marksville

Aug. 7, 2009

Sugarcane stretched towards the sky on both sides of the country lane. After a left on Old Hwy 1, the crop turned to cotton. We pulled into Marksville’s Casino and RV Resort with the sun lowering in front of us. I approached the counter. “No tent camping allowed.” Maybe “Resort” in the name should’ve given it away. Begging didn’t get us anywhere, so we rolled out of the parking lot and down the nearest road.

I saw a man working on a tractor at the end of a long driveway. “Bree, I’ll ask him if we can camp out.” When I asked, his face read a mix of skepticism and amusement, but he said, “Choose yourself a spot, and we’ll even let you get yourself a shower.” His wife. Penny, offered us towels and their 2-year-old granddaughter joined us outside to “help” cook our split pea soup. When it was her turn to try a bite, she got her mouth close to the spoon then declared, “I don’t like it.”

In the morning, we had said we’d leave by 7 am, but at 8:30 we were barely stirring. Penny had returned our load of laundry she had run for us. O’Neil came by on the tractor. “You’re still here?” he asked with a wink. “Well, y’all better come in for some coffee,” Penny invited from across the yard. She told us relatives owned all the houses on both sides of hers. The land had been her grandfather's. When I asked if the French last name meant they were Cajun: “No. We’re Coonasses out here,” she replied. They had recently constructed a pond out back to stock bass and crawfish; she said they leave out corn in order to fatten the squirrels.

O’Neil came in and we all enjoyed biscuits with homemade strawberry jam. Bree and I packed up our bikes and took a couple of timed photos with our hosts before we started biking once again.