We camped at six different Louisiana State Parks in eight days. Can’t sit still for some reason. 😁
With a campervan it’s easy to move to a new spot, so rather than coming back to the same spot after a day of touring, we just grab a spot at whatever park happens to be nearby. Louisiana State Parks are decent enough and dirt cheap. Regular winter prices for an electric site are $18-20. If you are over sixty-two you get half off. Ten bucks a night gets us a campsite, a bit of wildlife, hiking trails and a place to shower. Some State Parks filled up last weekend. Others, like the hurricane damaged park we are in tonight (Tickfaw) are almost empty.
Tickfaw is about 75 miles from the coast, yet it’s badly damaged from the last hurricane. A serious storm, for sure.
In this part of Louisiana there are wildlife refuge’s everywhere, only some of which have hiking trails. Other than gators and egrets, wildlife is sparse though. Perhaps a bit early in the season?
We tried heading down to Grand Isle, a park on a long spit of land at the southern end of Louisiana Highway One. We knew the park was closed (hurricane damage) but thought the drive might be interesting anyway. The route down was lined with blue-tarped and badly damaged houses from one of the recent hurricanes (Ida), so we turned back toward New Orleans and found another State Park for the night. Ironically, in the park (Bayou Sengette) we saw more wildlife than in the refuges, even though it was just outside New Orleans near a busy highway. Five species of heron (Great Blue, Little Blue, Tricolor, Black-crowned and Yellow-crowned) in a pond in the park’s picnic area all within a few hundred feet of each other.
We’re traveling to see nature, not cities, so avoiding New Orleans was part of my plan. Somehow though, the combination of Garmin trying to send us down the biggest highways in the area and Google maps trying to send us on the crappiest, roughest roads through the poorest neighborhoods, we ended up going straight through downtown New Orleans and ramping off onto city streets a few blocks from the French Quarter.
Didn’t stop and tour though. The French Quarter might be another trip.
Michael Janke 
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