Something about New Orleans gave me the urge to use black and white, I think it was all the crazy colors and general chaos that needed a bit of simplifying.

I still haven’t made my mind up about what I’m going to do next, the construction company is still looked like the winner. In talking to my prospective partner it seemed like he was making some connections and even started a couple jobs, work was certainly easy enough to come by and in a couple of days of putting up a website I already had a handful of leads.

Unfortunately, as the week wore on there were a couple of red flags, he managed to lose his phone, and was unable to get himself back on his feet losing the couple of gigs he did have.

I need to come back to this beautiful city when its not full of tourists (if such a time exists). Now it’s time to head back east.

By mid to late afternoon I was approaching Mobile, normally I wouldn’t cross a large urban area in the late afternoon knowing it might take me awhile to find a place to camp on the other side, in this case though, I knew a place I’d stayed on the way to New Orleans that I could get to before dark.

I was almost on through Mobile when I hit a wall of police cars and brightly colored floats. Another Mardi Gras parade, I am pretty sure I heard New Orleans give an evil chuckle as she flipped me off one last time with a long snaking middle finger.

Needless to say they stuck the parade right in front of the bridge I needed to cross the bay on. I would think police would be better at giving directions, about two hours of stopping and starting and a “small” on the highway I was finally out of Mobile and crossing the bay.

It was now completely dark and so foggy I could barely see 20 feet in front of me, Luckily, in all that stopping I had found a campsite that was only a couple of miles away, the second time driving past I even found the entrance, a large chain link gate. I pulled up and cut the engine so I could try calling the number on the sign to get the number off their voicemail for the after hours campground host who didn’t answer the phone. As I sat there in the cold wet fogg contemplating my options a car pulled in. Great I could follow them in and figure it out from their, that is I would have been able to if the damn bike did more than give the half hearted grunt telling you “leave me alone, I’m taking a nap now”. Well shit I guess all that stopping and starting plus running the grips and aux lights drained my battery.

It felt like time slowed down as I waddled my bike as fast as I could towards the now closing gate though I’m sure in reality it was the gate and I that were going slowly. I made it through with a couple of seconds to spare and pushed my bike to the deserted entrance kiosk. I finally got ahold of the campground host who came and gave me a ride to my site in his golf cart, for the first time this whole trip I had trouble finding trees that I could use. When I finally did find a place (a good 50ft from my ‘site’) it started to rain.

It rained all night. In the morning I explained to some rather annoyed state employees what my motorcycle was doing in front of their kiosk. After; approval from the parks director, an extremely rusty set of jumper cables, more directorial approval, a new set of jumper cables, a heavy rain storm, two trucks and 3 people I had a running motorcycle.

Once again I was focused on staying sane and dry so, no pictures, sorry.