Day 164: D'Arbonne State Park, LA

From Monroe, LA, we headed back up north to where we had left our route yesterday, so that Alea could begin her ride.  Before she could get going a woman pulled over across the street from us - one of our campground neighbors from Poverty Point.  She warned us that the highway shoulder would run out not far ahead (after crossing the river), and that traffic is crazy and people won't slow down or move over.

Lake D'Arbonne

We continued on, but I pulled over shortly after the shoulder disappeared.  The road was being used by either seriously drunk or Kamikaze loggers, who seemed barely able to keep their rigs in their own lane, let alone be able to thread the needle with Alea riding along side the road.  So we did something we haven't done thus far: we packed up Alea and her bike, and drove a few miles down the road to where our route split off onto a quieter rural highway.  It was far better to be safe than sorry.

When there are shoulders, often the vegetation is taking over...

The terrain has become hillier and the countryside more scenic in places.  We are camped at D'Arbonne State Park ($22 + $6 registration fee [even for walk-ins], power, water, showers, free wi-fi and free laundry).  It seems to be a very popular park on weekends, though it is virtually deserted right now.  With so few people the wi-fi has been pretty decent.

We have been looking ahead to Texas after learning on the Camp Inn Forum that weekends fill up fast at this time of year.  We've been dismayed to learn that extra registration fees are the norm for state and national forest parks in Texas, so it looks as though East Texas will be another expensive place for us to camp.  It is also looking as though camping in or around Austin may be problematic.  We had planned on camping at McKinney Falls State Park, but for the weekend that we had planned to stay there, there was only one available campsite - for just one of the nights (Friday).  We would still need to work something out for where to stay that Saturday, so we'll likely be working that puzzle when we stop for the weekend, hopefully in Oil City, LA.

Houseboats moored along the Ouachita River.

One of the perks of staying in Monroe last night was that the campground had an exchange library.  Most such libraries that we find are stuffed full of romance novels that have little interest to us.  But we managed to find three new DVDs to watch and four new books to read, including an interesting account of the most decisive battle of the War of 1812, which took place on Lake Champlain, NY.  So our stay last night was cheaper than normal, when you account for what we normally would have spent to restock our supply of DVDs and books.

The book on the War of 1812 was interesting, as it gives an overview of the events in 1813 and 1814 that led up to the Battle of Plattsburg.  A fourth great grandfather, Cornelius McEveny, died some time in 1813, and his wife, Polly Watson, died in December 1813.  They had lived in Franklin, Sheldon County, Vermont, which is only a few miles south of the Canadian border and about as far from Lake Champlain.  I had always wondered what connection their deaths may have had to the War of 1812, though they died too soon for there to have been any likely possibility that Cornelius had enlisted and died as a result of any military service.  

The book suggests another possibility: it tells of a bivouac of U.S. troops quite a bit farther south on Lake Champlain, where an epidemic of pneumonia broke out and spread to the nearby townspeople.  It is certainly possible that a build up of British troops just to the north of Franklin had precipitated a similar situation there.  The fact that they both died so close in time to one another suggests that infectious disease could have been a likely cause in one, if not both, deaths.  The book suggests a possible cause of infectious disease - the sudden increase in population caused by two warring armies who were bivouacked for the winter in cramped, temporary shelters.