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

Baby Language

For some reason baby equipment is an area in which American English differs markedly from British English. As well as learning how to care for a baby, we had to learn a whole new vocabulary! Fortunately we are now fluently bilingual, and I have compiled a handy US-UK baby dictionary for you. Diaper n. Nappy Mom says if you can read this change my diaper. The first time you change one of these you will be all thumbs and stick the little adhesive tabs to yourself, the baby and probably the changing mat before you get them where they ought to go. A few years later you will be able to lasso a running toddler and change them before they even know what's happened (yes, I have seen it done). You will also get through more diapers than you ever thought possible, creating scary amounts of expense and waste. Hence we are now mostly using: Cloth diaper n. Reusable nappy Cool baby. No longer those terry squares, the main drawback is that there are now so many types it can be qu...
5 comments
Read more

Melbourne Art Festival: A Surprisingly Good Afternoon Out

Maybe it was the warm autumn weather.  Maybe it was the fun of peeking into other people's back gardens.  Maybe it was the novelty of standing with other people, listening to real live musicians.  Or maybe it was just the giant pink ice creams. Whatever it was, Melbourne Festival had turned into a surprisingly satisfying afternoon.  I'd seen the posters for it and thought it might be a nice change from yet another walk on a Sunday afternoon, but that was about as high as my expectations had been. When we arrived, the male three-quarters of the family were immediately pleased to see the signs for classic cars at Melbourne Hall.  Shortly afterwards, I was pleased to discover that there were only about half a dozen of them, so that we could rapidly move on to less mechanical works of art. The festival was spread out around the village of Melbourne, in churches, halls, and private gardens.  Melbourne is one of those fascinating places anyway, with archways and ...
3 comments
Read more