Goodbye Louisiana Hello Texas

Day 19  Thursday 20^th April 2011

We decided to take the coast road and head for Beaumont in Texas but before leaving New Orleans we rode down to the French Quarter. 

French Quarter - New Orleans

 We stopped at the side of the road to take a couple of pictures and a guy walked up to me and introduced himself as an ink artist named Welmon Sharlhorne. He asked me if I had “one of dem fancy phones that lets get you Google”. As I had left my fancy phone at Thomas & Pia’s house I replied truthfully that I didn’t have such a phone as this. This did not deter Welmon. He gave me a pen and told me to write down his name and telephone number and to Google his artwork when I got connected. I did and he is well known – fancy that ! Check out Welmon Sharlhorne click here

Me and Welmon passing the time of day

It was hot and humid as we left the city and the open roads were long, not just long but very long. There was one point on highway 82 where we went 155 miles without seeing a fuel station – just miles of bayou and swamp. We saw the shrimping fishing boats that have suffered huge losses as a result of the BP spill not far off this coastline and we could see outline of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico in the distance. We had a little bit of excitement on what was, for the most part, quite a boring road journey today – we caught a small ferry to cross from the land spur that we were on back to the mainland. As we left Louisiana over the bridge into Port Arthur in Texas the area became far more industrialised with huge petrochemical plants belching out plumes of smoke giving the whole area a sort of oily smell.

Arrival at the Texas State Line

The sat navs worked well again as we reached Beaumont and guided us gently to our La Quinta motel which was fine apart from the fact that the only restaurant was MacDonalds. We tried ordering a Dominos pizza for delivery but the phone line was constantly engaged so we gave up and got MacStuffed for the second day in a row.