Creola, AL to New Orleans, LA
167 miles/267 Km
23 June 2006
Photo Gallery and Commentary
Today we arrived at Robert, Louisiana, our home until Tuesday. Robert is located north of Lake Ponchartrain, 50 miles from New Orleans. Susie is participating in the annual American Library Association meeting. Our preference would have been to camp closer to New Orleans, but hurricane Katrina put an end to those thoughts. The campground we had used on previous visits to the city is full of FEMA trailers housing construction and relief workers. Reservations at that campground were not available until a few weeks ago, and then only on a limited basis. The other alternative campground is still closed. We had identified some other possibilities, but a local friend strongly suggested that we look north of the lake.
The trip from Creola, AL was relatively easy. We covered the distance in about three hours. We picked up Interstate 10 in Mobil and headed west. We anticipated seeing quite a bit of damage along the route, but other than some damaged billboard and downed trees we didn't see much. The highway runs a few miles north of the coast and the towns that received the heaviest damage in Mississippi and Louisiana are south of the highway and not visible from it. I plan on going to the parts of New Orleans that were seriously damaged from the flooding and wind and will post some pictures later during this segment of our journey.
Many of the people following us have little or no idea of what campgrounds are all about so I thought I would take some pictures of Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park, where we are staying. This campground is really not representative of many of the places we will be staying. The Jellystone Parks "brand" is more of a destination park. It is geared to family camping with activities for the adults and the children. This particular campground (see http://www.jellystonela.com/ ) has several hundred sites, a large recreation hall, store, playground, swimming pool and several bath houses. Many of the sites have concrete pads that make leveling the trailer easier (of course, our site is the only one in this section of the campground that doesn't have the pad). It appears that there are many people who leave their trailers here on a permanent basis and use it as a getaway home. This campground has lots of trees that provide some shade (welcome in this weather). As a contrast, the campground we stayed in last night had about 70 sites and was geared to transients coming in for an overnight stay. It had limited facilities and no pool. It appears to have what seemed like a lot of construction workers who are staying there while working on Katrina damage.
