Exploration was the word of the day today so we hopped into Charlotte, bought some fuel and headed northeast on US-79. We passed through Minden where we briefly searched for the Minden Historical District but, strangely, it did not seem to exist, at least at our map coordinates.
Failing at that, we continued up 79 to the Germantown Museum which was closed because this is Louisiana and hardly anything is open on Sunday. Peg shot a few pix over the fence of some old, small wooden buildings behind the Museum itself. Back to US-79 again, we continued mostly north through Homer and Haynesville before crossing the border into Arkansas. In Arkansas, we continued north through Emerson and into Magnolia where we turned west. We were then back in Louisiana on US-371 headed southwest and then southeast back to Minden. While there were a few nice houses in the rural parts of the loop north and back to Minden, most of the homes looked like these folks live a tough, brutal sort of life with few luxuries. We noted there were a large number of oil industry installations in the area.
The houses are built on ground which is covered by many small hillocks and there are few drainages. Much of the terrain was covered by small ponds or bayous with forests of cypress; swamps. Numerous turtles were seen enjoying the sunshine while perched on logs and limbs jutting from the swamp bottom. We spotted some cardinals and bluebirds but not anywhere near the numbers we witnessed in Texas.
Peggy drove today so we mutually decided she needed a reward and we went to a restaurant called The Crawfish Hole #2 not far from our spartan RV park. Neither one of us are big crawdad fans but we were lucky because they also serve other stuff. Peg went for grilled chicken (C+) and I had the shrimp (B+) along with cole slaw and fries plus 3 hush puppies each. The hush puppies were actually good and the fries would have been terrific if they would have been hot. We did not get as rewarded as we thought we were going to be.
We took a few pix. To see ’em, click here