Ville Platte. Simmesport.

We're in Simmesport, Louisiana,on Sunday night. No bank vault is closed up as tight as a small Southern town on Sunday night. We found a truck stop gas station and bought some pre-made sandwiches for dinner. We dined pn them flopped on the bed in our dingey motel room. The sandwiches were, thankfully, better than I expected.

I think our motel tonight is the worst of our trip. Steve thinks that honor goes to the Ville Platte motel, painted garish yellow with lavender accents.

I wanted to go to the Chinese restaurant buffet in Ville Platte. Itmight have been bad, but there would be some vegetables. I was out-voted. We went to a Creole place. Michele and Steve were very pleased with their meals. I had the chef's salad and Michele's baked potato. I got even today. I had my best meal of the trip at lunch, chicken and sausage gumbo at a roadside diner with a giant stuffed snapping turtle in a glass case, an alligator onthe wall, and a truly bad-looking fish, an alligator gar, mounted on the wall. we urged Steve to buy a juvenile alligator head as a gift for Christina; Christina will just have to wait and hope until Steve gets home to find out if he did!

Speaking of snapping turtles, we encountered a turtle trying to cross the highway outside Ville Platte. Michele picked him up to take him across the road; the turtle responded by trying to rip her thumb off. The turtle went flying into the weeds.

We have seen our first rice fields, flooded. Other fields are flooded for raising crawfish or mud bugs as they are locally known. There are dozens of wire cages in the flooded field. The owner harvests the crawfish by reaching each cage in a little paddlewheel boat and dumping the catch into a bucket on board.

We have had nice scenery on pleasantly quiet roads with intermittent headwind and intermittent rough roads surfaces. The temperature is not too bad. There's been some cloud cover for shade. The humidity is high; we're sticky allthe time. Ibetwehave much to learn yet about humidity.

We have just about 900 miles to go. Sounds like a long way but the end of the trip is in sight. We all made flight reservations tonight and Michele and I made a car reservation to get to DC to visit Nicole and Andrew.