Baton Rouge

I'm in Baton Rouge visiting my in-laws for Christmas. My sister-in-law is also getting married on the 2nd so were down here for that too. I ate waaaay too much yesterday so this morning I jumped out on the road for a couple of hours in a futile attempt to do something about that.

At 8am on a Saturday in Baton Rouge everyone is still asleep. Possibly still hung over. I was alone on Highland Road.



One of my favorite things to do is just ride around a city like a tourist for a couple of hours. You get to see stuff up close like if you're walking but you get to see a lot more stuff.

The LSU clock tower...



I spun around the LSU lakes too. There were pelicans, egrets, cranes, ducks of all kinds, and some birds I couldn't identify. Cool to see so much wildlife in the middle of town.



This is the high school I graduated from, deep in the BR hood. Go big blue.



They're doing construction so the barbed wire is missing from the fence for now. But note the direction the brackets are angled. Inward. To keep students in.



Downtown Baton Rouge has a bunch of streets named St. This and St. That. There may be a St. Ferdinand but this street isn't named after him. Legend has it that a Frenchman made all the street signs way back. In French Ferdinand Street would be Rue Ferdinand. Rue meaning Street and coming first. So when making the signs, he put St. before the name. Signs were expensive back then so they just went with it. But they did catch the error before he made a saint out of Napolean.



The Wall. I used to skate that way back in my skateboarding youth.



The Fake Handrail...



The tall handrail at the church. I slid it in '92, was the first to do so, and it was apparently regarded as legendary for quite some time.



The State Capitol building.



The two trees I think of when I think of Louisiana...

The Great Southern Live Oak...



The Southern Magnoila...



Both grow in Georgia too but not as large and sprawling.

The Governor's Mansion. Hard to get a good view of it actually.



The cannons. We used to ride bikes down the hill. Looks like folks still do.



The Pentagon Barracks. There are 4 buildings. The 5th side of the pentagon is the river.



The Old State Capitol building. Declared by Mark Twain as the ugliest buiding ever built. Or something like that.



I have no idea what this is or what it's really called. We call it The Paperclip.



The USS Kidd and Mississippi River Bridge behind it.



Red Stick Plaza. Baton Rouge means Red Stick. Allegedly when the first white settlers arrived there was a Native American territorial marker at this site; a tree trunk stripped of branches and covered in blood.

We skated here a lot way back.



Tiger stadium as seen from the levee. Geaux Tigers.



I had to burn it right down to get back home for 10. The roads are dead flat but in Baton Rouge there is always a headwind. I should be able to get in a ride tomorrow too. We'll see.