We visited Louisiana yesterday! No, we didn’t take a quick trip to the land of Cajuns and crawfish, we drove to the picturesque Mississippi River town of Louisiana, Missouri.

We love small towns, and historic Louisiana, settled in 1817, has much to offer any visitor. One claim to fame for Louisiana is that the Delicious apple was developed here, and the Stark nurseries, which brought them to the world, are a major employer and famous around the globe.

Louisiana was an important stop for pioneers headed west, and a major river port in the glory days of riverboat transportation. Many riverboat captains and steamboat owners made their homes in Louisiana.

Louisiana’s prosperous past is reflected in the beautiful old houses lining its residential streets, including the beautiful gingerbread Victorian built in 1891 that was home to Missouri Governor Lloyd C. Stark.

There are also many handsome commercial buildings in the small downtown business district, including this one, home to the popular Eagle’s Nest Restaurant, and the neat stone building housing the Carnegie Library, built in 1905.

Folks in Louisiana are friendly, and justifiably proud of their town. Many said hello as they passed us on the sidewalks, or waved as we drove past. Louisiana is also known for its murals. More than 20 murals decorate buildings in town, depicting community and regional history. 

Many years ago we crossed the Mississippi River at Louisiana on the high, narrow Champ Clark Bridge, a five span truss bridge that carries U.S. Highway 54 across the river to Illinois. The bridge was built in 1928, and one trip across was enough for me! I scraped the exhaust pipe of our first motorhome trying to get over far enough for an oncoming eighteen wheeler to pass, which he did with inches to spare between our mirrors. In subsequent visits to the region, I have made it a point to travel the 30 or so miles north to Hannibal to cross the river on the wider four lane U.S. Highway 36 bridge.

State Route 79 goes from Louisiana to Hannibal, and if you’re in a big rig, it will test your nerves in a few places as it winds its way uphill and downhill as it follows the course of the river. Several pullouts lead to great views of the Mighty Mississippi, but they are not suitable for large RVs. But in our van yesterday it was a piece of cake.

We stopped at Mark Twain Cave and Campground to meet Ed and Marilyn Dray, longtime blog readers who spend their summers at the RV park, where Ed leads tours and Marilyn keeps the local hummingbird population busy at her feeders. It’s always nice to put faces with the names of the people we hear from, and Ed and Marilyn made us feel welcome as we sat under their awning and got acquainted. Be sure to check out their blog, The Happy Wanderers. It was a great day for playing tourist, and we had a wonderful time sightseeing in time in small town America.

Thought For The Day – A smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks.

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You’ve heard me say many times that our plans are set in Jell-O, and so it was yesterday. We fired up the bus, checked our tire pressures on our PressurePro tire monitor, emptied our holding tank at the dump station at the Meade, Kansas city park, filled up with fresh water, and pulled out about 10 a.m.

I had told Terry we’d have a short driving day, stopping either at the Elks lodge in Pratt, Kansas, a distance of about 95 miles, or maybe we’d turn north at Pratt and go up to Russell, on Interstate 70, which would have made it a 185 mile day.

On May 4, 2007 an EF5 tornado tore through the small town of Greensburg, destroying 95% of the community and killing eleven people. The National Weather Service estimated the winds from the tornado reached 205 mph. Today the hardworking citizens of Greensburg are rebuilding their community, and implementing “green” technology to save energy and help protect the environment.

Here is a link to photos of the town after the tornado hit, but on our drive through on U.S. 54, there was little evidence of the disaster. We wanted to stop and check things out off the main highway, but it was a cold, dreary day and I had a trucker climbing up my bumper, so we kept on moving.

By the time we reached Pratt, my fuel gauge was down below my comfort level, so I passed the turnoff to U.S. Highway 281, which would have taken us to Russell. We stopped at the Paso Junction Sinclair truck stop, where I bought fuel, and we decided to just continue on east on U.S. 54.

We passed through Wichita, where we have some folks who keep inviting us to stop for dinner, but we wanted to get to the Kansas City area to see Terry’s cousin Carolyn, who has been having some vision problems and may eventually need surgery. (I think Carolyn’s eye problems started after we visited last summer, and she saw me in my tighty whitey Fruit of the Looms. I guess if you rub your eyes that hard, it’s bound to do some damage!)

In Wichita we got onto Interstate 35 and drove north through the Flint Hills, arriving in the Kansas City area right at 5 p.m. I was afraid we’d get caught up in rush hour traffic, but on this Saturday afternoon, traffic was light. We pulled into the Grandview, Missouri Elks Lodge just as they were hosting a wedding reception in one side of the building, and holding the monthly mouse races in the other side. We’ve stayed at some friendly Elks lodges over the years, but I think this place tops them all. Everybody in the huge crowd seemed to take a moment to say hello and welcome us. We would have liked to have visited more, but we were pretty worn out, having covered 375 miles, a lot more than originally planned when we left Meade!

Back in the bus, I logged onto the internet to check e-mail and to check my bank account, as I do every day. I’m glad I did, because I discovered that the Sinclair struck stop in Pratt hit my debit card for three separate charges, two for $236.14 and one more for 256.98 (the actual amount of my fuel purchase), for a total of $729.08!

I immediately called my bank’s fraud line and reported the problem, and after checking the transaction record online, they stopped payment on the two bogus charges. Folks, check your records often, you never know what somebody is up to!

We have never had a problem in making online transactions, but several times when we have handed our cards to a clerk someplace, as I did yesterday, this has happened. It may be just dumb human error or it may be fraud, but whatever it is, I don’t want to be a victim.

Thought For The Day – Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber and not the toy.

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Yesterday started out windy here in Show Low, Arizona, but by noon it had calmed down quite a bit. My daughter Tiffany and her family stopped by for a visit in the early afternoon, and it’s always a treat to spend time with them.

My son-in-law, Jim, crawled under our Ford van to unbolt the winch we had mounted between our bucket seats to pull my motorcycle inside the van. With the bike gone, the winch was in the way, and Jim can use it on his ATV, so I told him if he’d remove it, he could have it. Jim also replaced a leaky gasket on the cap of the power steering reservoir on our bus, getting himself nice and dirty in the process.

Meanwhile, our two granddaughters, Hailey and Destiny, kept Terry and their mom busy, turning over rocks to look for bugs and taking a walk down to the playground here at Show Low Lake Campground.

Later in the evening we went to Tiffany and Jim’s house for a delicious pasta dinner Miss Terry made. My granddaughters have an endless supply of energy, and they just love crawling over their Grandpa. They are always coming up with something, including decorating me with their little plastic hair clips. The things I do to entertain those girls!

We have had a great time visiting our family and friends here in our old hometown, but Terry and I are both getting a bad case of hitch itch, and we’re looking forward to getting back on the road in a little over a week.

I’ve been looking at routes we can take to Sedalia, Missouri for the Escapade rally, and though we can get there in two or three days if we push it and take the interstates all the way, what fun is that? I think we’ll take Interstate 40 as far as Tucumcari, New Mexico, and then follow U.S. Highway 54 across the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and into Kansas.

U.S. 54 will actually take us across Kansas and into Missouri, within an hour or so of Sedalia. But, depending on our schedule, we may detour north toward Kansas City for a visit with Terry’s cousin Carolyn Henley and her husband Mel on the way. I have been doing some researching on the internet and have found several places I’d like to stop along the way to gather stories for the Gypsy Journal.

Whenever we can, we always prefer following the U.S. Highways and two lane roads in our travels. They are never as fast as the superslab, but we enjoy the slower pace, and that’s where we have found the real America.

Let’s face it, a Denny’s restaurant in Flagstaff, Arizona and a Denny’s in Toledo, Ohio are pretty much the same. My late friend Dave Baleria referred to it as Generica, the one size fits all cookie cutter land of corporate franchises that you can find at every interstate highway off ramp in the country.

We much prefer the small town diners and Mom and Pop businesses we find on the back roads. If you have lunch in any small town diner in America and do a little eavesdropping, by the time you finish your dessert, you’ll know who’s cheating on who, who just got their pickup truck repossesed, and who’s kid just got expelled from school.

And besides, the blueberry pie always tastes better in those places than the cardboard fare they serve in the chain restaurants!

Thought For The Day – Lead your life so you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.

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