day 12: Winnfield, LA to the middle of nowhere, LA

The eyes of the LORD are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good.

Proverbs 15:3

57.29 miles – 1,427 ft climb

Today was a light day. It was misting a little this morning, but the rest of the day was just cloudy. We did actually have a sun sighting today. Very brief, but it was a nice reminder.

We still passed quite a few broken trees and some places with standing water. I’m not sure if it’s leftover from Laura or from Sally or Beta. One lady told me that some places just got power back last week. Winnfield was bigger than we realized. I’m not sure the significance, but Winnfield had cute painted pigs all over town.

We stopped in Natchitoches today, (I found out it is pronounced Nack-A-Tish, what? how?) but didn’t end up spending the night. It’s a cute little waterfront town. We ate at a place called Lasyone’s that had authentic Louisiana food. They pronounce it kinda French sounding like Lay-zons, but if you look closely it is actually lazy ones. Hmmm. Bruce got red beans & rice with sausage and I got a meat pie. I guess those observant ones of you will notice that I accidentally didn’t even get my meat pie in the picture. Oopsy. Just imagine it looking kinda like those little fruit pies you used to be able to get at McDonald’s. Since we got there 10 minutes before they closed, we had to get it to go. But it worked out because we found a little place down by the river with a few tables and a nice view.

After lunch we drove out to the Oaklawn Plantation which had the original buildings and homes from when it was a working plantation. Walking around on it, I could almost imagine it filled with people milling about doing farm work. It was fairly empty (ie us and another family) so we practically got a personal tour from the Park Ranger. He was super nice and had lots of good stories.

Bruce wanted to ride some more miles because tomorrow is a long day. The map showed a little town called Hanna about 20 miles down the road. Perfect! The road from Natchitoches was pretty awful. But at least it wasn’t that crowded. I think it was almost harder bouncing around on it in Harvey than riding a bike on it.

I started looking for signs of Hanna around 18 miles down the road, but she was not to be found. When I got to the next town, I called Bruce and we decided that I would go back and meet him. We ended up boondocking in a church parking lot in the middle of no where. The church has no signs, so we weren’t able to call and ask permission. Hopefully no one will even notice we’re here.