Skip to main content

Caddo Lake


This is a somewhat belated post about our Labor Day weekend away at Caddo Lake, on the Texas - Louisiana border. I've just got the photos up on Facebook which tells most of the story:




It was fun to be camping again - I haven't done that for ages, but I've always enjoyed camping since we had a trailer tent when I was younger. In the States, of course, keeping cool is more of a problem than keeping warm, and the countryside is populated with lots of nasty bugs who thought of me as a tasty picnic. For some reason Graham tastes bad to them, which is totally unfair!


We were right on the border where Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas meet, so we drove around a bit just to say that we'd visited each state. To be honest they looked a lot like Texas.


We camped near a little place called Uncertain (which must give rise to endless puns) but the nearest interesting town is a place called Jefferson, which used to be a big inland port - paddle steamers would come all the way up the Red River from New Orleans. In fact Jefferson supplanted a place called Caddo Landing as a port, which used to be pretty much where we were camping, as far as I could tell. It was founded, grew to be a bustling port, and faded away again to the point where there's nothing left in some ridiculously short time - about 60 years! It seems incredible from an English point of view.


It was a good weekend and great to see something which you just can't see in the UK. We just don't have that kind of lake.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Laid-back Lille and Bustling Brussels

After a night in a tiny AirBnB in Canterbury , where there were chocolates on the table and artwork on every inch of the walls, we boarded a ferry with an absolute minimum of fuss, enjoyed a smooth crossing of the channel, and were deposited in the decidedly unscenic surroundings of the port of Dunkirk two hours later. Once we got past the cranes and shipping containers, though, the countryside was flat but pleasant. We stopped at a small town called Cassel, reached by cobbled roads winding up a hill. On the summit was an old windmill and a topograph telling you the distances to various improbable places; St Omer may have been visible in the haze, but Manchester was surely over the horizon.  In Lille, we found our apartment, unpacked the luggage (one rucksack apiece), and set out to find food. Our first choice was fully booked, so we embarked on that kind of aimless wandering where everyone is hungry and no one wants to actually choose a restaurant. We reached a Lebanese place call...
Post a Comment
Read more

Canterbury Cathedral

We were booking a trip to France, and I persuaded the family that it was madness to drive four hours to Dover and get straight on the ferry. "We should definitely stay overnight somewhere," I said. "Oh look, Canterbury is very handy - just twenty minutes from Dover." Of course, my suggestion was not influenced in the slightest by the fact that Canterbury contains England's most famous cathedral. On the way down, we stretched our legs on Dunstable Downs, an area of chalk grassland owned by the National Trust. I was pleased to spot a scarlet pimpernel for my 100 Plants Challenge . We also enjoyed watching gliders ascending and descending. We turned onto the M25 and made our way through busy traffic to the Dartford Crossing. This is one of those mythical points on the UK road network, like Scotch Corner and Watford Gap: the name familiar from traffic reports on the radio; the reality - for someone who grew up west of London - a hazy blur of imagination. It turns ou...
Post a Comment
Read more