Saturday 5 October
Yesterday is
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As a reminder, we are now into the non Florida leg of this trip. We will return to the sunshine state in a week’s time.
For the next two days we are taking a loop around Louisiana and will visit Natchitoches, Gibsland, Shreveport and Baton Rouge.
Ahead of us today we have 326 miles before reaching our destination of Shreveport.
We are going there to visit my Dad’s elder brother and to catch up with an old family friend.
The plan is to break the trip with a lunch stop at Natchitoches - home of Lasyones famous deep fried meat pies and the setting for the film Steel Magnolias. If time allows, we hope to stop at the Bonnie and Clyde museum in Gibsland.
After pottering about for a bit we got up at 7 and were in a taxi to the airport pretty swiftly saying goodbye to the lovely Bourbon Orleans hotel. Until next time !
There was some confusion at the airport as we asked to be dropped at the car rental place and we ended up at the terminal - turns out its only a short walk but with all our cases it was set to be a bit of a pain until a helpful chap loaded us up onto his golf cart and whizzed us over there.
It was nice and empty
and we had high hopes of a speedy get away but the Dollar agent was most unhelpful.
We had booked a premium car and it appeared they didn’t have any.
But we could take one from a lower class. Erm no, I don’t think so
we weren’t even being offered a refund if we did.
And nor were we able to go up a class either.
It must have taken a good 30 minutes of eye rolling, teeth clicking and sucking before we were despatched with a wave of the hand.
Really quite rude.
We had opted to go to the airport to pick up the car as it was on the way out of the city and we thought it would be preferable to battling with the traffic and horrendous roads in the centre.
Eventually we found something and were on our way at 8.15.
The satnav told us we had 1000 miles to go which almost gave me heart failure until realising it still thought we were in Orlando.
Phew it re set itself to tell us we had 4 hours to our first stop.
We reached Baton Rouge quite quickly
but missed a turn and ended up doing a complete loop - which lost us quite a lot of time.
The roads were really busy as there was a Louisiana State University football match on and the routes near the stadium were jam packed.
We ended up going over the bridge for a second time.
There was lots of road
and bayous
creepy abandoned school bus - proper horror movie stuff
and there is always one of these car repair places in those horror movies too 
and more road
and cotton fields
Before reaching Natchitoches at 1245
And discovering it was the weekend of their annual car festivall ( of course, proper holiday planning would have revealed this
).
It was rammed.
In some ways it added to the appeal of the place - it was really buzzing.
And in other ways it was a nightmare as everywhere was just chock full and my planned amble down the high street wasn’t going to happen.
Amazingly we managed to get a spot outside the restaurant.
Definitely a locals place.
Only one thing to have here is one of the famous Fatty deep fried meat pie.
Which we did with chips and gravy
I wasnt sure about it at first but as I went on I did quite like it. Andy says it reminded him of a Scotch Pie. The gravy was very flavoursome.
We thought it was quite funny that every server came over to ask if we were ok.
We could see them having a natter about us and we are sure that they did it because they wanted to hear us speak. I did duly oblige by declaring things to be absolutely super
.
The queue for the loo was interesting at the back of the restaurant in the storeroom
Opposite the big meat locker
Bill was less than $25 .
It was a bit of a shame that Andy didn’t want to look around - he was too busy trying to arrange the bank transfer for the paintings as things hadn’t gone to plan last night and he was having to phone to deal with it.
Of course being a Saturday and with the time difference it was a bit challenging.
And we had managed to find a place that seemed to have no Starbucks or anywhere similar with wifi !
I had a bit of a wander - it was great with music and everyone looking like they were having a great time. The stores were small and quite packed out though so I didn’t get to browse.
It was cool looking around
But time to get on the road again and say goodbye to