Thursday, April 13, 2000
Davis Bayou - Apr 13
Sorry to leave you hanging after our last tripnews -- this is not supposed to be soap opera. We did get our mail -- the day we were to leave Sam Houston Jones. The PO gave us their number so we could call, and it finally showed up -- sopping wet. We have no idea what happened, except that everything inside the envelope was damp -- no, more than damp, WET. That probably explains why it took so long to appear -- they must have had to hang it out to dry. Who knows where in the system it occurred, or what else was drenched.After Sam Houston Jones SP (near Lake Charles), we spent two nights at a KOA in Baton Rouge to catch up on practical things -- like taxes & laundry. It had so many security lights we could almost read by them!
Anyway, we're currently at Davis Bayou in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, near Ocean Springs, MS. We lucked out again and got the most desirable site (at least by our standards) in the CG -- set in the trees and fairly isolated -- it feels so much like "real" camping that we want to build a campfire every evening, only we're not really campfire people -- we enjoy it more if it's someone else's and we can sit by it or a few minutes, then go somewhere else -- away from the smoke & responsibility.
Everything in the park is so green, and the trees all have Spanish moss hanging from them. Much of the park is estuaries where fresh and salt water mix. Swamps have gotten a bad rap over the years -- all the simulation computer games require you to drain swamps before they're useful, and in the card game "Magic" swamps are the source of evil power and death. What we are gradually learning, however, is that swamps are a source of life, so much so that the world would have a hard time existing without them. They're now referred to as wetlands, and efforts are on to save as much of them as possible. Even so, they are gradually disappearing worldwide. Everyone thinks it's okay to just clear this little one.
We hiked the nature trail -- it's a little over 1/2 mile, with an elevation change of only 10 or 15 feet, which isn't much, but the vegetation change in that little bit is remarkable, from cyprus to conifers. The birds all heard we were coming so they hid. However, we still have managed to see least terns (finally!), two red-bellied woodpeckers (inappropriately named, since the red is mostly on the back of it's head!), and a barred owl, which left its roost in early dusk and we saw it mainly due to the scolding of nearby birds. We have seen a few spring warblers, but they hide before we can zero in on field marks.
Davis Bayou is appropriately in the Gulf Islands Nat'l Seashore, since it is truly an island of wilderness surrounded by homes, stripmalls, and casinos. We knew that gambling was legal in Biloxi, but were expecting casinos similar to Blackhawk/Central City. They are actually high-rise buildings like Las Vegas, drawing big name stars and acts. Cirque de Soleil has a continuous performance of Alegria here. Of course, not all is casinos -- our stay is coincident with the 53rd Annual Spring Pilgrimage, a tour of local homes, gardens, and historic places, which we are gladly joining in on. Many of them date to before the Civil War, and all are survivors of Hurricane Camille, which devastated the area in 1969. As one example, we visited St. Michael's Catholic Church, known as the Fisherman's Church for it's 40-foot high stained glass windows showing fish, water, and nets, commemorating the area's former chief occupation. Two priests were caught in the church when Camille hit, and they climbed up two statues on the alter an hung on for over 24 hours as 8-foot deep seawater swirled below them, ripping out the pews and damaging lower segments of the stained glass.
This spring pilgrimage gave us the opportunity to tour Beauvoir, the final home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the site of his library. It was quite lovely and interesting. We also went to a quilt show, which was WONDERFUL, and left us both inspired to do quilting! It was partly a show of items done by the women in a local quilting group and partly a traveling show of quilts representing manhole covers from different cities in Japan and a friendship quilt done by the same women while they were in Japan with military husbands. Towns in Japan have unique designs for their manhole covers, which are quite artistic.
Our cats continue to be endless source of entertainment, desirable or otherwise. When we first got to the warmer climate, the cats were shedding and having constant trouble with hairballs. Part of their regular diet is now Hairball Control food, plus the longer-haired ones get hairball medicine daily. Everything seemed to be under control until this week, when Gracie began gagging and barfing two or three times a day. What's worse, she would always be sitting on the bed, or on the computer, someplace where you would not want her to barf. So then we'd jump up and try to get her to move, so she'd race around the trailer, barfing as she went (fortunately not very much). And of course she associated our reaction with the barfing, not with where she happened to be, so the next time she'd be even more nervous, so even if she were somewhere OK, if we'd so much as look at her she would race around again. She seems to be OK now, having gotten rid of whatever the problem was, one way or the other.# posted by Doug and Willie @ 7:14 PM 
