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By Amber, on May 4, 2010, at 10:00 pm As soon as I knew I’d be visiting the refinery at odd hours, I started fantasizing about the photos I would take of the assorted refineries and chemical plants in the area. What I didn’t realize, having only been the passenger and not the driver on my two previous visits, is that there is nowhere very good (and safe) to stop and set up for a long exposure without inviting attention by plant security or police. Maybe it would have been fine and I would have gone unnoticed, but this was not really the time that I wanted to test that. Having to get bailed out of jail during a business trip is probably not worth the story I’d get out of it, so I settled for drive-bys from substandard vantage points. Next time I’m taking a getaway driver.
I made Mark drive over the Lake Charles I-10 bridge a couple times so I could take a picture from the one good vantage point in an otherwise flat area but my sedan is a little short; I’ll have to try again when he gets a new truck.
Actually just the first time over was for the photo. The second time was because I was so busy looking over my shots that I missed pointing out the turn-off for dinner:
Steamboat Bill’s is the only thing most people in my office like about Lake Charles. It’s worth a detour if you’re ever passing through. The portions are large, the ambience is fun, and they serve piping-hot ‘Louisiana rolls’ that are so sweet and oily that they’re almost more like doughnuts than dinner rolls (I order extra!). Another good eat if you’re passing through is Boiling Point. What it lacks in ambience, it makes up for in deliciousness and variety.
And now I really want a Louisiana roll.
By Amber, on May 2, 2010, at 10:00 pm During my trip to Lake Charles, I happened to get Saturday off from all refinery duties, so I got up early and hit the Creole Nature Trail. It’s a self-guided National Scenic Byway that takes you through some of the nation’s top bird migration territory in just a few hours of extremely easy driving. The loop can be started from anywhere in the Lake Charles area, making it accessible from I-10 and a potential day trip from as far away as Houston. There are several spurs — two along the coast, and one out to the Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge. I didn’t make it to Lacassine this time, but I will probably visit next time.
I stopped at the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge and did the Pintail Drive. It’s a gravel loop through a wetland and you’re supposed to stay in your car. This is a nice opportunity for people with mobility issues or fear of alligators to get fairly close to wildlife. I liked being able to use my car door as a camera rest, but I sunburned my left arm. Oops.
My favorite stop, one I visited two more times before I came home to Houston, was the Wetland Walkway at the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a few miles of sidewalk and boardwalk with benches and an observation platform. The alligators roam freely throughout the park, which makes it exciting because you never know where they’ll pop up — we even saw muddy tracks on the boardwalk. It was on my way to the observation platform that I ran into this guy:
I don’t know which of us was more startled. I stood very still for a long time, excited that I was going to get a shot of him crossing the walkway. Eventually I realized that I was not going to win a battle of wills against an animal with no concept of time who is already home. And, as Mark points out, an ambush predator accustomed to sitting perfectly still for hours at a time.
On my way home to Houston, I drove part of the trail again and took the western spur along the coast, then up into Port Arthur and on to I-10. The area along the coast was hit hard by Hurricane Rita in 2005 and hasn’t completely recovered. There are some RVs and some new construction, but the wetlands and fields are still full of twisted metal and the odd overturned vehicle. I’m told that there’s an old concrete building in the town of Cameron that has withstood several hurricanes — after the storm passes, they just go in and hose the place out and replace the windows.
The thing that surprised me most was how little traffic I encountered along the whole trail, even on a Saturday. There were many times when I could have completely stopped in the middle of the highway to take a photo and not have been in anyone’s way. Most of the people I saw were locals who were fishing the waterway along the road. The Creole Nature Trail is a great way to spend an afternoon. Next time I’m in Lake Charles, I hope to see more of it!
By Amber, on April 27, 2010, at 10:00 pm You’ll have to wait for the full pictorial review of my trip to Louisiana, because I forgot the card reader for my DSLR, and then Mark brought it to me when he visited over the weekend, but oops, my work laptop doesn’t have the right port. So here’s the ultra-quick summary thanks to the USB card in my other camera. My Louisiana trip, in a nutshell:
My employer did not send me here to look at gators and eat fried food, but those are the parts of the week that I am choosing to remember. The real reason I came here was to shovel rocks. Expensive rocks, but basically rocks. I have shoveled rocks before lunch, I have shoveled rocks before dinner. I shoveled rocks at 4 AM today in the rain, and I’ll be shoveling rocks at 10 tonight. I think they have a name for this in other countries: prison camp.
Actually I can’t complain because the rock-shoveling has taken up relatively little of my time (plus it earns me some street refinery cred), and dining out on my corporate card takes some of the pain away. Maybe ‘dining out’ is too generous a description of picking up fast food, but I had Popeyes for lunch the first day and I was hooked. I’ve had more Popeyes in the last seven days than I’ve had in the last seven years.
You can’t come to Louisiana and not have some local food, though. It’s crawfish season and everyone’s got signs advertising theirs. I generally like my food pre-disassembled so I had some fried crawfish tails and they were delicious. Lots of good fried shrimp around here, too. If you drive the 45 minutes to the beach, you can get just-caught shrimp for $3.50/lb. And the gumbo! I love gumbo and everybody serves it. Tonight when I made my Popeyes run, I noticed that the marquee at Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant was advertising chicken and sausage gumbo. I guess that’s what you have to do to compete in Cajun country.
Getting sent to Lake Charles generally elicits jeers and pity at my office for some reason, but unless somebody can tell me where to get authentic gumbo in Houston, I think I’ll be looking forward to my next visit. I could even see coming out this way on my own time. Just don’t tell my coworkers I had fun or they might want to come, too.
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