Swamp Thang

Our next stop after leaving the Lone Star Sate was a great little state park in northwestern Louisiana called Lake Bistineau State park.  Don’t even try to pronounce it right.  What you learn in Louisiana is that unless you are from there, you can’t pronounce it.  Now I like to think that I can get in the spirit of a place and kind of slide into the local vernacular a bit, but Louisiana-speak is a near native of Latin for a Midwestern boy.  In fact, we were visiting a bamboo rodmaking Baptist minister friend of mine (yes, you read that right) a few days ago and he was giving us some directions to our next stop.  He said: “just head down here to the stop sign and hang a right.  Take that road to the town of crowVUL, which you northerners would call CROW-ville.  Then follow that road up to the Town of DEL-hi, which if you are from India, you would call Delhi.”  There is no rhyme or reason to it and you can’t fake it.  You are either from there, or your not. 

All that aside, Lake Bistineau was lovely.   It was a quintessential, postcard type Louisiana spot.  Huge pine and deciduous trees reaching right up to the water of the lake, which is full of giant Bald Cypress trees with Spanish Moss hanging down from the branches.  We just hung out, hiked around a bit, and enjoyed the view.  We were planning on renting a canoe to explore the lake a bit, but canoe rentals don’t start until “summer” (after Memorial Day), ignoring the fact that it was about 90 degrees in the shade while we were there.  The other highlight comes when there is no light and you can hear the sounds of the night.  Hollow tree frogs calling out their sweet song to the ladies so loud it sounds like your high school tuba player warming up in your ear.  Crickets, bullfrogs, owls, and other unknown sounds combine intro a cacophony of indigenous audio.  It sounded EXACTLY what the bayou should sound like.  While I loved the experience, I slept with earplugs.  There is no way I was getting to sleep otherwise. 

After our visit to Lake Bistineau and our stop to visit my rodmaking friend, we headed to Vicksburg, Mississippi for a tour of the Civil War Battlefield, but we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves.  We were going to go to New Orleans, but when you are traveling around the country in your own little world, you don’t notice things.  Things like, the weekend we had planned to head down to N’owlins, was the same weekend as a little thing called Jazz Festival and 350,000 other people had beat us down there.  Didn’t think it was quite the right time to drag Francine through the French Quarter.  Oh well, next time.

Some photos of the Lake, just a taste of the Bayou.  I have been experimenting with an old photo technique I used to use a bit, pinhole photography.  Pretty cool when combined with digital cameras.  High tech and low tech collide and create some pretty interesting results. Enjoy.