Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th May 2022 Yesterday morning had been taken up with laundry but on Wednesday we booked places on the daily ‘hop-on-hop-off’ coach. This takes passengers into the closest town for sightseeing and you are provided with a map of the stops and the local places of interest. Our destination was Point Coupée, which is apparently one of the oldest settlements along the Mississippi River. As we boarded the coach staff, presumably from the local tourist office, handed out environmentally friendly reusable bags branded with the town’s name in the hope that people would spend some of their tourist bucks here. The name Point Coupée is derived from its position on an oxbow curve and means, unsurprisingly, ‘the point of the cut off’ in French. Someone at a garage/petrol station, now closed, clearly was a Pixar fan with a sense of humour. The lake which was created here by the oxbow when the course of the river changed is called False River and there were some attractive lakeside properties, many with their own little jetties. The stops on the hop-on-hop-off coach were not very far apart and we walked between them rather than waiting for another bus, […]
Daily Archives: 23/05/2022
Tuesday 17th May 2022 One of our top priorities on our first full day on the American Queen was to get some laundry done. Since we have found hotel laundry services to be expensive everywhere except India so far, we had found out in advance when we would be able to do washing for ourselves during this trip. We then worked out approximately how many pairs of trousers/shorts and tops we would need to reach these keys points and by packing sufficient underwear accordingly [and with Robert kindly putting a pair of shoes and one of Matilda’s toiletry bag in his suitcase] Matilda could manage with a cabin luggage sized bag. Making a ‘guesstimate’ about the size of the machines, Matilda had divided the dirty washing into a light and a dark load before we went to bed. When we woke quite early, she swiftly went up to put a load on, realised both machines were free and went to get the ’dark’ wash to put in too. She had just done this when another woman appeared and was clearly disgruntled that both machines were in use. If Matilda had been a little more awake she would have dissembled and […]