Paper Cowgurl: Camping trip day 3

Day 3....Today we finally get our boat tour!!! We all got up had a good breakfast and are ready to go. Lauren is very curious as to what we will see and Austin seems not to sure.

We had a group of bikers on the boat with us (they were from all over and were all out riding together).

The guy standing in the back is our driver and those are the other two couples on the tour with us (they were from up North were they didn't have things like this).

We left from Uncertain, TX...the driver told us one theory as to how the name came to be...since most of the steamboat workers couldn't read they used playing cards to "name" the ports. They would put a card on the shipment that would tell them which port to deliver each box to...at the end of the run they would have boxes that the card had fallen off of, instead of taking them all the way back to New Orleans they would unload the "uncertain" boxes at their last stop...hence the name Uncertain, TX.

We learned a lot of history on the tour. The steamboat captains used to travel from New Orleans to Jefferson using the lake...this was one of the only inland ports.

This building was Dick & Charlie's Tea Room...the river was the county line for Marion and Harrison county. Harrison was dry and Marion was wet so for a nickle you could ride a boat across the river to the tea room and spent the evening drinking (just save a nickle to get back across or you would have to swim the river...scary). Dick and Charlie had three rules, 1. There ain't none, 2. There never was none, 3. There ain't gonna be none. This is the last of many of these kind of establishments still standing (they are trying to save it so it doesn't fall in the river).

This is the Graceful Ghost (it is the one for tours), steamboats like this traveled these waters for years.

Some of the trees we saw on the tour were over 150 years old.

On some of the trees we saw these...they are for ducks. The guide told us there are some duck blinds on the lake but the only way to get one is it has to be passed down from generation to generation....you can not build a duck blind on the lake and the one's that were there were grandfathered in.

We saw quite a few beaver dams along the way.

Lauren is enjoying the trip....

I was glad we had a guide for the boat ride...it was like a maze of river streets going different directions.

This is looking up what was called the government ditch.....the steamboat captains needed a straight path to help with the trip....because of the cost and time it was taking they asked the government to help...the government created a bail out and took over the project...by the time they completed the project the rail road had come through and instead of hundreds of steamboats on the river there were only about 5 using the ditch.