Continuing through DeRidder, LA, on one-way Shirley Street - US 190 west. At least DeRidder is more on the ball than most Cincinnati suburbs regarding bike lanes.
SOUTH CENTRAL U.S.
Dec. 29 2009-Jan. 1 2010
PART 4
Continuing through DeRidder, LA, on one-way Shirley Street - US 190 west. At least DeRidder is more on the ball than most Cincinnati suburbs regarding bike lanes.
Along US 190 near Merryville, LA, was this structure fire that caught the surrounding forest ablaze.
US 190 crosses the Sabine River into Texas!
West on FM 1013 (a distinctive Texas designation) in Kirbyville, TX.
FM 1013 angles to the right here in Kirbyville, while Main Street continues straight ahead as a dead end.
Best guess is that this is FM 1013 near Hillister - though it could be south on US 69/287.
Same story here. And remember, this is very much the lowland South. You see a lot of skinny trees like this, which may have some hurricane damage.
Texas is the frontage road king. Miles and miles from any town, you can find Interstates in Texas that have surface roads that are immediately parallel. This is a one-way I-10 frontage road in Beaumont. This is going north (along the north-south stretch of I-10), and we have to loop under the freeway to go south.
This is probably looping to I-10 south at Calder Avenue, under I-10.
I assume this is south on the I-10 service road on the other side - going under Liberty Avenue.
The frontage road still, with I-10 on the left.
Today's big enemy: fog! The service road ramps onto what's actually a split for I-10 local traffic.
US 69/96/287 is a freeway called Cardinal Drive running southeast from Beaumont. And it's full of frontage. This photo is an attempt to show the possibly abandoned frontage road at right. Was this an old routing of US 69/96/287?
I'm guessing that this may be southeast on TX 82, approaching TX 87 in Port Arthur.
TX 82 takes us over the Sabine-Neches ship canal via the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge (formerly Gulfgate Bridge). The other end of the bridge does sort of a "Kentucky loop" - which means it loops over the road it intersects with, a practice seen on some newer Kentucky roads. The bridge was built in the 1960s.
Continuing on the span through the fog.
By using my keen deducement skills, I surmise that this is looking west across the Port Arthur Ship Canal from TX 82 - into the swampland that looms beyond.
This is assumed to be returning to Louisiana at the south end of Sabine Lake. Not so comfortingly, one medium-scale USGS map marks the state line in the salt water lake as an "indefinite boundary." So that means it's mine. (Just joking!)
TX 82 becomes...LA 82! This stretch is also marked on maps and signs as the Creole Nature Trail.
The southwest corner of Louisiana is almost all swamp. This is continuing east on LA 82 through Cameron Parish - a jurisdiction that has been nearly destroyed by hurricanes in 1957, 2005, 2007, and 2008.
Continuing on swampy LA 82.
In the unincorporated village of Johnsons Bayou, this is a school that appeared to have been gutted by the most recent hurricane.
This gas station in Johnsons Bayou rests in ruins, probably because of the hurricane.
LA 82 brushes up against this beautiful beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Each year, tens of square miles of Louisiana swampland disappear as the gulf expands (largely because of bad development or oil drilling practices). This scene here is of course only 12 nautical miles from international waters (as per the long-accepted rule).