March 13, 2010: Kountze, Texas to DeRidder, Louisiana

You know you’re in Louisiana when you order a Pacific Veggie pizza from Dominos and it comes with Cajun spices sprinkled on top.

Every year, three years counting, we’ve been in Texas at some point. Year One: we ended in El Paso. Year Two: we rode 983 miles across Texas. This year: we started in Kountze, just sixty miles from the Louisiana border.

Right before we hit Kountze last year, we started into bajou country with cypress trees growing in swamps along the Big Thicket Preserve of far eastern Texas. The air got more humid and the land flat. Black vultures took over from the turkey vultures scouring the highways for armadillo carcasses. And the rivers swelled to twenty, maybe thirty times the size of anything in the Colorado. All these changes stayed with us today as we rode into Louisiana.

It couldn’t have been a better first day. We spun 85 miles with maybe 500 ft of elevation gain along big-shouldered highways under sunny skies. The landscape varied from thick rows of planted pine logging tree farms to broad grassy pastures. The dense uncut forests are mowed back away from the highway about fifty feet on each side so gullies of water can flow off and away after big rains.

In Buna we wove our way through bubbly crowds of parade floats and gleeful locals celebrating their agricultural base on “Redbud Days”. People rode horses still shaggy with winter coats, pulled floats with their tractors bedecked with signs announcing: “Farm and Plant!” and at one point a bunch of kids asked Jerry if he wanted to hold a goat. Likely sensing the similarity between these baby goats and his currently favorite t-shirt that says something close to: “cranky old goats rule”, he politely passed.

Young and old goats in the Buna parade.

The highlight of the day, though, was our lunch in Bleakwood where sag queen Carol had organized Mama’s Kitchen to make a bounty of pies (pronounced “piiiiiiiis”) and a giant bowl of banana poodin’ for us. Which reminds me: you also know you’re in Louisiana when every café is named “Mama’s”.

One final note for the day: at the end of everyday, we have a group meeting to organize our ride for the next day. Tonight the group was so raucous Jerry said to Parker: “We’ve lost control of these people.” I’m seeing that too. Claire has an alligator toy strapped to the back of her bike fender; Rich has an alligator horn on his handlebars; Carol announced to everyone she would “slap ‘em silly and ‘em jerk bald-headed” if they grabbed food without washing their hands (look below to what she did to Marcella); and worst of all, Alan mistook riding the route for spinning on the indoor fitness bike in the hotel.