Jan 4-5 2012 Mississippi

We camped at Buccaneer state park. Named after Jean Lafitte, he hung out here too.  Right on the beach. There are still leaves on the trees, or maybe they don’t fall off all of the ones here. Lots of live oak and pine trees. 70’s sunny. We went to the Stennis Space center in the am, beach in the pm

Bus at Buccaneer state park. The rocket testing stands. The put the engines in these stands, pump fuel into them and set them off. They had photos of it, huge plumes of smoke and fire out the bottoms. They have a 120 acre buffer zone around the facility, so the noise won’t freak people out. The big F1 engines, they tested all five at once-that is how many were on the Saturn V rockets that were used for the Apollo program and you could not get closer than 2 miles or you would be deafened.  After that they only test one at a time, and you can get within 1/4 mile of them.

The Stennis space museum. With a model of the space shuttle in front, and a mosaic from inside the museum.

Part of the museum. You can go into the cockpit of the model space shuttle and try to land it. John crashed it twice.

A model of the bathroom on the space station. It is basically a big vacuum, since there is no gravity there. You have to put the black bar over your thigh so you don’t float away. John with the H1 rocket engine, they used 8 of those on the booster phase of the Saturn V rockets.

Scenic byway to space, and a pier on the beach

BEACH. Sugar white sand. The water is kind of brown from the silt from the Mississippi river, the second photo is stilts that houses were blown off of during Katrina. Looks like most of the houses stilts even washed away. The storm surge was 20-25 feet here.  Most of this part of the coast was wiped away. They just finished-6 years later, rebuilding the highway and some new houses are going up, all on stilts.

The train bridge on Bay St Louis. To the east and from the balcony over Beach Street in Bay St Louis were we had dinner. Bay St Louis was more protected and not everything was washed away, but there was lots of damage. They are just getting the seawall and road rebuilt there now.

The bayou by the park. Egrets, hooded mergansers, and the campground is at the end of the water, you can see a RV

Wild flowers are starting to bloom

The waterslide lost the bottom half when it was hit with the storm surge wave.  They had to rebuild the whole state park from scratch. Here is a church, the original foundation is still there and the new church is built behind it, up on stilts.

Of course the gulf shore is the low point of Mississippi. So John went out at low tide  and bagged his low point. I was doing laundry and sitting in my lawn chair in the sun, John could not wait for the laundry, so he did not get me to take a photo of him at the low point.  Later I rode my bike out there.