One Lap

Date: 11/08/2013

Day: 43

Location:  New Orleans, LA

Miles Today: 326

Total Miles:  9918

On the Road, Approaching New Orleans, Seen on the Road, A Quesiton for You, Tomorrow

On the Road

Our path today ran diagonally southwest from Montgomery across Alabama to the Gulf, then west though a thin slice of coastal Alabama and on to Louisiana.  About as deep in the old south as one can get.  And a bit of a long drive. 

Seen today on a coffee stop:  a young white woman, perhaps 22, exiting the establishment with coffee in hand, holding the door for a somewhat younger black man in need of caffeine.  Not a word exchanged.  Comity in the south.

The Colonel likes the --for want of a better word -- courtly language of the south.  People are polite enough to be civil in California, but there are more pleases and  thank yous, more sirs and mams here.  A lady at a drive through addressed the Colonel today as "baby."  "Thank you, baby" as she handed him the change.  That has not happed to him for some time, if ever before.  Heard today was a "Your Welcome" where the word welcome was swaybacked, a dip in tone in the middle of the word that the Colonel cannot coax from his lips.

At a table not far away yesterday evening, a black and a white woman sat in the silence of long companionship apparently unnoticed by those passing by.

A traveler can only report anecdotal evidence,  There is no telling what happens with these people out of the public eye, how they make decisions about, for instance, hiring and promoting people.  But the visible quotidian race relations here appear to be unstrained.

And, of course, New Orleans is poor.  It is poor and predominately black, like Detroit.  Is the poverty more bitter here than in Oakland?  Perhaps.  It seems so, but that may be an illusion.

 

Lots of flat today.

  

Approaching New Orleans

The approach to New Orleans is made over a 25 mile long causeway over Lake  Pontchartrain.  As the pictures below indicate, it is huge (630 square miles),  It is also shallow (12 to 14 feet on average -- not much different than San Francisco Bay.)  The lake is really an estuary, fresh water enters at one end, the other end is connected to the Gulf of Mexico -- it actually has small tides.  Lake P. was formed, according to Wikipedia (from which these two images are taken,) only single digit thousand years ago by alluvial deposits from the Mississippi river.

You can see the causeway on the right side of this picture.

 

 

 

The causeway is excellent road, three lanes in each direction.  The water is ocean blue, not Keys turquoise.

 

 If you look at this picture very closely, you can see New Orleans at the end of the road, like Oz or Venice.

 

Seen on the Road

 

This guy was moving a whole lot of cotton.  If Blake Edwards were still alive and making Pink Panther movies, that tripartite tailgate would fail and hilarity would ensue.

 It is not polite to mention gas prices to those in California.  Actually, one can buy gas for at least a nickel less than this around here.  The nice lady in the Shell station came out to laugh at the Californian taking pictures of her sign.

 

Tomorrow

All day(on foot?)  in New Orleans.  Picturesque pictures to follow.

 

A Question for You

A correspondent asks how many states this One Lap has touched.  Any idea?  Answer tomorrow.

 

Wellington Boot, Col.