After the storm this morning, I got underway just before noon. It turned into a lovely day. Traffic was light as I made my way out of Houston. However, my clever plan of using Liberty Road along the train tracks was not so clever. Numerous freight trains, many of them completely stopped, blocked crossings on the road. After about 8 miles of searching for a way around, I was finally on the Beaumont Highway.
The highway was rather dreary and commercial for a while, but past the town of Barrett it got pretty, A combination of pasture and mixed woodlands, with the occasional bayou, made for a nice view. Cental Texas was all about oaks. East Texas mixed in generous helpings of pines. It was a long ride to Beaumont.
Many rivers run through Texas down to the Gulf.: San Jacinto, Neches, Sabine. Often the only convenient crossing is a freeway bridge. If one is on a quest to avoid freeways, one must often take long detours.
At Beaumont I headed toward the Gulf, then turned northeast on Hwy 87 to get across the Neches River. Here at its mouth is is a mighty channel. I could see the towering bridge for miles as I approached; it was a little vertigo-inducing. But I must say, the view while crossing was great. It was my one and only view of the Gulf of Mexico on this trip.
The next river obstacle was the Sabine, which forms the border between Texas and Louisiana. I couldn't use the I-10 bridge, so I detoured far north to Hwy 12. Its crossing of the Sabine was pretty, but not dramatic. 12 ran straight east across Louisiana; not much civilzation and a whole lot of woods. Often they were bottomland forests with a foot or so of water covering the roots of the trees. At other times the woods were commercial tree plantations, mainly scraggly pines for paper mills. Towns were far apart and rather ordinary.
At one of the ordinary towns, Kinder, I had to make a decision. Hwy 190 ran straight east to Baton Rouge, or I could drop south to Lafayette. Highway 165 ran north to Alexandria on the Red River, and a road ran east from there to Natchez, Mississippi.
Even though it meant dissing Louisiana because I wouldn't even spend one night in the state, I was kind of set on Natchez. It meant a long day and it activated one of my fears: a wayward deer crossing the road in the dark. Off I went, through more woods, pastures, and farms. The sun was getting low.
In Alexandria it was the same old problem: the most convenient bridge over the Red River was a freeway bridge. But a little smartphone checking revealed a way that led through a nice, traditional downtown as the churches tolled 6:00 pm. The Red River was big and beefy.
The road east from Alexandria ran through tunnels of trees, and the sun behind me cast long shadows in front of me. Natchez was 50 miles away. At Jonesville a bridge rose up off the flatlands to carry me across the Atchafalaya, a serious river that used to carry more water than the Mississippi.
In Ferriday the highway to Natchez was blocked. Detours sent me south through beautiful farmlands, then north again along the massive levee on the west bank of the Mississippi. The land felt different, as if I were in the lap of something old and profound. Finally I got onto the Highway 84 bridge that crossed from Lousiana into Mississippi.
Wow, what a river! So wide it looked like the bay of an ocean, and muscular, with eddies boiling on the surface as all that mass rolled downstream. On the far bank the road climbed the bluffs of Natchez, which stood out in contrast to the flat land all around.
I chose a budget motel on the far side of town and headed through the old downtown. Wow, again! Natchez has an abundance of beautiful old buildings. I'm going to have to go back tomorrow morning to have a better look. The historic district looked great in the dusk. Here's a link to some pictures (I didn't take any on the bike.)
http://www.terragalleria.com/america/mississippi/natchez/
400 miles. No deer strikes today.Tomorrow: the Natchez Trace.
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