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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

January 11, 2005 - Baton Rouge Volksmarch, Louisiana

It was time to move on, so after breakfast we packed up the pickup hitched the trailer, and dumped the tanks before starting off for Baton Rouge. The traffic on Interstate 12 was heavy and fast, so I concentrated on holding the rig to the right of the right lane as the tractor-trailers and other traffic went thundering by in the left lane. Things became more difficult as we passed through Baton Rouge and the interstate widened to three lanes. I had to hold in the middle lane at times, and the rig was being swayed by traffic passing on both my left and on my right. Since the traffic passing on either side made the rig twitch in exactly the opposite fashion, it was impossible to predict which way the truck would try to swerve next and that was nerve wracking. I was relieved when we crossed the Mississippi and could turn off at the next exit for our campground.

The campground had a nice pull-through space for us, so I didn't have to jockey the rig backwards for once, and we were in time to unhitch and have a leisurely lunch in the trailer. It was hot enough that I put out the awning for some sunshade on our southern side as well as to dry it out, and we still had to turn on the air conditioning. It felt like nothing so much as a typical summer's day up north, and that was a very pleasant change for us snowbirds.

After lunch we drove back over the I-10 bridge to the state capitol building in Baton Rouge, circling around it once before we finally found a metered 2-hour parking space on the street in front of it. The price, however, was only 50 cents per hour, and I thought that was quite reasonable compared to the $4 an hour we were charged (gouged?) in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The capitol was directly across a pretty little park with a pleasant pattern of hedges and walkways.

Inside the capitol, a very friendly lady at the visitor information desk just to the left of the entrance gave us the start box, and Monika filled out our registration while I stamped our record books. The big entrance hall was decorated with murals and art deco type carvings that I thought were just unique, and I asked the lady if I could take pictures. She was so nice and the other folks we met so pleasant (even the security screeners!), that we decided to spend some time taking pictures of the House and Senate chambers.


 

We also took an elevator up to the 24th floor and a second smaller elevator to the 27th floor to get to an outdoor promenade near the top. Our reward was a great view of the parks around the capitol and an absolutely grand vista of the Mississippi River winding through the town.

That was such a wide vista that it defied conventional photography, so I tried taking a series of panoramic shots that I hoped I could later stitch together into a combined scene.

Having wasted the better part of an hour, we finally set off on our walk. The first segment was a small loop round an old arsenal building, after which we circled the capitol and headed back east along one side of the park. That brought us near our truck, so we stopped to throw in another 50 cents to give us plenty of time to finish the walk. We continued past the old state capitol, which looked like nothing so much as some kind of old castle. It had quite a history, being built before the Civil War, torched by Union troops during the war, and then rebuilt to again serve as the capitol until Governor Huey Long decided the state needed a new capitol building in 1932.

Crossing the business district, we strolled south to pretty much its southern boundary and then worked our way back up to the capitol in a kind huge zigzag pattern. The advantage of that kind of pattern is that we crisscrossed the downtown area and thereby saw it pretty well. Downtown Baton Rouge is interesting in that besides the normal complement of big bank buildings and small skyscrapers, we also traversed some quite old, funky neighborhoods with 100 year old or older cottages. I was very surprised that they had not been "urban renewalled" into something grander, more pretentious, and above all profitable. They had great location, but possibly they were protected from urban renewal by the National Register of Historic Sites or some similar state agency.

Other houses in that residential quarter had flowers still blooming and tropical trees like palm trees out in front. I really had to laugh at one place that had two huge pink flamingos in the front yard, one with a top hat and bow tie, and the other with some kind of feathery boa. I would guess that the couple living there had a rather good sense of humor, but I rather doubted that the Architectural Control Committee for our subdivision would have seen the humorous aspect. I still remember general homeowner meetings where some folks expressed outrage at the thought that people with kids in our subdivision would put up a swing set or a basketball hoop for children to play with. Can you imagine the response to huge pink flamingos?

Finishing up the walk past the state library, we climbed back into the truck and returned to the campground for the night. We both worked on the computers a bit after a quiet dinner of scrambled eggs, and plotted a loop for driving down along the bayou the next day. I finally got the camera software to stitch together the panoramic photographs of the Mississippi, and, after a prolonged struggle, Monika found where the software had secreted the resulting images using hidden files in a hidden folder in a very obscure corner of the file structure. Apparently the Olympus Camedia software writers did not want users to be able to access the files with any other software than what they supplied, which was downright irritating. I've been fighting battles like that with proprietary software, secret codes, and hidden file structures since the days of the Apple II computer, and I must admit I'm fed up with this secretive, proprietary, and coercive approach. After at last gaining access to the picture files, we finished off the night with Monika doing some crocheting while I finished reading Twain's "Roughing It" on Baby-both tasks help decrease our blood pressure.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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February 2005
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