BIG TRIP Chapter 4

Twenty years ago in the spring of 2002 I drove around the country by myself for six weeks. Here is another installment from the journal I kept on that trip.

-rh

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DAY 8 Thursday May 9th 2002 Travel day from New Orleans to tiny little Sabine, Texas. Just a 5 or 6 hour drive, give or take a little traffic. Beautiful drive thru Louisiana marshland and swamps. Many long stretches of raised highways over swampland. Also traversed a few very tall bridges over the swamps and over the Mississippi River outside of Baton Rouge. The area is in the midst of something like a drought. Yet there is water everywhere. (The swamps.) Ironic. New Orleans hasn’t had ANY rain for almost a month. Not sure if I’ve mentioned it yet in these pages but they have been matching or breaking record high temperatures there for several consecutive days now. Even as I left this morning, their forecast remained grim...

Sea Rim State Park

Well, Sabine was easy enough to find. Passed thru Janis Joplin’s hometown of Port Arthur this afternoon. An ugly little burg with nothing but oil refineries everywhere you look. No relief for your eyes anywhere. I followed Texas Highway 87 all the way to where it ends: here at the entrance to Sea Rim State Park. Very nice man named David at the entry gate. He was very polite and helpful. He informed me that out of 80 campsites in the park, there was only one person camping other than me. I pretty much have the whole place to myself, and I was very pleased to learn that camping on the beach is permitted. Problem is, as I soon found out: the beach is disgusting. So much dried crispy crunchy dead seaweed all over the beach that one can hardly reach the water’s edge without having to tromp thru several yards of it. When you do reach the shore, the water is so thick with seaweed that swimming is out of the question. To make matters much worse there is also a great deal of trash in the water and on the shore: ice bags, broken buckets and lids, cups, cans, plastic bottles, trash bags. It’s disgusting. I made one trek down the shoreline, picking up a few shells along the way. But the seaweed got in my sandals and on my ankles with every little wave that crashed on the shore. Gross. I had been looking forward to spending a few days here in seclusion, just drawing in my sketchbook, writing postcards and journal entries, reading, and playing my guitar. However, I have decided that I am not likely to enjoy much of anything in this desolate and sadly neglected place. Certainly the birds and the sounds of the waves are great. But I arrived here today in extreeem heat, with no tree cover whatsoever for shade. If I were to stay here for even a day, it would be a day spent huddling in the shade under my tarp all day to avoid the sun. There is no beach worthy of even walking here. And I have no desire whatsoever to sit by my tent for hours on end. So, bearing all this in mind and in spite of the fact that I am already one day ahead of schedule, I have decided that I will rise with the sun tomorrow and tear down camp in order to press on. Being a Friday, it is the beginning of a couple days when finding an available campsite is not as easy as it is during the week. So I might spend a long day in the car, putting as much of Texas behind me as possible, eventually stopping to stay in a hotel room, perhaps! Now there’s something to look forward to - a mattress! A roof! Air conditioning! Cable TV! I think I can make it all the way thru San Antonio and beyond before stopping. Right now, I’m thinking that Kerrville, TX looks like a 7 or 8 hour drive. Even that is not a terribly long time to be on the road. If I’m feeling up to it, I may even drive for 10 or 12 hours. Texas is a wide m@#%erf^*ker and beyond it I’ll still have to get thru New Mexico and AZ, of course.

Sea Rim State Park made the Top 3.

Anyway, that’s the tale of the trip for today. Sea Rim State Park: quite a disappointment. The good thing is that, among other things, I will only be charged for a single night here. (The original plan was 3 nights/4 days!) Also - I am now free to push on across Texas a full FOUR DAYS ahead of schedule! Tomorrow will be the 2nd travel day in a row, but I’m looking forward to it.

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Afterthoughts:

On my way out to the gulf-side campground at Sea Rim State Park, I stopped briefly in Sabine Pass. It was just a wide spot in the road (Texas Highway 87). They had a gas station, a little diner, and two little general stores. I pulled into the parking lot of one of the stores then went in to buy bread, peanut butter, jelly, chips, ice and some sodas. I still have the little commemorative Snow White jar the jelly came in…

The guy at the front entrance booth at the park was a super nice guy. A short, fat, talkative little guy with a mustache. A Navy veteran. He gave me all kinds of maps and brochures and stuff. Just signing in to the campground I spent almost an hour talking to him. He pointed out a lot of different birds flying and feeding all around us as we stood there talking, and he gave me a huge folded up brochure with full color pictures of Texas Birds. He was just a really talkative and helpful person. He even suggested an alternate route out of town when he learned that I was heading west all the way to California. They had a few little souvenir type things that they sold there: t-shirts, beach towels and crap. I bought myself a dark green ball cap with an alligator on it.