The old Capital building

This is the "old" capital building. Their brochure says "High on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River stands Louisiana's Old State Capital, a Gothic architectural treasure. The 150 year-old statehouse has withstood war, fire, scandal, bitter debate, abandonment and an occasional fistfight." We did a self tour of the inside of this building. They have all the rooms set up with various displays as it is no longer used for any obvious government business. One of the rooms had a hand gun on display that was "believed" to be the gun that killed Governor Long. We were going to spend more time walking around the river edge as they have quite a park area there, but the 30% chance of rain started to approach 100% so we just went back to the parking building, got our car and headed back to the motel. For those of you in the far North, the temps were around 77 today. Tomorrow we will get up fairly early and drive 468 miles to San Antonio, Tx.

When we got back I noted that the power plug for the 12 cooling for our new Coleman "ice" box was acting strange. Opened it up and sure enough had a intermittent connection. A quick trip to Wal-Mart and got a small soldering iron and fixed that. I brought multiple items, but no soldering iron. Then tried to read the pictures out of my camera and the drivers failed and asked me to insert my dirver CD. Right! That thing is 1100 miles away. So got out a usb memory card reader and pulled the pictures. Garmin says the trip has so far covered 1119.55 miles in 23:05 travel time for an overall average of 48.5 mph.

Capital of Louisiana

After the visit to Nottoway, we had Garmin take us to a eating place called George's. This is one of a small chain 4 bar and grill type places around Baton Rouge. We went to their original location. It was very "local" and probably few tourist ever go there. Our link to the place was a hint from my sister in Canada about a place called Georgies had good local food. Well only thing we could find close on Google was George's for local food. We had their Shrimp po-boy. It was good. The building is directly under the I-10 interstate so you actually could hear trucks driving overhead as you ate. Yes, I would go back. The local Constables (we know them as police) were eating there and there were several 150's outside. Next stop was go north into downtown area of Baton Rouge. We went to the current state Capital building that was completed in 1932. It was build during the 1930's during the depression after much convincing by governor Huey P. Long. Not everyone was happy as in 1935 Long was assassinated at the capital. That lead to a long investigation that we will not cover at this time. The picture was taken from an outside observation deck up on the 27th floor of the capital looking south towards the main city. There was some barge activity on the Mississippi river seen on the right side of the picture.

Nottoway Plantation

Today we stayed in the Baton Rouge area. We first visited the Nottoway Plantation that is about 20 miles south of Baton Rouge along side the Mississippi river. See picture included. I am afraid once you have seen 2 of these Plantation homes you have seen them all. This one was pretty and interesting, but quite similar to the one we visited yesterday in Natchez. This one was completed in 1859 after 4 years of construction. It has 53,000 square feet and was paid for by John Hampden Randolph for around $80,000. The current owner is obviously working to refirbish the building plus building more cabins or such making it into a glorified bed and breakfast. I guess if you stay there you have to get up and out early to accomodate the tours. We went on the 9 am tour.

Day 2 Louisiana

Greetings from Louisiana. This morning we were in Memphis. Memphis is much like you see it in the movies. Kind of seedy and dreary in places, but as we drove around, we were surprised to see all the trees in the city, too. The residential areas have so many trees all over the place. It gives it a small town feeling. We decided to drive by Graceland in the light of day. We had gone by there Sunday night. I'm glad that we did as it was much more impressive at night than during the day. Those beautiful front gates were closed and you could see the house up behind them all lit up and the ground had colored lights around. This morning it was a nice looking home. It is much smaller than I had thought it would be. We did not do the tour through it. Just stopped and took pictures and were able to walk inside the gates a little ways. We could see the Lisa Marie (air plane that he used) across the street. The tours do not start until 10 and we wanted to be on our way before then. In just a few minutes we were out of Tennessee and into Mississippi. It is a pretty state. It reminds me of Wisconsin with all the trees along the road. You could see some pastureland behind the trees with some green grass. After all the ice and snow that we have had this winter, it was a breath of fresh air to see the green. The temperature was in the 50's when we started out, but got up to 70 by the afternoon. It's February - and it is 70 degrees out! Unbelievable.
There were not many houses along the road, but the ones we did see all seem to have pillars out in front. Even the rest stops had a decidedly southern look. Most of the rest stops also have 24 hour security guards. We talked with one of them and he was a retired Memphis fireman. Quite a character. Not an Obama fan either.
When we got to Jackson, we took the Natchez Trace Parkway down to Natchez. It was a beautiful drive on a narrow two way road and the posted speed limit was only 50. Rich thought that was great. It was a very relaxing, leisurely drive. We drove around the town looking at the "plantations" as they call these beautiful old homes. We saw this one, Stanton Hall (pictured above) and the sign said that it was open for tours until 3:30 and it was 3:23 when we pulled up. There was a gift shop, so I wanted to at least have a peek inside of it. When I got in there, they said that the last tour started at 3:30, so we got to go through the house. It was built in the 1800's and in 1930's, the Natches Garden Club took it over and have restored it to look the same as when the Stanton's lived there. A member of the family has donated some of the furniture and paintings that were originally in the house back to them. They have a restaurant, a silver shop and a gift shop on the grounds. It is quite a place and is used by the Garden Club and also is used for weddings and special events. After our tour, it was time to get back on the road and start for Louisiana. We got to Baton Rouge around 6:30, found our motel and are tucked in for the night. Tomorrow we will explore Baton Rouge, have some Cajun food and hope to see some of the bigger plantations out in the countryside.

Trip has started

We started our trip this morning at about 6:30. The weather was good for traveling but about 33 when we left home. We were in 34 deg nearly all of Il then at St Louis it started to warm up a bit. My goal for the first part of the trip was to hit 60 (degrees not MPH). Well we hit 70 degrees and MPH today. That would put us well ahead of goal now. Tonight we are in Memphis Tn. Nancy is watching the Grammy awards and I am working the computer. As we drove south on I-55 in Missouri at the southern part of the trip we went through an area where they had been through a very bad ice storm a little over a week ago. All of the trees had broken branches. At first I thought it was just a local look with the tops of the trees bent down, then on closer look could see they were all recently broken off by the ice storm. This went on for around 75 miles. We stopped at a rest stop that would have been a very pretty rest stop previously, but see all the broken branches all over the ground which was what everyone with trees was dealing with. Tomorrow we head on south to end up in Baton Rouge via the Natchez Trace Pkwy and through Natchez to see some of their old Antebellum homes (if I can find any). Garmin says we traveled 629.74 miles since start of trip (today).

About ready to roll

The cold weather here at home has finally broken. We did not have a below zero temp this am and it got up to around 45 today with sunshine. We are still on schedule to head south Sun am. We want to get to Memphis which is about 623 miles south. There is no reason we should not get started as weather looks good. Hitting a good weather window has always been my worry, but according to the forecast there will be no problems except for possible rain. Rain I can take, it is ice I worry about. The van is gassed up and we are starting to pack stuff other than clothes that we want to take.
If we did anything wrong with this trip so far, it was not starting about a month sooner to get away from some awful cold weather. We will probably feel silly driving south in such warm weather.

Look who's blogging now

It sounded simple, so I decided to try it as we may have a good use for a blog as a simple travelogue in the future weeks.
Our voyage is being planned with a schedule that depends on the ability to start directly on our selected departure date.
The basic plan is to load up the van and drive south until we reach 60 - on the thermometer not on the speedometer.
More about our plans in the near future.