I arrived at Fontainebleau State Park on Friday, January 10 for five nights. After I left Palmetto State Park in Texas, I stopped to stay a couple days in Cypress, Texas to see a friend David. We met back in August at Boulder County Fairgrounds Campground in Longmont, Colorado. He was traveling for a few months in his converted camper. He converted it from an ambulance. It draws attraction and questions. People are a little surprised to see him pull up in it. There are plenty of converted school buses in the travel environment, but not many ambulances. I am not sure I’ve ever seen one other than David’s.
Cypress is a suburb of Houston. My only previous experiences with Houston have been driving through it on I-10 west to east as I’ve migrated from my Fall-Winter excursions in the southwest to the beaches of Northern Florida. Driving I-10 through Houston is kind of a nightmare. There is so much traffic and it lasts for at least sixty miles. By the way, Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States.
I had a different experience this time, avoiding most of I-10 as Cypress is northwest of the central Houston Metro Area. David has a nice house on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood. We drove into Houston one day so he could give me a different view and perspective on the town. We went to a well-to-do area with a shopping mall called The Galleria on Westheimer Road. It is a combination of some typical stores I would see at Danbury Mall and several stores that I understood to be designer-wear and are more likely to be found perhaps in expensive areas of Manhattan, with names I had not before seen and at times could not pronounce. After this, we went to a Dimassi’s, a restaurant with an extensive Mediterranean buffet, for nearly three hours. David told me a great deal about his growing up and family life in Bolivia. He came to the United States at the age of twenty-five and built himself a career in photography, eventually owning and running his own studio.
From Cypress, on January 8, I drove around the outskirts of Houston, avoiding I-10, and drove to Sam Houston Jones State Park in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The campground is newly renovated due to Hurricane Laura in 2020. It has new concrete driveways at each campsite and all the roads through the park are newly paved with asphalt. It was a damp chilly day when I arrived, but that did not keep me from riding a three-mile loop on the roads, finishing about thirty miles just before dark. The next day, January 9, it rained all day. This was the first real rain I had in daytime hours since I was at Brainard Lake on September 4! Four months!
I arrived at Fontainebleau on January 10. There is a rail-trail, called the Tammany Trace, at Fontainebleau. It is about twenty-eight miles long with good asphalt, kind of a cyclist’s paradise. There are several road crossings, but the roads are almost exclusively empty of cars, not busy roads by any means. Some are more like driveways. The scenery, almost the entire length, is forest with tall pine trees and swamp. I was at Fontainebleau for five nights and did bike rides four days, nearly 140 miles.
I met a couple from Connecticut who were traveling west with a couple from New Hampshire. Both couples had Mercedes campervans. They had left New England recently, being about a week into their trip, heading for Arizona. I talked with a guy named from Quebec. He and his wife were heading west, too. He told me they had spent a couple months in Spain over the summer, utilizing Airbnb, saying it was a good experience. I met several people on the beach at Lake Pontchartrain one night at sunset. One was a woman from New Orleans, originally from Switzerland. She comes to Fontainebleau several times during the year for the view and quite at sunset. She’s a nurse on a cancer ward in a position where work is both rewarding and at times stressful. She had a set of paints spread out on a picnic table and had apparently been painting. She seemed cheerful. The sunset that night was totally great.
It rained some of the time at Fontainebleau, too. This means the environment was optimum for frogs. Both days and nights had a fairly constant background sound of croaking males. I looked that up, not knowing if it was both genders who sing their song, according to several online sources. The females are attracted to the males by the sound of the croaking!
I also noted that my Merlin app did not detect nearly as many bird species as was the case last I visited. I was here for Christmas 2023, and there were well over twenty different species. This time only about ten.
I left Fontainebleau on January 15, driving about 250 miles to Davis Bayou Campground. Davis Bayou is part of Gulf Islands National Seashore. On the way, I stopped in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi to see two friends, John and Wendy. They are from the Danbury area, and they are traveling more or less full time around the country.
Davis Bayou is near Biloxi, Mississippi. I met my friend Linda there for five days. We met over a year ago at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona and have stayed in touch. Her camper, she named it Gilbert, is a Class C Ford Diesel, much larger than my van. We sat and talked each night for awhile in Gilbert. We took a couple daytime walks, did a couple bike rides, too.
The park has decent roads for cycling, though they are not long. One loop utilizing the paved roads results in about six miles. I would do 4-5 loops on my rides. When Linda and I rode, we took a route into the town of Ocean Springs, then up and over the two-mile bridge into Biloxi. On the way back, we rode along the bay beach, past the Ocean Springs harbor, then along a road with ocean-front mansions. It was scenically diverse and impressive.
Not to be outdone by my stay at Palmetto, I found myself chased by two dogs on a side road I took one day. I also had a flat tire about ten minutes after I escaped them. I guess I was fortunate that the dog-chase and flat were not simultaneous.
Now for a good-boy dog story. Linda and I were sitting at the picnic table by my van, the afternoon I arrived, when a guy walked by with his dog. Every campground seems to have several dogs. It is very common in parks with RVs, though people with tents have dogs, too. Of course.
The guy’s name was Denny. His dog was a rescue he found at another campground back around Memorial Day. The dog was running around the campground, looking skinny and unwell. Denny seemed to have a soft spot for him. He told us he had lost another dog a few months before Memorial Day. He spent some time with the wandering dog, then told the park ranger “let me think about this overnight” regarding keeping him. The ranger had told Denny that the dog had belonged to a homeless woman that had been camped out in the woods near the campground, and the authorities had removed her or forbidden her from camping there. She left the dog when she vacated.
Denny decided to keep the dog. He took him in, took him to the vet, where there were a number of issues with required shots and medicines for tapeworm and other concerns. It was not inexpensive, and he laughs about it, telling us he named the dog Cash. They are the best of buddies. He said Cash goes with him everywhere. Cash is an American Stratford Terrier. He has a great temperament, too. He was a friendly spirit to be around for the fifteen minutes or so we talked with them. And Denny, well - he’s the hero of the day ...
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