Horse and Buggy Territory

We are in northern Indiana, specifically in Shipshewana. This is the RV capital of the country where many RV manufacturers are located. As we neared the area we saw an increasing number of trailers and motorhomes on the roads and we weren't surprised. Our 5th-wheel trailers were all made in the neighborhood. We aren't far from Ohio where our Airstream was manufactured. But we came here to appreciate the Amish culture and workmanship, so we are seeing lots of horses and buggies. Bicycles are also frequently the mode of travel.

Today we walked a block to E and S Bulk Sales, a nearby Amish market. This was one row of the parking lot. The other day we saw both buggies and trucks at the grain mill.

I didn't realize that buggies needed to be licensed until I really looked at the license plate on them.

Amish farms are well-kept and beautiful. And they don't have electrical lines running to them.

We arrived here Wednesday and when I looked through the events in the area I learned the flea market was only open Tuesday and Wednesday. Those days are shopping days, I read. We visited E and S Sales that day and it was packed. On Thursday we were driving around the area and I decided that was laundry day. Clothes lines in backyards were full of drying laundry. (Sorry about the Colorado State Parks pass in the lower left. I couldn't take the photo without it in the corner.)

We went shopping but we didn't do much buying, except for food. We ate both breakfast and lunch at the Blue Gate Restaurant. Believe me, we didn't need to eat much else on either day.

The people who operate our RV park obviously love birds. Two sites are blocked off with cones. The only reason we can figure out must be that a killdeer has a nest in each site. Look at this little bird.

The shopping area in Shipshewana is beautifully landscaped with lots of flowers.

Not Fun

Driving through the Chicago suburbs to Wisconsin is not fun. The traffic is terrible.



The tolls are expensive. Even though we paid for the privilege to drive the road, it was really rough.



It may be the fastest route (that is what our GPS says), we still had to stop for toll stations--costing 85 cents, $2.80, $17.00 and probably others I can't remember.



Finally, we made it to Wisconsin. After driving through Milwaukee, we saw the beautiful, neat farms we remember from when we lived here in the 1980s.







We are glad to be here.

Birds

Monday, we--the three couples in training to be tram drivers at the refuge--went birding with Martin, the director of the Valley Nature Center, which operates the tram. This is what birders look like in the field.



Birding is really big business here in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. A recent survey showed that tourists who come to the valley for birding and other nature-related activities spend over $300 million a year while in the area. Like I said, big business. None of us training to operate the tram are serious birders, but we all want to know enough to talk reasonably to all those birders. Thus, the day of birding.

We drove to Brownsville to The Nature Conservancy's Southmost Preserve. It provides native habitat for birds and wildlife. As you can see from the sign, the non-profit Nature Conservancy has corporate sponsors.




In this part of Texas, 95% of that habitat has been cleared to allow farming and ranching. Wildlife agencies are piecing together parcels of land to provide a wildlife corridor where the animals can travel around the open farm land. The Southmost Preserve is not open to the general public, but Martin works with the director of the preserve and we were able to go there.

We walked to this viewing deck on a small resaca (oxbow lake that is intermittently
flooded then dries up).



What little I knew about birds didn't include anything more about waterfowl than that some of them are ducks. This is what a bunch of ducks, stilts, and other waterfowl look like floating on the resaca.



Now I know that this is an American Avocet.



And this is a Black-necked Stilt.



On the far side of the resaca we saw a small stand of Sabal Palms, the only native palm in Texas. Once there were 50,000 acres of Sabal Palms along the Rio Grande. But they where cleared for farming, as well as to provide pilings for bridges and docks. Today only about 500 acres of palm forest remain in the U.S., almost all on this preserve and the nearby Sabal Palm Preserve.



Here is our trusty group walking to another area of the preserve.



As we walked down the path, we saw that GM is another sponsor of the preserve. By the way, the "Turk's Cap" is a small shrub with bright red flowers that are a real favorite of butterflies.



We drove on to the Sabal Palm Preserve, where we ate our picnic lunch and had a chance to walk through the palm forest. It is really impressive.



This coarse grass is everywhere in the preserve. It is Guinea Grass, imported in earlier decades by government agricultural agencies and ranchers seeking a drought-resistant grass for cattle. The cows wouldn't eat it and they found it didn't provide good nutrition. But the grass thrived and chokes out native plants. You know what they say about "the best laid plans."



We learned a couple of other things as well. This is a blurry photo of a bug trap. We saw a lot of them along the roads. Martin explained they are there to catch the boll weevil. Remember hearing about that bug in songs years ago? It is still a problem for cotton farmers, but now they have a way to determine where it is so they can spray the plants to prevent damage.



We saw a lot of these concrete pipes in the fields. Turns out, they are stand pipes connected to underground irrigation pipes. They contain valves that can to opened to irrigate the fields.



Traveling, spending time in new parts of the country, is a great way to learn about lives and ways that we have never seen before. That is one of the reason we love being RVers.

Tobacco

John and I both smoked for years--I for many more years than John. Our parents smoked. Both of our sons smoked at one time. When we were in college, we could even smoke during some lectures. We received a very nice ash tray as a wedding gift. All restaurants were smoke-filled. So it was very appropriate that we visit the Tobacco Farm Life Museum in Foley, NC, south of Wilson, where we were staying. Many small town museums are not well done, but this one was excellent and very informative.. We learned the whole process of how tobacco is grown today and in earlier times.

Today Wilson appears to be a run-down city with little employment. I think it was in the 1960s that 50% of all the tobacco grown in the US was grown within 50 miles of Wilson and the city was a major tobacco market location. Before the age of the automobile there was a wagon manufacturer in town that could turn out 15,000 wagons a year. Tobacco was the crop that kept the southern farmer going after the Civil War (called the War of Northern Aggression in one of the museum signs) because it was a crop that could be raised without slaves.

Not being farmers, we often drive by a farm field and don't know what is growing there. We think all farmers should be required to label their crops for passing city-dwellers. We didn't know whether or not there was any tobacco growing in the fields we saw in North Carolina. At the museum we learned that the fields full of large green leafed plants were tobacco fields.



At the museum, they had a few small tobacco plants. Here is one, up close.



This is a reconstructed tobacco drying shed.



And these are what are called "hands" of tobacco, the way the leaves are tied for handling.



The museum included this old one-room school house,



and exhibits of what life was like on small tobacco farms. Most of those exhibits were inside and difficult to photograph. I did get a picture of a examining table from a small-town doctor's office. I'm glad the equipment has been improved over the years.



On our way to the post office in Wilson, we passed two tire companies with statues like this on the roof. We think we saw a story about this fellow on Texas Country Reporter in the past few months.

Aaargh, Houston!

Unfortunately, there is no way to drive east out of Texas on Interstate 10 without going through Houston. I had planned our route using the outer ring road around the city, but then realized it is a toll road and is open only to people who have a transponder to pay the toll fee. That's not us. And for some reason Cairn (our GPS, remember?) didn't choose the I-612 ring road either. This is the second time we have tried to drive into Houston on a Sunday and the traffic was terrible. The same thing happened three years ago. This is what traffic looked like yesterday as we were approaching I-10.



The closer we got to the ramp to I-10, the slower it was. We spent so much time stopped and creeping at 5 mph or less, our arrival time in Beaumont was 50 minutes later than what had originally been estimated. When we got close enough to the ramp to I-10 to see it was a parking lot as far as we could see, we finally pulled out into the through lanes and drove five miles to the northern part of I-612 and used that road to access I-10. We don't know what had been going on but we did merge into very light traffic on I-10. The traffic jam we had been in must have still been holding up those vehicles.

As we drove the last part of our journey on open roads. This is a crawfish farm. Who knew farmers raised crawfish?



A little further down the road we passed this complex. It looks like a refinery to me. The sign said it was a chemical plant. I guess that means it refines oil into chemicals.



We spent the night in Beaumont, today it is on to Louisiana.