Days 169 & 170: North Toledo Bend State Park, LA

Alea had a fairly long day planned for Sunday, and we contemplated splitting the mileage.  But for a change it wasn't nearly as humid as it has been nearly every day for the past two months.  Plus the rural backroads where even less crowded than on weekdays, and a good part of her route was either fairly flat or low rollers.  So she managed to do her planned 59 miles with no problem.  Except that the private RV park in Logansport, LA that we were aiming for turned out to be nothing but a glorified parking lot, with zero shade and nothing else good to say about it.

I couldn't resist a selfie with this big fish...

I had anticipated that the private RV park might be a problem, as this one doesn't post their rates, there are no online reviews and no pictures (Allstays indicated that they charged more than $30 per night).  The weather was so much more pleasant than we've experienced in a long time, and our next planned stop wasn't that much farther down the road.  So I had suggested to Alea that if the RV park didn't measure up for us, that I would take over and ride to the next stop, where we would stay two nights instead of one.  Alea isn't always receptive to any last minute changes that I make to our plans, but this time she was on board right away.

Thus I rode 35 miles in full sun, in temperatures ranging from the low to mid 80s.  But with less humidity it was more enjoyable than some of the cooler, but very humid mornings that we've had lately.  Of course it was my luck that most of my ride was through moderate rollers, which meant a slower pace than I had expected.  But I expect it is good to remind my muscles now of what they will be experiencing more of once we get to Central Texas and beyond.  So together we covered 94 miles today.

We are staying at North Toledo Bend State Park ($25, power, water, air conditioned adjustable showers, free wi-fi and free laundry).  The actual nightly rate is $22, but we also had to pay a one time $6 registration fee, so it actually works out to $25 per night since we are here two nights.

We are loving the laundry at Louisiana State Parks.  We had to pay 75 cents per load to wash at the first park we stayed at (Poverty Point), but the dryer was free.  Since then, both the washers and dryers have been free.  We did four loads of laundry at Poverty Point for $3, plus another six loads since then for free.  The same laundry at the average laundromat would have set us back nearly $40.

We are also loving the free wi-fi, as often times our AT&T mi-fi and Republic Wireless phones don't get much of a signal, if any.  We take advantage of it to do extensive pre-planning for areas much farther along on our route.  It has helped to keep our mi-fi use for last month lower than it has been for most of this year: it saves us an average of another couple of bucks per night.  So even though we don't like the $6 per night registration fees, we probably save at least that much on free laundry and wi-fi, so we can't complain.

Love bugs.

We have entered The Land of the Love Bugs.  They are everywhere - on the van, on the camper, on us, on our food.  I had to stay sharp while riding along to keep from sucking in dozens of them (I think I only got four or five that way [8 or 10?, since they are usually paired up]).  We set up our fan in hopes that it would blow them away from where we were sitting.  But within a half hour there were more than a dozen of them that were on the fan housing in front of the blowing fan blades - they were hunkered down and didn't seem to mind at all.  

They are hard to see in this picture, but Alea was getting swarmed by love bugs.

We will be in fairly rural areas for the next few days, so in the middle of Alea's ride I drove into Shreveport for groceries and to gas up for 40+ cents per gallon less than we are likely to find along our route ($1.76 vs $2.05 to $2.15 - we've started using GasBuddy.com to know when we are passing through areas of lower than average fuel prices).  That helped to break up what turned out to be a long day on the road.

On Monday (our second day here) we concentrated on getting more chores done.  Alea did laundry while I removed some rust from one of the camper's chrome wheels.  I also continued to work on the piece of wood that we will bolt to the roof of our van, which will support our new awning.  We've decided to leave it unfinished and consider it a temporary arrangement.  Once we are back in Boise and I have access to the needed power tools, I will fashion a more permanent version.