Sunday, June 26, 2011

The church where Bonnie is working has an older congregation. They just love our Bonnie. The priest is also a professor of philosophy but he is not too much of an egg-head. He gave a very well balanced sermon that included Kierkegaard's study of the binding of Issac, this morning's old testament lesson, and common sense wisdom.  They have a little pipe organ which was nice to sing to. Worshiping using the Rite I service required that Yvonne and I stay on our toes. It was a pleasant change from Rite II.

After church we went to coffee hour to meet the parishioners and have a bottle of cold bottle of water, not hot coffee. (The environment dictates some very different norms.) Everyone was really friendly and interested in our trip and we heard stories about RVing. (We do not view ourselves as RVers.) We said our goodbyes to the parishioners and give Bonnie a hug and got on the road again.

We continued to drive into pine woods and forest and rolling hills. The overcast skies finally broke and we had lots of sunshine. It is plenty hot and the humidity is becoming a factor.

Shreveport LA came up very quickly. Yvonne tried to find BBQ for lunch before leaving TX but Stanley was determined to keep driving. Then Rosemary (the GPS) found us two BBQ places in Shreveport. The first was "O Taste and See BBQ and more". We headed off the freeway only to find a little pink house that was closed, it was Sunday after all. We tried again and Rosemary found "Shane's" and we were off. This time "Shane's" had been swallowed by a housing development. There was no sign of it anywhere. So we gave up and munched on mixed nuts and V8 juice and kept driving down smaller and smaller roads towards Lake D'Arbonne  State Park.

We pulled into the nearly empty campground, registered and went to look for our camp site. Stanley was going to have to back in so Yvonne got out to assist. As she opened her door, the buzz sound of cicadas accosted her ears (These bugs only come out every 13 years and have waited for Yvonne to decide to travel to this side of the US). Now many of you know that Yvonne has some serious feelings about bugs, especially flying bugs, UGH!!!!!!!! She closed the door to decide if she was going to get out of the truck. She gathered her courage and out she went. The sound of the cicadas comes in waves, when the wind blows through the trees or when there is a disturbance on the ground they strike up the band. She quickly got used to it (that is what she says).

After we got set up, we got a cold beer, and walked down to the lake. We went onto the boat dock out into the lake. There we saw two herons and one egret posed picturesquely on tree stumps sticking up out of the lake. We took some pictures and headed back to the air-conditioned trailer. We were really beginning to feel the heat and the humidity. We stayed in the trailer writing the blog, catching up e-mail and fixing dinner. Then we got out the bicycles to tour the campground. Unfortunately we had not looked at the road as we came in. This campground is on the banks of a lake. There is no direction from our trailer along the lake shore to anywhere in the campground that is not uphill and really uphill. It is just no fun to walk the bike to the top of the hill and then coast down. We did not stay out too long because it was hot and the walking was too much work. What did we expect?

After a good night's sleep we left for Kathy Sproles house in Tuscaloosa AL.