Lake Bisteneau State Park

I've decided I've had enough of the heat and humidity of the south in the summer and I'm heading north in search of higher latitudes and higher altitudes. I found Lake Bisteneau State Park on the northern edge of Louisiana near my northerly route and headed there to camp for a night on my path to escape the heat.

Arriving on a sunday evening I found this park mostly empty except for a few campers, mostly in RVs. It was eerie and mysterious: while the facilities reminded me of the state parks in Maryland that I enjoyed as a kid, it was also like a ghost town in that nothing seemed to have been used in a while. You can see this lack of use in the absolute calm water surface that reflects so well in some of my pictures. This parks is about water but nobody is going near it?

The answer to why may be an invasive Asian weed that's clogging the lake to the point where the surface is covered in it and you can't see the water. Boat rentals are cancelled and I'm sure folks are taking their personal boats elsewhere.

My campsite was near the water but covered in a rich canopy of green trees. I'd had enough tent camping on gravel lots and messy sand so when I saw the option to park next to a deck and camp on top of clean, dirt-free wood, I started feeling a little better about.. camping in a swamp. It was still horribly hot and humid here and at night it cools down a little bit but doesn't drop under 75, so I ran the electrical cord to my tent and setup the fan. Camping with a fan, that's roughing it.

I don't recall what I had for dinner because the memory of swarming mosquitoes, moths and biting flies attacking my camp lantern was distracting me so much. On top of that, the flying southern cockroaches that kept leaping onto my legs didn't provide much comfort. It seems as though the cockroaches live under the deck -- you know a couple inches from my tent opening. I didn't like the idea of this but I was stuck with it. It was the fact that I found four or five had flown into my car that really bothered me. Your house getting cockroaches is easy to fix -- call somebody with chemicals -- but your car? Cockroaches crawling out of your the food bins of your car every time you stop on your road trip to camp?

Thankfully, I got them all out.

I did, right?