Sunday February 11th 2018

It was cold this morning. A cold front moved through the area during the night leaving behind temperatures in the high 30s and cold north winds. I resisted getting up as long as I could only getting out of bed long enough to turn up the heat. When I did get up it was hard to move slowly. A flurry of activity kept me warm.

All of my plans for the day went a little wrong. It started with my plan to leave at ten thirty or eleven. I only planned to travel about a hundred and fifty miles to Beaumont TX. When I got on the road early at 9:30am I put that plan in question. I stopped at a Texas rest area a few minutes short of Beaumont before noon to reconsider my plans. It was still very early. Traffic wasn’t bad and weather conditions had improved some. Getting a little further east was possible and would reduce the distance I had to travel on Monday. My goal was to aim for the Lake Charles Louisiana area about sixty miles east of Beaumont.

The new plan was to stop at the Louisiana Welcome Center and make a few phone calls to find a campground for the night. That plan failed when the Welcome Center was a construction zone. Without a place to stop, I can’t do research or make calls. This is one of the disadvantages of solo travel. I continued on looking for a rest area or an appropriate exit with a big parking area. Soon I was in Lake Charles without having stopped to finalize a plan.

The second new plan of the day was to stop at the KOA in Lafayette LA. It was about seventy miles east of Lake Charles on I-10. I stayed there on my way west last February. It’s a big campground so I had a high probability of success by just showing up. The alternative was to keep going to the place in Baton Rouge that I have a reservation starting Monday night, but that had a lower chance of success without calling first.

Site 127 at the Lafayette KOA.

I arrived at the Lafayette KOA at two thirty after 280 miles and five hours of travel. There were plenty of open sites. The travel day started out with a strong north wind hitting the drivers side of the RV as I traveled. I was constantly fighting to keep the RV in the lane. Traveling through downtown Houston went without any complications. It seemed like it took forever to pass through the city. At one point I thought I was almost through when I saw a sign indicating that the city was still 17 miles away. The concrete and glass structures lining the road must go on for a hundred miles along I-10.

I’m much further east than I expected to be. I only have about seventy five miles to Baton Rouge tomorrow. I’ll be staying there for four nights. Hopefully, tomorrows plans will be more executable. I don’t want to leave here until 11 or later. There is another Louisiana rest area welcome center just before the Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge and the long highway bridge that crosses the swaps south of the refuge. I plan to stop there for an hour or so. Let’s see how well this plan goes.