The Deep South... YOIKS!

Dan:

One thing Jen forgot to put on the last blog entry about New Orleans... The locals seem to be taking it all with a bit of good spirit. They have a bumper sticker there that goes as follows: "Took my Chevy to the Levy, but the Levy was... GONE!"

Anyway having left New Orleans and the best state park camp site we have ever used, we headed for Destrehan Plantation. This is an 18th century sugar plantation that was pretty interesting. All the staff who do the tours have to wear period costumes... very silly! At the height of their success, the Destrehan family had over 200 slaves living in rather scanky wooden shacks. These slaves had a big hand in the uprising that led to the ring leaders being beheaded and their heads put on stakes for all to see... Hmmm... nice!



Happily things have changed quite a bit since then and Louisiana is actually a really nice state, the people were some of the friendliest we've met so far.

A quick visit to a Walmart Express-lube for an oil change and we hit the road again and made tracks towards Florida along the south coast. The drive to Florida was all interstate, so not very exciting, but we did pass through Mississippi (the state, not the river!) and Alabama (Richard and Tracy's CD was put on with "Sweet Home Alabama" at full volume!).

We finally arrived in Florida late last night and camped in St Augustine, the oldest established city in the USA. For the first night in months we were able to sleep with the tent open. Yep, it's luuuuurvly and warm :-) In the daylight we took a short drive around and saw the European architecture. Then we headed off to Daytona beach. For $5 a day you can drive about 10miles of the beech. Well, it would have been rude not to, wouldn't it :-) Unfortunately you are not allowed to splash in the sea so we made do with enjoying the drive and rescuing the locals who had no idea how to drive on sand! We ended up dragging one car about 40feet along the beech after he'd managed to get hopelessly bogged down in the sand!.





Jen:

This is where our "holiday" begins, we will be doing all the touristy things for the next couple of weeks before we head back to New York and home. Actually, it's not that bad - we are booked into Disney for the next 4 nights, 2 days in the theme parks and two in the water parks - Hehe, but appart from that the plan is to visit NASA and the Kennedy Space Centre tomorrow and after Disney head down to the Everglades National Park and then down to the Keys - there's a KOA down there with it's own bar on the beech, lol! :-) When we head back up we'll visit Miami and SEA WORLD! Wahoo! That, I am a little excited about. As Thankgiving is somewhere in the middle of that lot we hope to find a nice little resturant that'll feed us as my birthday treat. Cool eh?!

P.S. My elbow is still killing me after falling off in Moab (almost a month ago now), any ideas if this is right?! It's ok usually, but if I lean on it it feels like someones stabbed it with a big carving knife! Ow! Answers on a postcard...