Florida Ride - Day Three

Florida Ride - Day Three

We started our ride this morning from Livonia.  The temperatures were in the low 50s and the humidity was in the high 90s.  It was hard to stay warm without sweating under my cool-weather riding gear.

The Spanish moss brought back a lot of old memories for me, from when I lived in Savannah, Georgia.













I hadn't peddled very long this morning before I noticed that the highway was littered with small chopped pieces of cane and other debris.

I found a place to pull off the road to see what was being grown.  And found two plantings, this young crop...

... and this full grown crop of sugar cane, reaching 8 to 10 feet high.  All of the chopped cane that I saw was being transported in large open-top trucks, thus the littering.

Louisiana cane takes about 13 months after planting before it is ready to be harvested.  The littering begins when harvesting starts in October.  It last about 3 months. 











As we were researching about the crops grown in the Acadiana Basin, we found that perhaps the most popular crop was that of rice/crawfish.

Rice is planted in flooded fields, then a couple of months later the same flooded fields are stocked with crawfish, which are ready for harvesting about three months later, just before the rice is ready to be harvested.










Several miles further down the road I found that the debris along the side of the road had changed.  I was now riding through logging country, and the debris along the road was pine bark chips.  The cross-winds from the passing vehicles blew it off the road and onto the shoulder where I needed to ride.












We had to cross the Mississippi River just after we arrived in Baton Rouge.  As with the Atchafalaya bridge, without any shoulder it was impossible to continue across the bridge on my bicycle.

Further, we found US 190 through Baton Rouge to treacherous for a bicycle, so Diane transported me to the outbound side of the city, where I resumed riding to our lunch destination.











We found a lovely park about a mile off the highway, where we stopped for a quiet lunch.  While I stretched out on a bench, Diane was able to walk around the park on the paved pedestrian paths.  (And not a mosquito in sight!)













When we arrived at out motel in Hammond, later in the afternoon, we received a recommendation to eat at a local diner.  Considering that we only had motel-room-sandwiches the night before, this place was great!

The service was first class, and the food was even better than that.

Takeaways: 

During today's ride I noticed a couple of different conditions: the highway being littered with chopped cane, and the highway being littered with pine bark.  Being aware of the presence of both of these could have stopped there without further thought or investigation.  Even noticing that the size and shape of the pine bark made it more apt to be blown to the side of the road wasn't that significant.  But as we continued to observe and inquire about local crops, we discovered and learned more than we were able to see -- the farming (production) of crawfish.  When the flooded rice fields are stocked with young crawfish, they burrow down into the mud 6 to 8 feet deep, where they stay and molt for the next three months, when they surface again to feed.  They are not only out of sight to us but to the farmers, as well.  In the Doctrine and Covenants the Lord says: "study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people."  (And, I suppose Crawfish).  A major part of our trip and our sharing each time we got together was about the things each of us observed, or learned along the way.  Life is like that, we can go along accepting the things we see at face value, but altogether miss what is below the surface, unless we take the time and put forth the energy to learn what is really there. 

I was initially disappointed when Diane had to drive me across the Atchafalaya River, and then again across the Mississippi River.  My disappointment was rooted in my original intent of riding my bike from Texas to Florida.  From a purist point of view these necessary adjustments didn't allow me to fulfill that objective. But as I thought more about it, I realized that I wasn't doing this so I could report to someone monitoring my ride, but rather for my own enjoyment and purposes.  This change in my paradigm opened the way for us to make other appropriate, but not required adjustments, which proved to make the overall venture more enjoyable than it might otherwise have been.  Further, the minor adjustments we were thus able to make opened the way for us to see, do, and learn things that otherwise would not have been possible.  Life is like that, when disappointments, discouragement, or setbacks come along, we can let them derail us from our destiny, or real purpose in life, or we can use them to grow and progress, and still arrive at our ultimate destination, all the better for it.