and Sandy ended up behind us because they stopped off at an RV dealer for a while to gain some insight on problematic aspects of their rig. So it was that Monika and I were the first to arrive at the campground and sign in. I was immediately struck by the presence of really huge puddles of standing water, but fortunately the ground was solid underneath the surface, which was unlike Virginia where you would typically have slippery reddish clay at the base of a puddle. We pulled into campsite 19, unhitched, and waited for Lloyd and Sandy to come and park in site 18-it was fun being right next to each other because we could just walk over for chatting or to see a movie. In this case after we all went out for dinner, we joined them for a screening of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World" and that was a fun way to end the evening.