Thursday, February 9th, 2006 - Drive to Lafayette, Louisiana.

Rolling out of the campground at our customary 8:45 a.m., we drove around the smog-shrouded southern rim of Houston and continued east on Interstate 10 into Louisiana. Interstate 10 was heavily traveled and in spots we endured the jostling of rough pavement or the nerve wracking intrusion of concrete barriers for the construction zones. The land was absolutely flat and featureless, so there was not a great deal to look at, either. The interstate finally backed up solidly just as we reached Lafayette, Louisiana, where we planned to stay for a couple of nights, so we just bailed out a couple of exits early and worked our way through town to our campground.

When we entered Acadiana Park we found 35 travel trailers carefully placed on different campsites, but no people! It turns out that the trailers were owned by FEMA and apparently awaiting folks displaced from last season's hurricanes. The units were quite obviously brand spanking new and consisted of many different makes and models. Most even had expansion units on the side and it seemed kind of a shame that no one was using them. The units were typically 30 feet long, and from our search for a travel trailer a couple of years back they would cost around $25,000, so unless FEMA got a much better price those units represented about $875,000 of taxpayers' money.

There were no sewer connections in the campground and the units were not set up to be movable. Since the single public toilet would be clearly insufficient for 35 trailers, exactly what was FEMA thinking to even put the trailers here? Storage? It was certainly not all that cheap. Our campsites cost $13 a night and so each month those trailers cost the government about $13,650 for storage, which is a great deal more than simply storing them on at an RV dealer for say $50 per month. Was this just another "Heckuva job, Brownie!" from some incompetent Bush administration lackey? Fortunately Acadiana Park still had about 35 sites free for us transient RV campers, so we backed the trailer into site number 58 and set it up for the night. It was too late to drive out to any of the local attractions but we wanted to stretch our legs a bit, so we walked over to the nature center at the east end of the campground and took a look at that. It turned out to be a small but nice nature center with a corn snake, a king snake, and a local variety of tarantula in glass cages plus a video about the local wetland ecosystem and lots of printed displays.

We also walked some of the trail system for a while. Surprisingly, the presence of hardwoods with Spanish Moss, cypresses in the water, and saw palmetto in the dryer areas all reminded me of what we had seen in Florida during Wanderung 1. In retrospect the climate is not that different from the Florida wetlands areas, but it was a curious feeling of deja vu. After wandering about a bit we returned to the entrance station to sign up for a couple of nights and then we retreated into the trailer for the rest of the evening.

It is curious how some things that you take for granted at home, like bathrooms, become so much more salient while you are traveling. At home, your bathroom is probably heated and has a flush toilet with a toilet seat on it, toilet paper, hot and cold running water, soap, and a towel to dry your hands. Any or all of these components can be missing at a public toilet in a campground. In fact, in many of the campgrounds I found myself having to mentally think about what the bathroom was lacking before I made the long journey over there. The bathrooms at the Acadiana Park were pretty good in that they were heated, had flush toilets, toilet paper, hot and cold running water, and paper towels, but the toilets lacked toilet seats and the soap dispenser didn't work so I had to remember to bring soap. It was almost like making a trek to an outhouse, only a bit warmer once I got inside, but in this case I still had to sit on a cold stainless steel commode with no toilet seat. Brrr!

According to Wayne Erbsen's "Log Cabin Pioneers", frontier folks living with outhouses apparently had a similar winter time problem with freezing cold toilet seats. Being creative Americans, they developed an ingenious solution. During the winter they simply kept the toilet set behind the wood cook stove and brought the warmed seat with when they had to go to the outhouse! Now that solution would have certainly worked in our situation, but I never could quite bring myself to the point of carrying a spare toilet seat with me to the bathroom. Somehow I would feel just a tad conspicuous taking it in, and even more so if folks were watching while I took my toilet seat back OUT of the bathrooms. I mean, who's to believe that the toilet seat is really mine and I'm not just nicking one from the Park Service? So I didn't feel like carrying a spare seat with me although I could certainly understand why somebody would do that. Maybe someone makes an inflatable model that would fit in your pocket "just in case", kind of like those inflatable neck supports for sleeping on airplanes only several sizes larger? You could carry it inside in your pocket and then blow it up while in the stall, and that way you wouldn't have the embarrassment of folks watching you carry a toilet seat in or out of the bathrooms. Of course, what the other folks in the bathroom would think if they heard you inside a stall blowing up your portable toilet seat I'm not quite sure (and explaining might be very awkward indeed!), but at the very least you wouldn't freeze your derriere the way we had to and that would be worth a lot. If any Gentle Reader has a bright idea about this, please drop us an email!