Lakes, Swamps & Bayous

Aloha all,

thanks as always for your interest in a German-Hawaiian perspective of Road Tripping through America. Last night (I think for the first time ever) I was “accused” of not having written enough about our trip this year. So don’t blame me if this blog post turns out longer than you care to read. Also, rest assured that it’s our final travel blog for this year. Not to ruin the suspense, but we have safely returned to Maui, just in time to miss any potential post-election craziness on the mainland and….drumroll…for Sandra to go back to work!

Since we were less rushed on this trip, we often slept in until it was warm enough to have breakfast outdoors. But our last day in Arkansas started off with such a spectacular sunrise that we got out of Joy before it was safe to do so in shorts and T-shirt. But it was well worth it:

Mystical Sunrise at Lake Greeson

This was part of stretch of five nights in a row in five different lakefront campsites. We are slowly starting to imagine that when we grow old, we might become more like “normal” campers and actually stay in one of these beautiful places for a few days. But for now, we always seem more curious about the next place. As pretty as most of these campgrounds are, we’d probably get bored staying in one place, unless we start to get into fishing.

Maybe we should get up this early more often...

After our “Lazy Lake Days”, Jefferson, TX was just the right town to re-introduce us to civilization: Small enough to explore the town on foot, sleepy enough to feel safe during a pandemic, old enough to have a historical museum, warm enough to have a delicious lunch outside and quirky enough to have the most elaborate model train set I have ever seen: 

1/3 of the model train set at the Jefferson Historical Museum

Hard to believe that this little town used to be the second busiest port in Texas. During the heydays of Jefferson (around the time of the civil war) their population was about 15 times as big as today. You can still see the glory of days past in some impressive historical buildings. Jefferson owed its importance to a huge log jam called the “Great Red River Raft” which made the otherwise tiny Red River navigable. This log jam was at times over 160 miles long and lasted over 600 years! 

Johnson Ranch & Marina at Caddo Lake

We had been to Caddo Lake last year and loved it so much that we made sure to come here again on this trip. This time we rented a canoe for a full day to explore the lake and the bayous around it. And even though we had been here before, the day canoeing on lake Caddo was unanimously voted the most fun activity we did on this entire trip. It is such a magical place that I am surprised how 'low key' it remains. If it got too busy, too developed or too fancy, it could ruin this special place, but for now it’s just perfect and we hope it stays this way, so we can stop by every time we are in the area for a few serene hours on the water. 

Canoeing on Lake Caddo - voted favorite five hours of our 2020 trip

Still not sure whether it's a Water Lily or Lotus flower?

Lake Caddo - what a bizarre and wonderful place

Of course it’s not all as idyllic as it seems: The plants that cover large parts of the water and make it looks so magical are an invasive pest. The water level is controlled by a system of levies and dams now, which is great for us to paddle and for local fishermen and outfitters to make a living, but also great for invasive plants.  

this is Not a road, we paddled down this overgrown alley!

We’ve always been grateful for park rangers, volunteers and other dedicated workers at historical sites. But on this trip in particular, we’ve been to a few places that would have been disappointing without a good interpreter. The “Mission Dolores” in St. Augustine, TX is the best example. The only other mission we had been to was the Alamo in San Antonio, where of course it’s all about the Texas revolution and less about the history of Spanish missions trying to convert the natives to become Catholic. So the Mission Dolores sounded like an interesting place to visit. Little did we know that there is nothing, absolutely Nothing, left of the actual mission. Ironically, the last remnants of the fort were paved over by the road that leads to the historical site. But we had a fascinating visit thanks to the site manager and museum curator, who talked to us and answered my questions for over two hours…I can’t believe that I am the same guy who was bored in history class in high school…

Not Mission Dolores,
not even a replica of Mission Dolores,
just the visitor center at the
former site of Mission Dolores

I have to admit even at the Big Thicket National Preserve, I enjoyed our talk with the park ranger more than the walks and hikes we did. Not only because there were no mosquitos inside the visitor center.

The carnivorous Pitcher Plant

Ranger talk at an oversized pitcher plant 

A few years ago, we spent a week in Pompeii, Italy with our families. Somewhat out of the blue, last week my dad told us about a Pompeiian Villa in Malibu, CA. We filed it as a place we can visit whenever we go that far west again. But the very next day, Sandra found another Pompeiian Villa in Port Arthur, TX, just a few miles from where we were. Of course we made the little detour. Due to the pandemic, the villa is not always open these days. We “had to” visit the local history museum to get a tour to the villa from there. And after the necessary arm twisting, we also agreed to a guided tour through the museum. All together, we got a private tour for almost three hours through the museum and the villa. I’m starting to think that the pandemic is a good time to travel if you enjoy tour guides who are eager to finally share their knowledge again.

Atrium at the Pompeiian Villa in Port Arthur, TX

Joy at the Pompeiian Villa

Port Arthur is pretty close to Houston already, but we had extended our trip by two days, so we had time to take a little detour along the gulf coast. This included driving through a crazy thunderstorm and Joy’s first ferry ride from the Bolivar Peninsula to Galveston Island. 

Joy's first ferry ride

We had heard some less than flattering things about the Texas Gulf Coast, but we were very impressed. Maybe the beaches are not the most pristine or the finest sand, but that’s not really what one would be looking for when coming from Maui anyway. But the drive was very scenic, the crabs very delicious and Galveston seems like a fun town, even though we only did a brief drive through tour of the town, just a sneak peek to realize that we have to come back for a longer visit some day. We probably should not wait too long, they tend to get a lot of hurricanes in this area, you never know how long until another storm changes everything again.

Crab dinner on Bolivar Peninsula

We did visit two of the historical mansions in Galveston. At the “Bishop’s Palace” they only had self guided tours, the house was impressive, but we were in and out in half an hour. At the Moody Mansion, we went back to our in depth style. We were the only ones signed up for the guided tour and got another very detailed two hour tour. But don’t worry, if you are getting tired of even just reading about yet another long tour of some historical site, this was the last one for this trip.

Moody Mansion in Galveston

We did stop at the San Jacinto Memorial. This is the site where Texas won their independence by defeating and capturing the Mexican President Santa Anna in 1836. And because this is Texas, for the centennial celebration, they built the tallest masonry column in the world. The 34 feet Texas Lone Star on the top makes it bigger than the Washington Monument in DC. They show an interesting movie about the Texas revolution, which included the “Independence Hall” in Washington-on-Brazos which we had visited at the very beginning of this trip. With that, we had come full circle. 

San Jacinto Memorial

From here on out, we were mostly on a mission to get Joy winterized and get our covid test for the flight back to Maui, which all went smoothly. Joy is now stored for her winter hibernation until hopefully we will get to travel again next spring. Who knows, somewhere there might be more lakes with pretty campsites around them and more tour guides who need someone to listen to what they have to share... 

A hui hou, Joy!

Chris & Sandra

Extreme Social Distancing in Oklahoma and Arkansas

Aloha all,

Oklahoma will always hold a special place in our hearts as the 50th state for us to get to. It was last, but definitely not least, so we are glad to return so quickly to this underrated place. If you just want to see that Oklahoma is prettier than most people think, you can just look at the pictures below, if you want to find out why we like it so much, you’ll have to look at all those words in between the pictures, too. 

The aptly named American BeautyBerry

Our timing was lucky on our first night back in Oklahoma: The motorcycle rally at the campground we stayed at had just finished and we got the best campsite: All by ourselves; right by the river. I love floating down rivers and we still had our tubes from last year. I was very excited and did not mind that it took me at least 15 minutes to blow it up. However, my enthusiasm was quickly deflated when after just a few minutes, I floated right into a sharp stick. But we’re still excited to be back in Oklahoma!

Before and after the Sharp Stick

We visited the very interesting Choctaw Capitol Museum. The history of Oklahoma as “Indian Territory” makes this state very unique and there’s always more to learn. I knew this area was part of the Louisiana Purchase, but I was not aware that using it to relocate native tribes was part of Thomas Jefferson’s reasoning for buying it. As brutal (and for many fatal) as the Trail of Tears was, apparently this forced removal and shameful treatment of Native Americans was the more humane option. Letting them keep their native homelands was apparently never seriously considered. Deceases that were accidentally introduced (and even intentionally spread) together with the forced removal from their homelands have decimated native populations, but from our brief experiences and limited perspective, it seems like the tribes in Oklahoma today are doing very well. 

Capitol of the Choctaw Nation

The Museum in the Choctaw Capitol had an exhibition about the “Original Codetalkers”. They have gotten a lot less recognition, but three decades before the Navajo Codetalkers helped in WW2, the Choctaw helped with secret communications in the first world war. We heard some Choctaw being spoken and I can confirm, there’s no way Germans ears could have picked up any of that. The ironic part is that the military used the Choctaw Codetalkers only a few decades after the official policy forbid the Choctaw and other tribes to use their native language.   

Speaking of native languages: We also visited “Sequoya’s Cabin”. He was a Cherokee tribal member who is credited with putting the Cherokee language in writing in the early 1800’s. To accomplish that, he did not use the Latin alphabet, like most other native languages, but he created a whole new syllabary.   

ᎠᏍᎦᏯ ᎩᎦᎨᏱ

If your device displayed the word above, you can see how pretty it looks and it proves that the Cherokee language lives on and adapts even in the digital age by being included in the Unicode, the world’s standard for digital text. 

Another sad and ironic twist: Sequoya volunteered to fight for Andrew Jackson. A few years later, when Jackson had become president, he returned the favor by pushing for the forceful removal of native tribes, including the Cherokee and Sequoya, resulting in the tragic Trail of Tears.

The drive to our next site was supposed to take us through Arkansas for just about 10 minutes. Then we saw one of those brown signs and ended up spending two days in Fort Smith. Just proves that any National Park Service site is worth visiting, even though the actual visitor center was closed due to the pandemic. Again, we were lucky to run into a volunteer who gave us a private tour of the fort. Actually, not just any volunteer, it was historian and author Markus ‘MC’ Woodward. Not only did he take almost 3 hours to tell us about the history of the fort, he even pretended to enjoy himself, saying he hasn’t talked this much since he retired from teaching. 

Our personal tour guide at Fort Smith NHS

With our curiosity awoken, we explored more of the town of Fort Smith. We visited the local history museum, where I particularly enjoyed the exhibition about the myth and the facts about Judge Parker, the so called “Hanging Judge”. While it is true that in the Wild West era of Fort Smith, there were some hangings, a lot of the folklore was added by Hollywood and by the local tourism authority to entice travelers to ‘hang around a while’.

Fort Smith also has the unique distinction to have the only whorehouse on the National Register of Historic Places. Yes, you read that right. It’s called “Miss Laura’s Social Club and it has a fascinating history! Despite the ongoing pandemic, it was also the only place so far where at least Sandra got a quick medical check up and she was quickly cleared as healthy enough…to work as one of Miss Laura’s girls…

The only Whorehouse on the National Register of Historic Places

On a beautiful walk along the Arkansas River we discovered a good excuse why we will have to return to Fort Smith soon. The very impressive looking building of the “US Marshal Museum” is built, but the exhibitions won’t open for another year or so. Sounds like something right up our alley since we know hardly anything about the US Marshal Service and this is probably the only place where we will ever learn anything about them. Some people don’t read a book because they wait for the movie. We’ll wait for the museum.

The (future) site of the National Marshal Museum

Back in Oklahoma, the Spiro Mounds Archaeology Center is one of the most important, but also one of the most underwhelming historical sites to visit. Millions (!) of native American artifacts have been discovered here, including some of the best preserved and most ornate. For centuries, it was the cultural center of tribes ruling about half of what is America today! But don’t feel bad if you don’t know much about the Spiro Mounds, neither did we. Like the manager of the site explained: "Our problem is that the sites you can visit today are basically piles of dirt." With tourism and the Instagram factor in mind, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde were a much better idea. Due to remote location and the lack of a place to take an impressive selfie, this important place is very sparsely visited. In fact, currently there is only one person working at the entire site. His name is Dennis Peterson and he is one of the most gifted interpreters I have ever met. Any little question of mine triggered an interesting history lesson. I am not kidding: We spent 4 hours at this site: About 30 minutes walking around the piles of dirt, 25 minutes in the tiny museum and the rest talking to Dennis or in this case more being talked to by Dennis. His enthusiasm is even more impressive knowing that he has managed this place for over 35 years! And $7 is a pretty cheap tuition for a series of history lectures by such an expert. 

Yes, the sign at the entrance is the most photogenic
thing at Spiro Mounds

As Tommy commented, we can be “such suckers for superlatives”, which is kind of ironic because that seems very much like an American thing to me. But it’s true, we drove up to Cavanal Hill simply because it claims to be the “World’s Highest Hill” at 1,999 feet. It’s a dubious claim since it’s unsure from where they measure that (it’s more than 2,000 feet above sea level) and there is no official differentiation between a hill versus a mountain at 2,000 feet. I had hoped for a little better view from the top but the marker was the most impressive part, not even a shop to buy the T-shirt to prove we’ve been to the highest hill…

Maybe the highest hill or
possibly the lowest mountain in the world

And some people never learn…so the next day we went to another rock with a dubious claim to fame: The “Heavener Runestone Park” used to be a state park and the claim was that vikings had sailed to America about 1,000 years ago, came up the Mississippi and Arkansas River and engraved a traditional rune stone here. The theory has not been substantiated, so it’s no longer a state park, but a free local park run by volunteers. But even if it’s a “fake” and the rune stone is only 100 instead of 1,000 years old: This would still make it the oldest physical evidence of “fake news” west of the Mississippi, if you were to be into those kinds of superlatives.

The approx. 100 or possibly 1,000 year old Heavener Runestone

Maybe because we don’t try to do quite as much as normally and we stay away from cities and events, we have been staying at even more pretty campgrounds than we usually do. We have spent at least half our nights at campsites right on lakes, which is surprising in an area that has hardly any natural lakes at all. But we enjoy the “fake lakes” as I call the reservoirs. Most of them were built by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control. To our benefit, around the lakes, they often built several campgrounds, hiking trails and even some disc golf courses for our enjoyment.

We took the Talimena National Scenic Byway back into Arkansas. We are slightly too early for the best fall colors, but the scenery and the weather is perfect for strolls, walks and hikes through nature. So as a reward for reading (or at least scrolling) this far, I’ll leave you with some nature pictures or ‘extreme social distancing’ pictures, since we are sometimes the only ones on a trail:

Stick Bug on a Stick

The Motherload of Mushrooms at Lake Ouashita

The "Ghost Plant"

The first fall colors

Trail in Queen Wilhelmina State Park

(Not) stuck between a rock and another rock
at Robber's Cave State Park

Oklahoma is OK!

Life is Good at yet another pretty campsite buy a lake,

Aloha from Lake Greeson,

Chris & Sandra

On the Road Again - Covid can't stop Joy!

Aloha and Howdy! 

There is a big RV boom going on because more and more people discover how convenient it is to have your own bedroom, kitchen and bathroom with you while traveling, especially during a pandemic. It’s somewhat ironic that we out of all people kept delaying our road trip this year month after month. The risk, the restrictions and a 14 day quarantine were enough to hold us back. Maui was too good of a place to ride out the craziness. We were trying to balance our desire to be responsible with our urge to travel. We were on the fence anyway, so a few hours after Hawaii announced the option to get a pre-travel test instead of quarantining upon return to the islands, we booked our flights to Houston, where Joy has been patiently waiting for us. 

 On Maui, I felt like the Corona virus was not only affecting the respiratory system of humans, but also the rotation of the planets: Time flew by so quickly. Sandra and I went on a walk, I played a little tennis, maybe some ultimate and woosh! another week was over. We’ve only been back on the road for ten days and it already feels like an eternity, filled with all kind of new impressions and experiences. I feel we have already seen more on this trip than in 6 months on Maui. Don’t get me wrong: Maui is still our favorite place to live in the world, but ideally interrupted by long road trips.

What Mark so nicely titled: "An Ode to Joy"

We were relieved when we got to the RV storage place and saw that Joy survived the 10 months without any serious issues. Having to check on her to make sure everything was OK was one of our excuses to justify traveling during a pandemic. Even before we made it any particular place or saw anything really special, we were excited just to be in Joy and on a road trip again. If only because you never know what’s around the next bend or what (or who!) you are going to see the next day… 

To our delight, we found out that our friend Melinda was visiting her family on Lake Conroe, just 20 minutes from our first campground. It was such a pleasure to see Melinda and meet her delightful family. Her dad has actually been to Germany before we’ve ever been there. And how convenient that after happy hour drinks and a delicious dinner, all we had to do was walk down the driveway. Our first historical stop was “Washington on the Brazos”. Even though this is the place where Texans declared their independence, this former capital of Texas had almost disappeared. At least they have reconstructed “Independence Hall”. It’s basically a log cabin, but it is “Where Texas became Texas”, as they say here. Even though we might have heard about it when we visited the Alamo in San Antonio or other historical sites in Texas, I was not aware that the delegates voted to declare independence at the very same time of the siege at the Alamo. 

It could be argued that the massacre at the Alamo achieved nothing and that declaring independence in Washington on the Brazos meant everything. However, the Alamo is a huge tourist attraction with 2.5 million visitors a year; while Independence Hall is an out of the way little historical site with only a handful of visitors when we were there. But our tour guide Chandler (a truly gifted interpreter!) made us feel truly connected to the events 184 years ago. 

"Independence Hall" in Washington on the Brazos, TX
The building might not be as impressive as the one in
Philadelphia, but for Texas history, it's just as important.

We were very excited to see Chandler again the next day when we visited the Fanthorp Inn, another historical site 20 miles down the road. This time he was dressed in period clothes (plus the mask) and knew just as much about the old roadside Inn as he did about Independent Hall. We were the only guests, possibly the whole day, so we got a long, private tour. As charming and interesting as the Inn was, I am glad we are 170 years late and travel in Joy. This way, I know who I get to share my bed with. Apparently it was very common to share a bed with a stranger back then. I wonder whether I would have loved traveling just as much back then… 

The historic Fanthorp Inn

 “Harvest Host” is a club we belong to that connects RVers with breweries, vineyards, farms and museums that let you park overnight for free. The only “price” to pay is to visit the business. So at a brewery, we “have to” drink beer, at a vineyard we “have to” do a wine tasting, etc. It also brings us to places we would never visit otherwise. I didn’t even really know what a “Meadery” is… 

Touring the bee farm

The Bee Weaver Honey Farm has been around since 1888. Our tour guide has been there for over a third of that time! The “Meadery” is a new 2020 addition where they started making mead out of their own honey. Besides touring the bee hive, we got to sample a dozen different honeys and nine different meads. It tastes more like wine than beer, but is officially its own category. Some of those meads are pretty strong. After sampling all the different meads (and then ordering our favorite ones again, of course), it was very convenient to have our own bed parked next door. I’m not sure how other people do it. 

Mead tasting at the BeeWeaver Honey Farm
and WildFlyer Mead Co.

There is only one Presidential Library along our route and we’ve been there before and it is currently closed, but we found two nice substitutions: In Huntsville, we visited the Sam Houston Memorial Museum. Since he was the President of Texas when it was an independent republic, we could count it towards our presidential sites. Sam Houston was a very interesting character, obviously with some flaws from today’s perspective. I might have given him too much credit for refusing to fight for the confederacy and stepping down as the governor of Texas when the Civil War broke out. We had a long talk with the museum curator and he thinks that was more pragmatism and the foresight that the Union was going to win than true loyalty to the Union, let alone opposition to slavery. In a beautiful park setting, the museum also included two of the homes Houston has lived in. 

The Hall of Presidents at the American Freedom Museum

We got another presidential history fix: No, I am not talking about the debate, that was about the least presidential thing I have ever seen. We went to the “American Freedom Museum” in Bullard, TX. This surprisingly elaborate museum tells the story of America mostly through its wars, but it also has a “Hall of Presidents”, where we spent most of our time. So now we know at least a little bit about each and every president (we still like the first 44 the best!). Our next job is to remember what we learnt when one of you tests us or when it comes up in a trivia game. The museum is located on the campus of a ‘Christ centered’ school. It was very well curated, but a bit of a bias could be noticed occasionally. For example, they suggested that the ‘Civil War’ should better be called the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ and that domestic terror, like the Oklahoma City bombing, was inspired by Islamic terror groups. 

Some of the historical places we like to visit are still closed, but many are open, like the Goodman-LeGrange House in Tyler, TX where we not only got a private tour, but were also the fist to sign the guest book in a couple of days. Since we are often the only visitors around, it feels pretty safe. We only skipped a couple of places that seemed unnecessarily ‘risky’. We also visited a small, quirky railroad museum in Tyler. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these sites are run either by dedicated volunteers or enthusiastic staff. They are the reason that we enjoy small little out-of-the-way, third-rate places as much as the popular top attractions. 

A big THANK YOU to this guy at the Cotten Belt Depot Museum
 in Tyler, TX, and all the volunteers in small museums
and historical places who work so hard and make it look
like they are having fun...

Before you are falsely impressed that we study so much history on our trips: We also played some disc golf, ate some Texas BBQ, went on a few smaller hikes, camped on lakes and in forests and paddled a paddle boat:

I want to address two misconceptions people might have about Texas. It is not all vast and barren, in fact for the past ten days, from Houston to theOklahoma state line, we’ve been mostly driving though lush, green forests. We probably took particular notice of that since we had practically no rain on Maui all summer and the island is drier than I’ve ever seen it. Apparently, we just missed another fire above our neighborhood. We much prefer our campfire on the lake here. Both are under control now. 

The other misconception is that everybody in Texas is a Trump supporter. That’s not true. When we drive on the rural backroads here, there is at least one Biden/Harris sign for every 100 Trump signs. I also noticed that the Trump supporters are split between those who want to make America great again and those who want to keep it great. 

Today was our last day in Texas before we cross into Oklahoma. Sulphur Springs surprised us as an absolutely delightful place. The main town square has been revived very successfully. Beautifully restored buildings, red brick roads, an impressive courthouse and the most public bathrooms I have ever used…

The (very) public bathroom on the town square
in Sulphur Springs, TX

Then we took a quick detour to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower and tomorrow we’ll be heading to Southeast Oklahoma, supposedly the most scenic part of the state. Since we even liked the rest of Oklahoma last year and we are just so darn happy being able to road trip in Joy at all this year, I have a feeling we might enjoy it there, too. 

Yes, we miss Maui, but this will have to do for a few weeks...

Life is Good, even in 2020! 

Chris & Sandra