Thursday, 20 February 2020
Today's 2-20-2020. Some date.
I wasn't intending to go far today. There's a state park a little ways south of Bossier City that charges much less than this KOA, so I figured I'd head for that.
When I was packing up the cabin so nothing would move around while we were driving, I discovered that YET AGAIN that same drawer latch had broken. So I had to stop everything and locate an RV supply store in the area, which was fortunately just a few miles down the street from the KOA.
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| today's route |
The store was actually farther away than I thought, and I was headed west away from town and out into the country by the time I found it. I passed a large GE Transformer plant (and wondered if they'd had any movie-like trouble).
The RV supplier said they had a different brand of the same thing I'd been using and hoped this brand would work better for me. I hope so too, but I also think the contents of that drawer've been just too heavy for the catch to hold, especially since it was put on crooked in the first place.
Next, to the Barnes & Noble
The B&N is on the east side of town, but it was straight down 70th Street, which is the road the KOA and RV supply store are on (in the west), making navigating easy.
Back past the GE plant, around the south end of the airport runway - 70th St. has been designated State Route 511 and runs for miles and miles, acting like a business route by servicing many companies. Also shopping centers, which is where the B&N is.
I was there looking for 2 authors: Deborah Lipstadt, who writes about the Holocaust, and Cheryl Strayed, who wrote the book Wild.
The B&N said they found lots of Lipstadt's books in their catalog but had none of them in stock. I pointed out that the Holocaust is an important subject and she's an important writer on the subject and they really should have a few of them available. But I was disappointed. I own and often watch the movie Denial, about her having been sued for libel based on the book she wrote of the same name, and I was hoping to read the book she wrote about the trial. Guess I'll have to try somewhere else.
But I did find and buy Wild. I'd seen the movie with Reese Witherspoon and wanted to read the book that inspired it. I read a bit in the store and found it hard to stop reading.
On to the AFB
I was getting a little desperate (again) to get rid of my recyclable glass and thought I should at least give the air force base a try. I stopped at their Visitor Control Center (spooky name) near the west gate and found the soldiers at the counter didn't know they even had recycling on the base. But another soldier on my side of the counter told them exactly where to find it (across from the commissary) and said it accepted glass - and that's as close as I got to it. Of course they wouldn't let me go on the base, and I couldn't find anyone at the Visitor Center who was willing to go to the recycling place for me, so that was that. Not unexpected but disappointing anyway.
On the road to the campground
My road directions said the campground was only about 25 miles further along the road but it would take nearly an hour to get there. Which it did, which should give you an idea of the road conditions.
I crossed a very large unlabled river, that I found out later was the Red River. I'm so used to it doing something functional - like form the boundary between Texas and Oklahoma - that it seems odd to have it meander through the state of Louisiana like any old river.
I guess the ground must have already been saturated by previous rains, because it rained a fair amount yesterday but not enough to account for the flooding I saw all day. Gutters in town, drainage ditches out in the country, crop fields, front yards, bayou and river banks, all flooded way above the level that's obviously usual for them.
I drove through the community of Koran, which seems an odd name, but I can't find any information online about it except that it's a "populated place" in Bossier Parish with an elevation of 190'. And I can tell you that it's got a church named Koran Baptist Church, which just sounds odd.
Then I was in Webster Parish.
I saw blooming daffodils and a large flock of sheep, with one young one running to keep up with mom. Very cute.
The road seemed like one long series of s-curves - which accounts for the longer-than-usual driving time, I suppose.
Lake Bistineau State Park
The first thing I saw inside the park was a sign saying: "All Horses Must Have Current Coggins." Yet another odd thing, since I've never heard of coggins, with or without horses. But I looked it up and found it's the name of a test for Equine Infectious Anemia, which is a viral disease transmitted by biting insects for which there is currently no treatment and no cure. Sounds terrifying and I can't imagine why I haven't heard of it before. Although the symptoms sound like the Potomac Horse Fever I heard about some years ago, and that one of my favorite authors, Dick Francis, wrote about in his mystery Driving Force.
On the way to the campground, I found the lake was so flooded they'd even closed the boat ramp - which seems to me an indication of real flooding. And in fact, a number of the campsites had flooding problems to one degree or another. Add to that the fact the campground was built on a slope and had a winding road to allow more sites to be near the (flooded) lake, and I had trouble finding a spot to stay in. In another life, I'd have liked to stay near the lake, which had a lot of cypress in it and was very picturesque, but I was quite worried there might be alligators, which were a problem I didn't think the dogs needed.
And the campground's wifi signal was down, had been down for a while, and this fact had been ignored on their website that claimed they had a functioning wifi signal (the staff told me all this without even bothering to apologize when I pointed out I'd come here because they claimed to have the connection). Turned out my hotspot didn't work there either, so I spent a quieter time there than usual and decided not to stay more than the one night.
But I saw a large flock of Cardinals, which was nice. I don't remember ever seeing more than 3 Cardinals together before (dad, mom, fledgling) and thought they just kept to themselves. Not today, though. Very pretty.
And I saw a Red-headed Woodpecker and a Kingfisher. All very nice.
I replaced the broken drawer latch, and this time tried to empty it a bit. The only problem with that is that every place already had stuff stored in it, so I had to do some shuffling. Now the drawer is lighter and there's a different brand of fastener on it, so if it breaks again I'll have to try the only other thing I know to do, which is to drill new screw holes to put the latch on straight, instead of slightly crooked as it is now. But maybe I'll be lucky this time.
When I took the dogs out for their last walk before bed, we started walking toward a parking area away from the campground, to skirt a large field with scattered brown scrubby leafless bushes. Dexter, and then Gracie, seemed to perk up and started to stare at the field - not really alerting as if they'd seen deer, but definitely showing a generic interest in the field. So I stopped and looked more closely and suddenly realized some of those scrubby bushes were actually deer. Quite a few of them. And quickly wheeled the dogs around to walk in the other direction before they realized that there really were deer there. Close call.
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