Day 10: Louisiana, Texas

As usual, we woke up relatively early (between 7 - 8) and enjoyed a continental breakfast. This time it was porridge for A and some raisin bread for R. There were also some Swedish people enjoying their breakfast, and besides that we haven't really spotted Finnish or Dutch people anywhere.

We put the navigator to a Goodyear store in New Orleans for the oil change. While driving there, we also saw other parts of the city. Everything looked surprisingly ok and without knowing it would've been impossible to know that 80% of the city was wiped out less than 10 years ago. We got to the car repair shop, and yes they could do it but unfortunately they had just ran out of the cheap oil type that is included in the rental company's contract with them. So no luck.

We wanted to take the coastal route to Texas. We ended up in a relatively small highway which went through few very small "cities" and mainly swap land. Even though our alligadar (radar for alligators) was tuned to its max, the only thing we spotted was one dead gator by the side of the road.

We couldn't help but to wonder how do people in such a remote location, or mainly what do they do there. Interestingly most of the houses were built on top of poles. This was probably because of flooding or animals or both. We stopped at one point to a beach location by the Gulf of Mexico. It was very different than our paradise beach experience on Florida's side. Oil rigs were visible in the horizon, the water was brown and the beach was full of dirt and junk.

Once we crossed over to Texas, we were greeted by a huge oil refinery with its distinctive smell. That was probably the place where they convert Texas Sour and other raw crude oils to different kinds of fuels. We entered the town of Port Arthur which mainy seemed to be a oil/gas town. Again, very different landscape and way of living just by crossing a state border.

Our destination however was a place called Nederland! Which is of course dutch for The Netherlands. It turned out this small city with 17000 habitants was started up by a bunch of settlers from the Netherlands. They first sailed 3 weeks from Antwerpen, ended up in the area of nowadays Nederland and thought that this looks enough like back home, let's start a town here. In Nederland there was a small windmill museum (which was an actual replica of a windmill) and of course we needed to go there. We were greeted by an older lady who got so excited after hearing that we live in the actual Netherlands. She made a phone call to the neighboring building an insisted we go there, as there would be a man who can actually speak Dutch.

After seeing the windmill museum, we walked over to another museum building. There was a man in a wheelchair whose mom was Dutch and he had lived there for many years. He told in perfect dutch, that there is a heritage festival every year and that not a lot of people in the Netherlands know that such a place exists. He told that he still needs to deal with some tax stuff in the NL and he got a letter back asking to check what really is your address as we seem not to be able to locate it correctly. Probably the Nederland, Texas is a bit confusing :) We drove around in Nederland a bit and saw for example a day care center called "Little Wooden Shoes" and an orange water tower.

After one hour of driving completely to wrong places (navigator said there's a hotel in the middle of a gas plant...) we ended up to a motel. Next to it was a Mexican place. While going in there, we saw one guy having huge amount of food at his table even though he was alone. It looked like he had ordered several meals. Little did we know, that we would get double the amount of food, as the portions were HUGE. Luckily we were able to get a doggy-bag, where we packed most of our food and decided to have that as a breakfast. We already skipped lunch today, but we should probably start ordering only one portion for the two of us, as even that is hard to finish :)