Last week of January, 2017.

A quick perusal of the app-map suggests that the road and coast stay in close proximity, which would be a continuation of what has become the style for this journey, a close and intimate connection with the Gulf of Mexico’s shoreline.

Of course, I’d made that egregious mistake of presupposing, of visualising a place; I’d had an image of swamp mangrove, bald cypress trees swagged in Spanish Moss, a curtain of silent marshy vegetation between ourselves and the water, with only occasional glimpses of the sea. Where sand had birthed a beach, a canyon wall of condominiums would have sprung up, each tower sequestering its own private beach. It’s an image drawn in part from previous travels along other similar shorelines. Only it’s been a revelation: the surmised image has been shattered. True, there have been bogs and resorts, but the sand spit barrier islands have easily out-competed the concrete .

Then we arrive on the Mississippi Shores. The state has a relatively short exposure to the Gulf, but has garnered a blazon of disaster publicity. Hurricane Katrina made landfall here on 25th August ’05 and in so doing glaringly exposed an ossuary of political and social skeletons. The clean-up is complete, but the evidence still visible. Yet for the distance cyclist there is the glory of an uninterrupted boardwalk, post-Katrina now rendered in cement, that runs for over sixty kilometres. A classic promenade with an uninterrupted view across the shoreline to a vast open sea that today is gentle rippling steel, edged onto a mottled mackerel sky of fractured sun shafts.

Derelict pier post Katrina

To landward are the storm survivors, avenues of grand oaks that lead to the gracious plantation mansions, interspersed by vacant lots of clipped grass with a forlorn, fading ‘for sale’ signs. Ghost plots: even the vacant cement plinths, the concrete flight of three steps to nowhere, have been removed, as if no memorial should exist to depress the real estate’s value. The sole reminders are a series of sixteen commissioned high rise public conveniences distributed all along the coast, high enough to carry the high water mark, the surge of twenty-three feet.

Stand and look out over today’s innocent ‘scape, it’s near incomprehensible to contemplate the power of that past hurricane’s natural force. It’s easier to stay in the present tense and return to the easy pedal-trance down by the shore.

Some people see life in one way….

I calculate all that power to be somewhere in the region of 840 horses champing at the bit, waiting to enter the national park. It’s not an extreme example, they’ve been passing us ever since we left Miami. No, we are the oddities; we with our fore-end quarter of one Clydesdale power of bicycles.

That multiple assemblage of rig, which could contain up to eight people and would still be considered one unit, yet two people on two bikes are of an equal score. The charges are similar. In fact they will be seniors who will have purchased a ‘$10 life-time, all-state pass’ and so gain free entry and a half price discount to hook up their motor coach. But that’s not my grump; they’ve served their sentence, paid their taxes, earned their benefits, no….. They will now be provided with a hard standing, sewage drain, water tap, 50 amps of electricity, manicured lawn, grand shade trees, all supported by a splendid wrap around view. The tent camper, paying exactly the same tariff, (we’re not alone), will be crammed onto the tyre-rutted, tree-less, grass-less, value-less corner into which one of these septuagenarian driven behemoths would have difficulty negotiating.

The injustice can feel stark and yes, I am in a grump, in part as our immediate and near intimate neighbour had an in-depth two-hour ‘phone conversation, one that terminated at two in the morning.

And yet I know who has the greater freedom, as we, the following night, pitch in a beautifully secluded spot reserved for those that are prepared to walk a short distance from their mode of transport. And a couple explain how they’re stuck, unable to move on, as they’re awaiting delivery of a new servo motor, to replace the one that retracts their bedroom extension.

Whilst others see it differently…….

Juxtaposed signage…..spotted in New Orleans:

One’s the patron saint to several countries, the other the liberator of several more….. however I suspect this is the only place where their lives have crossed.