![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
After a visit to Eastern Mountain Sports, we have our rugged and only faintly ridiculous wilderness sun-hats, and we have our 98.11% pure DEET bug spray. The grey-ponytailed salesman (a mild-mannered researcher at Harvard by day) was incredibly helpful and enthusiastic, despite not working on commission. He managed to sell ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adfamiliares a nifty new backpack as well, and would've sold me a waterproof camera bag and a pair of lightweight swamp pants if we hadn't distracted him with other customers.
We purchased this fourth (4th) bottle of bug spray because we're about to travel to the wilds of Louisiana for a week. We'll be in a little town called Galliano, an hour south of New Orleans. (Yes, you can drive an hour south of New Orleans without entering the ocean. I was surprised too.) Galliano is home to 7,000 souls and looks, on a map, a lot like a centipede—a wavy central highway with dozens of side streets growing straight out to the sides. We'll be right in the middle of the bayou—alligator safety lessons will apparently be part of our first night's activities, and we'll be driving past the town of Cut Off to get to where we're staying.
We do this because we're going to help tidy up the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary after Katrina. The exact procedure is still a little fuzzy, but it will involve planting erosion-resistant plants, collecting garbage, and not getting eaten by alligators. This is the SWIL service vacation my college SF club put together, thanks in large part to the efforts ofcarpenter. (So if we are eaten by alligators—and I don't mean to keep harping on the alligators—you will have someone to blame). I hope we can do some amount of good there, though I feel very small in the face of thousands of square miles of wetlands. At the very least, our tourist dollars will flow into New Orleans on the weekends, which can't but help.
We depart on Saturday, for six hours on Amtrak, three hours on USAir, and an unknown amount of time on two public transit systems. Wish us luck!
adfamiliares a nifty new backpack as well, and would've sold me a waterproof camera bag and a pair of lightweight swamp pants if we hadn't distracted him with other customers.We purchased this fourth (4th) bottle of bug spray because we're about to travel to the wilds of Louisiana for a week. We'll be in a little town called Galliano, an hour south of New Orleans. (Yes, you can drive an hour south of New Orleans without entering the ocean. I was surprised too.) Galliano is home to 7,000 souls and looks, on a map, a lot like a centipede—a wavy central highway with dozens of side streets growing straight out to the sides. We'll be right in the middle of the bayou—alligator safety lessons will apparently be part of our first night's activities, and we'll be driving past the town of Cut Off to get to where we're staying.
We do this because we're going to help tidy up the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary after Katrina. The exact procedure is still a little fuzzy, but it will involve planting erosion-resistant plants, collecting garbage, and not getting eaten by alligators. This is the SWIL service vacation my college SF club put together, thanks in large part to the efforts of
carpenter. (So if we are eaten by alligators—and I don't mean to keep harping on the alligators—you will have someone to blame). I hope we can do some amount of good there, though I feel very small in the face of thousands of square miles of wetlands. At the very least, our tourist dollars will flow into New Orleans on the weekends, which can't but help.We depart on Saturday, for six hours on Amtrak, three hours on USAir, and an unknown amount of time on two public transit systems. Wish us luck!
