49.6 mi / 12.9 mph / 138 ft. climbing
Home: Royal Palms Motel

Today we needed to cross the Pearl River, which defines the border between Mississippi and Louisiana. The obvious route is to continue west on US-90, but when I plotted the general route to New Orleans weeks ago, the routing algorithm refused to let me go that way. Huh? The next crossing is 6 miles north, but that’s an Interstate, and the next crossing is 10 miles north of that, but that’s another Interstate, so the “shortest” route it would give me (where bikes are allowed) required riding 50 miles upriver, then returning back to US-90, for a total detour of 100 miles!

A search revealed RideWithGPS’s refusal was due to the fact that the US-90 bridge over the river was closed, and the Adventure Cycling Association confirmed that, yes, this 100-mile detour was the currently-approved route for the Southern Tier. Ouch. Luckily I did a bit more searching, and found references to people on bikes still being able to get across on US-90. It turns out that the Louisiana Department of Transportation had declared the bridge unsafe and closed it way back in 2022, so it’s not like the bridge is actually missing, it’s just that they don’t want vehicles going over it and causing it to collapse into the river. Thus, assuming we could get around any physical barriers, the biggest remaining risk is if they were actually doing the re-construction when we needed to pass through. “Luckily”, it sounds like Louisiana essentially has no money to spend on bridges (the downside of living in a relatively low-tax state!), so their latest projection is targeting replacement by 2028 at the earliest!

So while I had pretty good confidence that we would be able to make it through, I knew it was still a risk when we turned off onto the closed highway. On top of that, we had made a last-minute change to our plans that nearly doubled the mileage we would need to cover today, even if the bridge-crossing went perfectly.

Even before our turnoff, traffic had been light, but it dropped to nearly nothing on the now-severed leg of US-90. Seven miles brought us to the newly-isolated border town of Pearlington, and we soon passed the first of the increasingly-serious “Road Closed” signs. A guy in a pickup driving the other way slowed and waved me down. “Oh good, I bet he wants to let us know whether it’s passable, and maybe he’ll offer us a lift if it’s not?” No, he was actually interested in riding his bike through from New Orleans and was asking us if it was doable! Uh, we’ll let you know in an hour, dude!

A mile later, we hit the true closure, at the first of four bridges that will need to be replaced as the highway crosses multiple streams of the delta. A solid wall of concrete Jersey barriers blocked the road, and 20 feet in front of it, a 3-foot high mound of dirt stretched from guardrail to guardrail. It seemed like the dirt was a relatively-new addition (it showed minimal erosion), so I’m not sure if it was added to further discourage cyclists/pedestrians, or just to make the crash a little softer if a drunk idiot managed to drive this far? Either way, it was definitely more difficult to lift the bikes (and our bags, one at a time) over the dirt than the concrete, but both were manageable.

The bridge seemed solid enough, but the line of vultures roosting on its girders were our welcome to the post-apocalypse. Now fully alone, on a road where a vehicle has not rumbled by in years, the leaden skies matched the gray, decaying pavement. As Rett pressed ahead, the vultures would lazily launch from their perches just before she reached them, ready to fulfill their role if the bridge collapsed around us, or if the the undead haunting this no-man’s land left any flesh remaining on our bones.

The closed and unsettling section of road stretched for about 2.5 miles between the barriers. Thankfully there was no surprise at the far end; the same concrete wall/dirt wall double barrier was the only thing we had to get around. And while the west end didn’t exactly land in the center of a metropolis, there was a surprisingly-large swamp tour operation running there, and Rett bought drinks in their office which we figured then gave us the right to make and eat lunch in their tour staging shelter.

Now back where cars could travel, there were still very few of them, and the nightmare scenes somehow actually got worse?! I saw a fairly large creature dash across the road ahead of us; an otter? Fox? Beaver? Large cat? I couldn’t identify it, but when we reached the undergrowth from which it had emerged, we were shocked to see a pile of dead animals. Again, I couldn’t positively identify them, but I’m pretty sure these were raccoons, about 8 of them. What is happening here?!

A little further on, yet another unidentifiable animal was standing in the grass shoulder, this one also dead, but huge, and covered in vile, antagonistic black hair. Some species of cattle? A bear? A Death Dog from ‘Willow’? None of those made any sense at all, but the last one at least put me on the right track. Half a mile later we saw (and smelled) a more-decomposed version of the same beast, and then a regular spattering of at least a dozen more. Again, what the fuck is going on here in Louisiana?! Eventually I saw one where enough flesh had decayed from the bones to reveal sharp fangs pointing upward. I searched for “feral hogs Louisiana”, and yes, apparently they’re quite a problem here.

Mixed in on the roadsides between the rotting corpses was a huge amount of trash: old furniture, busted toilets, mattresses, etc (which also meant we were riding through an unusual amount of broken glass on the road). That brought a unifying explanation to all the madness: this pseudo-dead-end road was an illegal dumping ground, and the various dead animals likely had a similar source as the old tires: something people wanted off their property. Regardless of the “logic” behind it, the scene did not make for a very welcoming entrance to Louisiana!

Our original plan had been to camp at a new KOA campground near the start of the death-road; its opening is a boon for cyclists on this route (even at $56), since there are essentially no other places to stay on this route east of New Orleans. I had booked a site days ago, but the forecast now showed significant rain starting tomorrow morning and continuing through the day. Waking up in camp in cold rain and then riding through it for 35 miles sounded not just unpleasant, but potentially dangerous. I’d also realized that our further-than-expected stop last night meant that New Orleans was in reach today, so we decided to eat the cost of the campground and push on to a cheap motel in East New Orleans.

The madness diminished a bit when we crossed a big bridge that brought us to a thin strip of land barely separating Lake Pontchartrain from Lake St. Catherine. Here the road was lined with stilt-houses, many with punny names like “Pier Pressure” or “Suite Magnolia” displayed. When we passed “Room With a View 2”, Rett wondered why we hadn’t seen “Room With a View 1”. I guessed that the numeration may be temporal in nature rather than spatial, and a later look at historic aerial imagery confirmed it: Hurricane Katrina wiped nearly every single “Version 1” house from this incredibly-vulnerable strip right into the sea. It’s easily the most-annihilated recipient of Katrina’s destruction that I’ve looked at so far. Which also makes it the most-insane place for building to have reoccurred. I remember “don’t even rebuild New Orleans” being a relatively-mainstream thought post-Katrina, and whether or not that idea had any validity for the city itself, it certainly seems like it should have been applied here!

Development actually lessened as we got on sturdier ground, and then it wasn’t until we were 10 miles from the French Quarter that there was a hint that we were approaching a city at all, much less a city big enough to have just hosted the Super Bowl. While the east-side neighborhood we were riding through didn’t seem especially bad, the entrance to our motel parking lot was blocked by a steel gate, and the proprietors were protected by a plate of bulletproof glass when I checked in. Maybe it’s all to protect from marauding herds of wild boars that sweep through town like death itself? Our non-smoking room smelled more like a non-non-smoking room, and Rett laughed at how much it felt like a Mexican hotel (the wet washcloth hanging on the shower handle was not actually a gross remnant left behind, but a way to block the leak that would otherwise spray out of the handle), but it had a fridge, microwave, and TV, and most-importantly, a roof, and cost less than $10 more than our campsite. And, we’d survived the apocalypse. Laissez les bons temps rouler!