Tales from the Christensen Cruiser

From Western Florida I headed towards New Orleans. Again keeping to the shore as much as I could, I motored along on Highway 182. There was a detour with the whole highway having to go around the beach. I then started to see lots of impromptu parking lots and soon saw that I was in the middle of the 42^nd annual National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama. I found a five-buck parking spot and got out to have some shrimp and see what was going on. There were lots of booths selling arts and crafts, food, and so forth – sort of a Puyallup Fair on the water. The sun was out and the place was packed. Where I landed was close to a stage and the crowd was thin at eleven in the morning. There was a guy coming on so I planted myself to listen. He was an excellent guitarist, and the more I listened, the more I liked it. He was doing something I have seen other people do, but still fascinates me. He was playing for a while, recording a bit of it, and playing it back in a loop and then playing lead to his own rhythm. I don’t think this was really possible until fairly recently, at least for a guy with just a guitar. Probably Robert Fripp was doing stuff like that in the seventies, but I would imagine that sort of equipment cost gazillions of dollars, and nowadays it’s probably an ap for an iphone or something. Affordable too, probably. As my dad said, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools”, meaning that it’s the skill of the man, not the fancy tools that gets the job done. (I still have the framed New Yorker cartoon that was given to me on my way to college. It’s a drawing of a frustrated guy coming through the front door with his wife asking “How did Arnold Palmers’ shoes and Arnold Palmers’ gloves and Arnold Palmers’ clubs do for Fred Schwartz today?”, as the steam is coming out his ears.) You get the idea. Point being this guy could PLAY, and his lyrics were cool too. It was a great show, with not too many people listening. I once saw Elvin Bishop at the Fieldhouse at UPS, and nobody came. A very sparse crowd, and Elvin came out and said that maybe some were thinking they made a mistake by coming, but that “the best time he ever had there was just two of  us!”, and proceeded to rock the house for hours.  It’s a sign of a true pro and this guy played a fabulous show in a difficult time slot. His name is Will Kimbrough and he has played with major guys like Rodney Crowell and Jimmy Buffett to name just a couple. I bought a CD and have listened to it a bunch of times. It’s called Wings and I highly recommend it. I’m not a lyric guy so it takes a few listens for me to understand the song. He is an amazing writer. Check his stuff out.

After a great lunch of a pile of shrimp and a beer, I headed west again. I took my next ferry from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island, Alabama and on through Biloxi, Mississippi. On the coast, both Alabama and Mississippi are pretty small. Both are big states, but both having a surprisingly small stretch of coastline. About this time, I started seeing all kinds of cool cars on the road – not just cool cars, really great classics and hot rods of all sorts. Turns out I was in the middle of the 13^th annual “Cruisin’ the Coast” celebration, where cars cruise up and down a twenty-nine mile section of the coast. People set up chairs along the road to watch all these amazing cars go by. It was really fun to drive along and have people applaud the Christensen Cruiser. They thought I was part of the cruisers! I was I guess, but by this point I had been cruising for four thousand miles or more. Now that is a cruise! Being a motorhead, it was fun in all sorts of ways.

I made it to New Orleans before dusk and found a hotel to stay at where I could leave the rig safely. The truck protects me from all sorts of stuff and is my safe haven, so securing it is fairly important. I got settled and got a cab, partly for the ride, and partly to get the local knowledge down a bit. I ended up with the perfect guy, who I had drive me around just a bit to get oriented and so forth. He told me which blocks were good to be on, where the gay part of Bourbon Street was and where the straight part was, and some local scams to look out for, all of which were tried on me at one point or another. It was all good information and a big help to me. I got out and started walking around. The street was packed and there were a whole lot of young people getting as blown as they possibly could. A whole lot of amateurs. I ended up finding what looked like a venerable old place a block off Bourbon Street. I had a great meal of some local fish that was blackened and fabulous. (I know, I know. No specifics for the foodies out there – sorry.) I had a couple of Manhattans and went forth into the fray. By now it was getting late and things were really wild. People bumping into you without even noticing, really drunk people, and the street smelled of overindulgence, to put it as mildly as I can. It was one of those moments where one is glad to have a few miles on the personal odometer, and know that that sort of thing is not remotely fun anymore. Not only that, the knowing that you were going to wake up in the morning feeling just fine, while a lot of these kids were going to be total wrecks and sleep the day away trying to recover was somewhat satisfying. One of the coolest things I saw that night was a couple of cops on horses. These horses were just hanging out in the middle of this bacchanal and were just as calm as could be – totally relaxed in the middle of the storm.

I got up the next morning and walked all around the French Quarter, seeing all sorts of music on the street, and going in to any shop or gallery that struck my fancy. In the light of day, it was a beautiful city, though driving in the day before, there was still lots of evidence of Katrina’s wrath. For obvious reasons, the French Quarter was just about perfect. I walked in some of the neighborhoods close by, and the architecture and the whole vibe of the town was just great. I got to see a funeral march go by as I walked, which was a pretty cool way to send somebody off to the next life – a joyful celebration, not some sort of dirge.

I’d had enough and got moving the next day, sticking to Interstate 10 for miles and miles of highway built above the bayou and ended up in Breaux Bridge. I meandered around town and found an RV park right beside the freeway. Run by nice people and very together. There was a restaurant that specialized in crawfish nearby so I walked to it and had some local beer and a sample plate of various crawfish delicacies.  This town is ground zero for crawfish, so it was really great. (I didn’t get to do the whole pile of them on the newspaper, but you can’t do everything.) By the time I finished my dinner it was pouring out, so I walked back having a fairly good shower on the way.

The next morning, after completing a long overdue oil change, I headed out of town. I stopped to visit with an old horse and two goats for a while to get the flavor of the place and headed for Texas.

Onward to Galveston…