To Texas and back again

Palmetto Island was one of the very best campgrounds we’ve visited so far, in any state.  It had spacious, mostly wooded sites, a lot of morning bird song and a laundry facility – free! The park even had wifi. We decided to stay two nights and relaxed mostly, with only a quick trip to Dollar General for water and charcoal.  Fellow campers were heading for Sam Houston Jones SP near Lake Charles so we tried to book a site also but got tangled up in reserveamerica.com’s convoluted system and gave up.

When we we left we headed west along the coast and did a little birding, including a lunch stop on a dike in Rockefeller WMR where we watched the alligators watching us and viewed (from a safe distance) a controlled burn at the end of the road. There were many (seedy) RV camps along the road but we chose to cross the border into the first park we saw in Port Arthur, Texas, a facility right under the causeway and on the Sabine River. It was a large paved area with a view of a Cheniere LNG plant,  a huge oil refinery and empty tankers coming down the intracoastal waterway. When I checked email again, a confirmation had come in from Sam Houston Jones SP so we reluctantly headed back into Louisiana in the morning.

The road back provided us with some really good birding.  A flock of terns on the beach – Fosters, Caspian and Royal – were close by, a flock of small peeps (probably western sandpipers). A stop at Paveto Audubon Sanctuary gave us a nice early morning walk even though there weren’t too many birds.  As we drove north we were treated to the brief appearance (up and back into the ditch) of a large rail and more than a few glossy and white ibis, egrets, shorebirds, especially willets, and one unidentified sandpiper. We walked the boardwalk at Sabine NWR with some nice people from nearby Louisiana and gave them a tour of the van before heading to the campground.

When we first started thinking about this trip, Ron bought Guy Fieri’s Diners Drive-ins and Dives and talked about all the road food we would eat.  Except for a few notable meals (beignets at TCoons,  the boudin at M&S Deli) it hasn’t really turned out that way.   We’ve had some upscale meals, a couple of fast food type stops and more than a few campground meals based on leftovers. But on the road to the SP we spotted a place called Sausage Link so we had to make a u-turn and pull over.  It was the real deal (as Guy would say) filled with local working folks and people picking up meats to bring home for dinner. I had the oyster burger (fried oysters on a hamburger bun) and Ron had their famous smoked sausage.  We split an order of boudin balls (really good) and, happy as oysters, finished our drive to the park.

Sam Houston was a big disappointment. It was crowded and the site we had was short, crumbling and backed onto the playground. But we tucked in and made the best of it. The next day we took a long walk in the woods and tried to decide how to spend the rest of the day. There are many casinos in Lake Charles (all those local oil workers with time on their hands and money to burn) so we thought we’d pick one and have a Saturday night’s entertainment. We decided it would be more fun to go to the one with the racetrack; slot machines are boring and poker machines, well, been there done that. So off we went.  It wasn’t until we were nearly there that we realized we were more than halfway back to Texas. So after a delightful dinner at trackside, and after watching (and betting on) nine races, we spent another night in a casino parking lot. As an aside, we wagered about $30 (mostly on horses with “CAT” in their names; thanks for the system, Jen) and won exactly $30.20.  Came out ahead again. Barely.  It was getting cold so we watched the ninth race on TV from the casino. The horse we would have picked, CatWhoDat, (20-1 shot) charged out of the gate and led the pack for 9/10 of the mile before fading to sixth.  Our hearts nearly stopped. We would not have been happy had he won.

Drove the rest of the way into Texas and spent the night in Village Creek SP, a park nearly devastated by last fall’s hurricanes.  Tomorrow we drive to Houston for a night in a hotel and a Tuesday flight home. I’ll pick up the blog in a little over a week.