Road Trip 2007

New Orleans, Chapter 14

The Trip Home And Some Reflections


This photo is for my friend Stu in Fruita, CO.  He loves shooting clouds.
 Myself, I am attracted to the different cloud layers, contrasting with each other.
New Orleans, August 29, 2007

The last week I was in New Orleans, there was a really active thunder storm.  I was driving West on St. Charles Street abreast of the Audubon Park when three simultaneous forks of lighting hit the park.  This lightning was so close to me that there was no time to even count to one.  The thunder was immediate and crashing like being between two cymbals, not the puny kind, the two foot in diameter kind.

There were a lot of thunder storms in New Orleans over the course of my August stay.  The storms usually dropped the temperature by five to ten degrees but dropping from 101 to 96 is still miserably hot.  At least the rain felt cool.  One storm lasted long enough to flood the intersections and sides of the city streets.  I had heard that the storm drainage system was blocked up so I wasn't surprised to see the water back up.


The bucket rack (above) was built by a girl, also a "Hands On" volunteer.  She made it for storage of clothes but could serve for storage of several different things.  A practical application of materials just sitting around, begging to be nailed together.

The dorm I lived in had various volunteer crews housed in it.  I was the only independent (the only person not associated with a larger group. )

While I was there, DCC (Disaster Child Care) swapped crews about three times.  A crew consisted of three women from any part of the country, thrown together to manage child care for people needing to stand in line for disaster relief.  Having somebody from DCC to look after their kid(s) while standing in line for sometimes hours, was a big big help.  

This is one of the earlier DCC crews.  They played cards and then invited me to play cards with them and then they played some more cards.  The first time I met them, they were, you guessed it, playing cards.  They worked also, eight hour shifts out at the Super (sports) Dome near downtown New Orleans.  The one time they weren't playing cards, they were making Play Dough, from scratch.  I was amazed how closely they duplicated the actual feel and texture and color of commercial Play Dough.  A big thanks ladies, for teaching me some new card games and for stepping up to help New Orleans

This dorm  besides housing me and DCC and Hands On also had kids from Americorps as well.  Both the kids from Hands On and Americorps, constantly worked hard and played hard.  They made me tired just from watching how active they were.
This young lady (Daisy) is smiling ear to ear because I just finished fixing a flat on her bike for her.  (See the brand new rubber on the rear wheel!)  She is part of one of the two Americorp groups to go through this dorm and she is typical of the enthusiasm and hard work I talked about, that these kids exhibit.  Her budget didn't allow for fixing the bike.

I had never heard of this government thing, Americorps before.  Offering kids out of high school and later, financing for their college education in return for a two year? contract to do state side volunteer work.  Sort of like the army without all of the dictatorial over seeing and uniforms.

Nothing lasts forever, whether it be good or bad, nothing lasts forever.  For me, I had promised myself to say my good byes and to leave on Saturday, September First.  The day before, I had given my car a happy meal of 5-30W Synthetic oil, supposedly a mileage inducing oil.  It must have worked because I typically got 22 mpg in spite of the fact of traveling 80+ on the interstates in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

The first leg of my journey out of Louisiana was clouded by a storm of bugs.  The entire front of my car looked like a bug wars battlefield.  I stopped at a gas station to clean them off of the windshield.  I asked one of the people gassing up in the same station, what they were.  He called them "Jack and Jill" bugs.  I presume that isn't the scientific name but possibly their name because of the frequent hook ups, appearing to hold hands or what ever it is bugs do.
This guy also cautioned me about leaving them plastered on the car too long as they tend to eat into the paint.  I may have won the battle but I also may have lost the war.

When I finally got the car washed, the service manager apologized for not getting all of them.  I simply replied, "Forget about it.  I fully expected to have to follow up with a wax/cleaner to get them all off."   Those little buggers cost me about three hours of scrubbing with Turtle Wax.

I didn't do much touring on the way home.  About the only significant thing is that I took the wrong turn out of Baton Rouge.  I was suppose to head towards Dallas but instead I got headed off to Houstin.  Since my destination goal was the Grand Canyon, it really didn't matter that much except getting to the Grand Canyon from Houstin, would be longer mileage wise, then from Dallas.  I did regroup and I finally got to Dallas.

I did do one side trip before the Grand Canyon.  I took a detour off into the Petrified Rock Forest.  The first attraction in the park was a "News Rock."  I couldn't imagine at the time, that this was a lead in to petroglyphs.  The Native Americans used the black oxide on the surface of the rock to scratch images into the rock.  There was no interpretation available to decipher the images or possibly it was just graffiti, Indian style.  I really don't know.   It was easy to imagine that it was a "News" rock.  Not one to deliver on the steps of your teepee though.
 

Every park has to have a critter or three.  This guy seemed to be a very large and healthy specimen of what I normally think of as a common fence lizard.  I am sure it has some exotic scientific name but Fence Post Lizard pretty much works for me.  If you see them turned upside down, they usually have dual blue stripes running down their belly.  Kind of sexy, like wearing thong underwear in the lizard world.

This little guy was tempting the lizard.

Finally, three pictures into the Petrified Forest and now a picture of a petrified log.  There are scientific explanations about how these were formed but I find them hard to believe.  My thinking is, if they were formed the way they say they were, how did it retain any of the wood characteristics?  In another words, why didn't the rocks form in huge clumps rather then as logs?  My theory is that Space Aliens left them here for us to ponder over.  Kind of like all of those oil deposits the scientists claim are "Fossil Fuel."  Wrong.  Dinosaurs and trees fell into oil but only added to the quagmire, they didn't produce it.

Pretty, isn't it?

What if these petrified trees were once alive and huge beyond our imagination and then compressed and formed by unusual high pressures, like diamonds were formed, to become rocks.  That I would believe, much more so then minerals soaking into trees and forming rock.  It makes more sense to me, How about you?  What is your theory?  

That's the neat thing about us humans, we can question scientific explanations.  It's not like all scientists are experts; being correct all of the time.  Even Einstein had fallibilitys as I am sure Stephen Hawkings has also.  Time has proven over and over, that agreement about a theory doesn't always hold out to be fact.

Different critters benefit from different flora, don't they?  Bee's are not the exclusive pollinators or harvesters of flowers.  In Red Mountain Pass, CO for instance, I observed flies doing the job.  Here, this is an apparent wasp of some kind.

Two great thinkers with their own theories about life, about scraping a living out of the desert after the tourists go home.


 You know that this little guy has one thing on his mind, not being the next meal for Willie E. Coyote.

A jumping off place.  The silly rangers put up a guard fence to protect viewers from accidents when what they should have done is install a spring board with a bungee cord attachment and a coin operated release to use the bungee cord.

For some reason, these two pictures just seemed to belong together.  I don't know this couple.  I just happened along as they were trying to pose each other singularly.  I volunteered to shoot them together as they jokingly reflected on using the resulting photo for Christmas cards.  Post card or Christmas card, a darn fine portrait even their Moms would be proud of.  I jokingly told them I was going to post their photo on the internet.  I got a good laugh out of that one.

Can you guess where this was taken?

These last six pictures are from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  I camped there two nights, the first night with a very wet three or four hours of thunder storms.  The second night was very pleasant.  My tent weathered the storms very nicely.  

What an adventure.   Thank you for tracking my travels.  Sometimes I wonder if anybody is going to read my web pages.  Lately, I have had visitors from around the world.  This inspires me and makes it worth while keeping a travel log like this.  I am now getting complete strangers telling me how much they enjoyed visiting my site.  I apologize for the huge content and I thank them.  

Opp's, I forgot to acknowledge a super nice couple touring from Germany.  When I arrived at the park September 3rd, there were only two unreserved sites for me, #55 for one night and #70 for the following night.  The couple from Germany who were moving into # 70 on the first night, agreed to swap sites with me so that I could have two contiguous nights in campsite #70.  Sweet!  Thank you.




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