Moving On

It's Thursday morning and we are now camped just outside Baton Rouge, in the LSU football RV Park (well its the one everybody uses for the LSU Games). It is very quiet and I am writing this as the sun comes up. But what of Tuesday and Wednesday? Well Tuesday we had a quiet day. We got up to the news that our friend Paula had passed away that morning. Paula was the first of our Soggy Bottom Bunch of Friends, when she had introduced herself to us on the day before Thanksgiving 2007. She was a happy vibrant person who bounded from one activity to the next. She had made us feel very welcome at Soggy Bottom. Sadly she had contracted cancer which had finally taken its toll. This news was followed by Jim and Kathy saying fond farewells as they left us in order to return for their Bike Fest in Destin. We had had a great time with them and they had been very patient with us and our English ways. That evening we heard that they had arrived safely in Fort Pickens, near Pensacola. After the departure of our last link with Florida we used the free laundry facilities to do some washing, then went out briefly to get some cards from a Walgreens. Note: Walgreens is what I call a 'Formula' shop, as every one is almost exactly the same. First, they are built on a corner - they are a pharmacy, but they also sell bits of all sorts of things like a small Woolworths. They are often the first shop to appear in new estates, they are often quite competitively priced and along with their identical competitors, CVS - there are thousands of them.
We ate one of Connie's spaghetti sauces with, surprise, surprise, spaghetti as Sally had managed to get some Sally Legal non wheat spaghetti.
Wednesday, we got up and had something special - Sally made American pancakes, using her, now perfected, diet legal recipe of rice flour and Gram flour. The occasion for celebration? Why our wedding anniversary! - number 37, we think. Well I still love you Sally!!!
We then broke camp and moved on to Baton Rouge, with enough time to watch the sun go down on the Mississippi River and then go out for a romantic dinner for two at 'Sammy's Sports Bar and Fish Restaurant'. We had a great meal there -Sally had sauteed jumbo shrimp and I had Gumbo ( a soup - see From Blue Mountains to Blue Sea, October 2009, Jackson MS), which was completely different to my previous Gumbo, but still delicious, followed by Red beans on rice and pork chops (of which I boxed one,as I was too full). We rounded the night off with a Cold Stone Ice cream, as they have a Raspberry Sorbet, which is Sally Legal. I was forced into buying a coffee ice cream with brownie, pecan, chocolate and caramel blended into it. Again I brought half of it home to eat later.
I have no idea what we will do for the rest of today, but I think that the delights of Baton Rouge are calling.

The Trolley Song

Monday. It is a little know fact that New Orleans has electric trolleys (trams), Even less well known is that it is the oldest continuously operated trolley system in the world (1823). So today (Monday) is our chance to ride the trolley.
We had intended to return to the Audobon District to wander through the park, and perhaps go to the zoo. However as we passed the trolley terminus at the Leonidas district Jim suggested we ride the trolley. Seemed like a good idea, so we parked the van and jumped aboard a waiting trolley. The Trolley we are on is known as the St Charles Trolley as it travels down S Carrollton and then swings east and travels through the Loyola Univ., Audubon, Uptown, Touro and Garden Districts, past the Lee Circle and terminates at Canal St. These areas were built in Victorian times and have lots of grand houses fronting on to St Charles Ave, which is a wide boulevard lined with massive live oaks. The trolleys travel on an Up and Down line in the central reservation (US = Median)., so you can get a good view of all the houses we pass. As well as the Audubon Park and the Loyola University. Having taken the first part of the route, we jumped out at the start of St Charles Ave and bought ourselves a Stone Cold Ice Cream each. Stone Cold ice cream is a delicious ice cream, you choose the flavour and then choose what goes in to it, they then take your ingredients and blend them together with the ice cream. So I had Coffee with caramel and heath (dime , now Diem, bars) crushed in it. Sally found a dairy and wheat free Raspberry sorbet, which was very good. Jim had straight banana ice cream (no the bananas were not straight, the ice cream had nothing else in it) and Kathy had a green one, which could have been either mint of pistachio. Having had a break we hopped back on to another trolley and trolleyed right along St Charles Ave. We passed some wonderful big colonial houses, as well as some newer Art Deco houses. Many houses were decorated for Halloween. We had planned to go all the way to Canal St, but there were repairs being made to the track so we had to change from trolley to bus and it seemed to be a better idea just to get the trolley back, which is what we did. After this we were getting ready to eat, so instead of coming back to the trailer and cooking shrimp BBQ we went to a seafood restaurant called Bordreux's and has a seafood dinner, Sally had the dish of the day - rice and red beans with catfish, I had jumbo shrimp stuffed with crab. Both of them were delicious. After returning to the trailer we sat and watched Jim and Kath's home football (NFL) team the Jacksonville Jaguars lose badly to the Tennessee Titans. A great day.