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Palmetto Island State Park
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by Scott Gilbertson
</jrnl/2017/05/palmetto-island-state-park>
Thursday, 18 May 2017
From New Orleans we headed west through the bayou country, crossing from the Mississippi basin to the Atchafalaya river delta area where the Atchafalaya River meets the Gulf of Mexico. It's a land of wide open fields, rice paddies, blue crab traps, great flocks of snowy egrets wading patiently through marshes. There's hardly anyone living out here, the roads are thin strips of land barely above water level.
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-19_115617_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-495" class="picwide" />
Every now and then there are pockets of swamp, bald cypress trees in a lake of duckweed so thick it looks like you could walk across it.
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_121751_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-481" class="picwide" />
Palmetto Island State Park exists just inside one of these pockets of unfarmed land, though it is not full of bald cypress, but, as the name suggests, Saw Palmettos. It was the sort of place you can tell is going to be pretty nice just by the drive in, the road kep getting narrower and narrower, and rougher and rougher, sure signs of good things to come.
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-19_100253_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-493" class="picwide" />
We came here just looking for a nice place to get some work done, with little entertainment for the kids, but it turned out to be one of the nicest campgrounds we've stayed in. It had the newest, cleanest facilities we've seen, there was even a leave-one-take-one library full of kids books that we used to swap out a books.
<img src="images/2017/IMG_0327..pg_" id="image-494" class="picwide" />
I got some writing done, the kids played around the campsite in the mornings and then after lunch, when the heat and humidity was becoming a bit much we all headed over to the splashpad to cool off.
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_164119_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-482" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_164458_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-483" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_164929_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-487" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_165416_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-488" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_165037_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-486" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_171636_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-489" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_174137_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-491" class="picwide" />
And just to liven things up a little, there were plenty of wild pigs running around. And bears. Supposedly, we did not see any.
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-16_172253_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-490" class="picwide caption" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-05-18_124039_palmetto-island.jpg" id="image-492" class="picwide />
The other part of the reason we came to Palmetto Island was to postpone a decision about our future direction. From here we could still go south to beaches of Texas, the Bolivar Peninsula, Galveston, Corpus Christie, or we could head due west, inland, toward Austin. There are good arguments to be made in favor of both, which is why we postponed the choice and came here.
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