Going to New Orleans, LA

My husband had a course to take for his business in New Orleans.  Since NOLA is the opposite end of the state for us it takes a good 6 hours of driving to get there.  It's just long enough were my husband doesn't like to do it by himself and so he asked me to join him and help drive some.  I was please to help him out and to get the trip to New Orleans.  So while he was being educated I was being educated about the city by being a tourist.  Over the next couple of posts I hope to share what I saw while I was there.
    One of the things about Louisiana as you drive down I-49 is you notice how flat it it and how extensive the fields can be.  So when you notice a little relief it gets your attention.  In this picture way in the back you can see some hills.  These hills usually are the Catahoula formation. I wrote about them before with my Hodges Garden post here .

We turned onto 190 and used that to get to I-10 and Baton Rouge.  While driving I couldn't help but notice how well the sugar cane was doing.  It looked like it was just about ready to be harvest and looked very healthy and should be a good crop this year in this area.

Sugar Cane growing in Louisiana

I usually try to take some pictures of the Atchafalaya Basin   but I must admit that I was driving as we were going through it and didn't get any.  Maybe next time.
Just before getting to I-10 we switched drivers and I was then able to take some more photo's.  I'm always fascinated by the the Mississippi River and love getting pictures of it and seeing how high or low it is.

The one thing that you notice with I-10 is how much industry there is in the area around it.

I was surprised to see the river was down as much as it was since we had been having rain earlier in the week. 

The west bank of the Mississippi River as seen from I-1o

It was hard to get a good photo of it because of all the beams and traffic.

I think this ended up being the best one I took

The Mississippi River looking south from I-10. (10-13-13)

I was glad we traveled when we did on Sunday afternoon and missed a lot of the heavy Baton Rouge traffic.  So I was able to enjoy the scenic view as we head south to New Orleans.

This bridge always fascinates me.  Its so low but it just goes and goes for a long time.  For the longest time I thought this was the  /wiki/Lake_Pontchartrain_Causeway  but I found out later its not that at all- just an ordinary bridge.  Here I was hoping to be able to travel on the worlds largest bridge - oh well maybe next time..  On the right is Lake Ponchatrain (  Lake_Pontchartrain ).

On the left was the swamps.  I must admit I do like to check them out because after Hurricane Katrina the area looked liked a bomb had gone off and everything was grey and dead looking.  Its so nice to see it has come back to life again.

I do like see the swamp area's too. 

This area hasn't come back as fast as the rest of it has but it still looks a lot better than it did.

I do like seeing pampas grass (/wiki/Cortaderia_selloana).   These looked very healthy. 

This is it for the trip getting us to New Orleans.  I'll be blogging about the rest of the trip in the days to come.