Three states in one day!

Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama all in one day. Amazing when you think that Texas took ten!

After leaving Slidell, the first part of yesterday's route took Mark across a huge swamp which is drained by the Pearl river and its distributaries. In the vicinity of Mark's route the swamp is known as Honey Island Swamp. It is one of the least altered river swamps in the US. Several companies organise swamp tours and if you click on either of the 'gators below you can explore the swamp 'virtually'....








Or, even better, here's a short video of the Honey Island swamp!



There are apparently 1,000,000 alligators in Louisiana - and a lot of them are in the swamp! Here's just one in a million....


The distributary known as the East Pearl River is the Louisiana/Mississippi state boundary...

In the Artemis web diary today there is talk of 'houses on stilts' in the swamp and I guess those shown above must be some of them. A search on Flickr also produced these image of a house on the Pearl River (above)and river front house in the swamp...








OK... enough swamp talk... time to move in to the state of Mississippi... through which, due to the configuration of its western boundary with Louisiana, Mark only had an 80 mile journey yesterday.

In many ways, the state of Mississippi typifies the 'Deep South' of the USA and its current socio economic status today is a consequence of a long history of cultural and racial tensions, political differences with 'the north' and the fluctuating fortunes of farming and industry. At 37% it is the state with the largest % of African Americans and in August, 2007, a report by the United States census Bureau indicated that Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. There is a pretty thorough description of the social and economic history of Mississippi here which you might care to read for more background information.

One of the facts which is recorded is that back in the early 1990s, in an effort to boost the economic fortunes of the state, the state legislature legalized casino gambling along the the Gulf Coast including the towns of Bay St Louis (left), Gulfport and Biloxi through which Mark cycled yesterday. An indication of how much gambling tax was earned by the state is the fact that it lost half a million dollars a day following damage to casinos on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Although much of the world's attention was focused on New Orleans at the time of Katrina in August 2005, massive damage was sustained by communities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast as witnessed by the images in this excellent set .
Bay St Louis, for example, 'lost' its bridge link to the rest of the Gulf coast during the hurricane and this was only restored in May 2007 . East of Bay St Louis on Long Beach I reckon that the damage to beach front areas is visible on the image below where buildings have been removed leaving only foundations ..
..and here again further along the coast ...In fact, if I have learned one new thing today while 'trawling' for the blog, it is the extent to which areas well to the east of New Orleans were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Statistics suggest that 90% of the buildings along the coast in Biloxi and neighboring Gulfport were destroyed by the hurricane. Katrina claimed the lives of 53 people in Biloxi. Since 2005, 6000 people have left Biloxi.
...and so on east to the swamps surrounding the river Pascagoula - which is apparently the only major US river entering the Gulf which has not been 'managed' by building dams and through the city of Pascagoula which suffered major flooding at the time of Hurricane Katrina as witnessed by the image below showing flooding at the Chevron oil terminal to the east of the city...

Beyond Pascagoula was the border with Alabama, the third state of the day.......






of which, more tomorrow!