Hitting the Road!

Sunrise on the road

I'll make no excuses nor offer any apologies for my lack of posts...I've been living life!  I will however, say that I still do enjoy blogging and am using my current cross-country trip as an excuse to get back into it. 













Myllisa, Jim, Vic and Andy getting oriented to Cajun-style seafood boil!

One of the biggest changes in my life since I've last posted is that I've been accepted into Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association (CVMA) Chapter 23-3.  I'll save the background on CVMA for a future post, but there's a core group of a dozen or so folks with whom I ride or participate in community events pretty much every weekend.  These bikers have become my CVMA family, so it's only fitting that a handful of them accompanied me on a pit-stop at my parents' house in Louisiana on our way to Gettysburg, PA.  More on that later!

We enjoyed  a mostly uneventful and dry ride for almost 500 miles until we encountered what I can only describe as a Louisiana squall about an hour from my parents' house.  I was riding lead when we spied the ominously dark blue horizon into which we were about to roll.  I pulled over to get a consensus.  The verdict:  we're close, let's push on!  In hindsight, I wish I would've snapped a pic of the clearly defined curtain of rain that we ran into like a solid wall, but I was so focused on staying on the road and leading us through a safe path that my GoPro stayed idle on the handlebars.  I've ridden tens of thousands of miles on motorized 2-wheels, so I'm not easily intimidated when I'm on  my bike.  But for the intense 10 minutes that it took us to get through the squall (and what we all swear was hail), my mind raced with potential reactions to all the "what if" scenarios popping into my head.  Obviously since I'm posting, everything turned out all right and just gave the first of what I'm sure is going to be a lifetime of stories to be recounted later from this trip.

It's just not a trip to my parents' house without boiled seafood. My dad boiled up some Louisiana blue-claw crabs and fresh, off the boat shrimp along with all the "fixins" for us.  Soooo delicious! There's always one non-seafood eater in every crowd, but my mom is the queen of entertaining and had some down home favorites on standby. 

As a testament to the unique way of life from which I hail, we walked across the yard to the neighbor's house to check out their latest find. It's not really a pet since it's only there temporarily, but it's quite the creature.  What you see in the pic is Andy putting his hand above (at a safe distance!) a 100+ pound alligator turtle.  It's easy to see why it's sometimes called a dinosaur turtle with it's crazy looking spiny shell and head.  According to National Geographic, this ugly carnivore is found almost exclusively in the southeastern US and can live to be 100 years old.  We didn't mess around with it enough to get it to open its mouth, but apparently it has a red string of flesh that hangs off its tongue that acts like a lure to attract unsuspecting frogs and fish. 

When the eating was done (and yes, I was the last one to push away from the table :-), we took a walk to dump the shrimp and crab peelings into the back bayou.  Usually, the scent of food scraps in the bayou will bring alligators to the spot, but none graced us with their presence this night.  We walked along the bayou side and skirted the swamp that my brother and I grew up playing in as we made our way back to the house for more eating!  Now, as an adult, I look at the bayou and swamp in amazement that we spent so much time in this environment as kids.  We had a pirogue (flat-bottomed, wooden Cajun boat) that we would paddle around and had a rope hanging from a tree that we'd fling ourselves into the snake and alligator infested bayou with.  Perhaps ignorance really is bliss because I can't seem to recall a single incidence of being harassed by wildlife during any of our childhood adventures.  Well, sometimes my brother would coax me precariously close to dangerous critters, but we almost made it home in one piece before the sun went down!

Our excellent day of riding and visiting with family was capped off with dessert while sitting around the back porch telling stories and enjoying the interaction of four generations.  This is my mom in the photo rocking her great-granddaughter to sleep.  I sure do enjoy being home on the bayou :-)