Day 5

We got an earlier start today, mainly because the motel was so nasty that neither of us wanted to stay any longer than necessary. It was a motel with outside access to the rooms, which always makes Cathey nervous; but this one had some special features like a bent door frame that let in the night cold, a heating system that alternated between too cold and too hot, and also a non-latching bathroom door. Cathey was starting to get a bad impression of the South, but things got better today.
We crossed the Mississippi bridge again and went back to Denham Springs on the east side of Baton Rouge and set up our trailer in a nice KOA park. Since this was our first ever setup of this trailer, I don't think we did too bad. We had a nice concrete pad to setup on, so it didn't take long. The big disappointments were the water heater and the coax cable that I forgot to bring - easily resolved with a trip to Target. The water heater is a mystery; it fired up this morning when I first turned it on, but the water never got hot. When we came back in the afternoon, I asked for some assistance from the handyman and he showed me that the reset buttons on the face of the heater needed to be pushed in, and then it fired up again but apparently it turns off again before it has a chance to heatup the water. I keep thinking there is something that I forgot to do but there aren't many controls, only the reset buttons on the outside and the on/off switch on the inside.
So after we got setup we ventured back to Baton Rouge for a fabulous seafood dinner at Ralph and Kacoo's. They are a famous (around here) seafood restaurant chain that has about a half dozen outlets in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and several places in Texas. Ralph and Kacoo's was a favorite dining place for me and the guys I hung out with when I lived here in 1980-81. The food was as great as I remembered and the hushpuppies were even better!
After our dining experience we did some aimless touring of the LSU area and then were going to go up to Baker, where I lived when I was in the area, but missed the road and ultimately ended up back on I-12, conveniently near a Super Target, so we picked up a few things that we needed and headed back to our humble abode.