Our Latest Adventure--Louisiana

Travelogue--Day 6


We are now at the rally site in Rayne, Louisiana. The city has a large grounds around it's civic center where they have laid out almost 800 RV sites. About their biggest industry in this town is RV rallies. Not only is this a major source of income directly to the city for the use of the rally park, the many RVer's that come into town spend a great deal of money with the local merchants. We arrived here on Sunday and have gone out to eat, with a fairly large group, three nights so far.

Sunday night eight of us went to the Frog City Cajun Restaurant for some real cajun food. Monday night we went to Chef Roy's. They serve really good seafood. Last night I lead a group of 16 back over to Duson to Thibodeaux's Restaurant for a supreb meal. This is one of the places we ate when we were down here in January on our way to Florida.

The rally does not officially kick off until Monday evening of next week. Normally at these rallies folks are discouraged from arriving before noon on Sunday. Our club, Monaco America, is different in that area because we start arriving up to a week early to start the fun. By this past Sunday evening we had seven coaches on site and by this evening (Wednesday) we now have about 25 coaches here. This includes almost all of the officers and the key volunteers. The parking committee, which I am serving on this time around, has laid out all the sites, assigned golf carts and are ready to lead the coaches into their sites when they arrive. We figure that at the rate they are arriving that the majority of the 94 coaches coming in will be here by Saturday or early Sunday. So far the parking of the coaches has gone pretty smoothly. We got some major rain Monday evening and some of the coaches leveling jacks began to sink into the ground. We are parked on grassy areas. So far we only have gotten one coach stuck in the mud. My brother, Bill, had his jacks sink in so far he could not get level. He decided to pull the coach a few feet forward to get on firmer ground. When he did he buried his back wheels down to the rims. We had to get a city employee to come over with a big backhoe and chain to pull him out. This is not an unusual occurance in the big rally parks that have grass to park on instead of concrete.

We have not done much siteseeing yet. We have been busy working with the club officers and volunteers getting things set up. Also, we have been to this area before and have seen much of it. We also have made the necessary trips to Wally World for the items we forgot to bring with us. (For you non-RVer's, Wally World is your local Wal-Mart.)

Internet access will be a little hit and miss the next two weeks. The rally park does not have WiFi. They do have a dial up connection in one of the buildings but I have not been able to get my laptop to work on a dialup connection. I am currently sitting in a local McDonald's paying $2.95 for a two hour WiFi session. Future updates of our travels will be added as we get access to the net.