The USS Kidd & the Baton Rouge Green Crawl

First and foremost, we heard this morning that Daniel’s grandpa was in the hospital and we would like everyone to send their prayers and best wishes to him for a quick and full recovery. We are thinking about you Big Bill and we hope you feel better soon!

Over the past few days, Daniel and I have gotten to explore some great places and meet some even greater people. It all began a few days ago when we took a ghostly tour of the World War II naval destroyer, the USS Kidd, which served in that war on the Pacific Front as well as the Korean War, losing some of her men in the former. The USS Kidd is now docked on the edge of the Mississippi in Baton Rouge and has been rehabilitated to serve as a museum.  Being a history buff, I was excited to explore a WWII military ship so closely since I had never even seen one before. It was a self guided tour, which essentially meant that we were handed a map of the ship and then sent off to explore every nook and cranny without a chaperone to bestow logical explanations or even to pull us back into the 21^st century reality every time our minds began to wander. This time of year is the tourist off –season, so we had the entire ship to ourselves with the exclusion of the ticket-taker at the beginning. Having free range of an entire naval destroyer without another person in sight allows the mind to easily drift into the misty reverie of what might have been.  Daniel and I certainly began to drift away, but he to the North and I to the South. He began to imagine himself sitting behind one of the big guns, shooting away at the approaching enemy with flawless aim. I imagined apparitions of angry soldiers who had never gotten off the ship behind every corner and in every dark bunkroom.  In the mess halls, he saw brotherhoods of soldiers gathering around, excited to go off to war. I saw cramped, dark rooms at the bottom of steep, narrow ladders and wondered how two people could both make it up if they were running away from something sinister. However, we both agreed on how cool the deck was. Daniel loved the huge guns and 40s style helmets while I greatly enjoyed the rampant sunlight and listening to the Mississippi wash away the ship’s violent past and provide it with its new duty of teaching to whomever would like to learn. 

Daniel wearing a helmet behind one of the guns on the deck.

The USS Kidd from the shore.

Angie putting on a brave face... about to go down the hatch.

The following day we were lucky enough to be able to participate in the 3^rd annual Baton Rouge Green Crawl. It was a great event and we met some really awesome people throughout the evening. We began the event in downtown Baton Rouge at Dana Brown & Associates, a landscape architecture firm that Baton Rouge Green was partnered with for the night. It was intriguing to learn about how important good landscaping is to the environmental health of an area and how Baton Rouge is continuing to pursue more environmentally friendly regulations in this area. We also got to hang out with Suzannah from Baton Rouge Green, an organization that encourages and sponsors an urban forest in Baton Rouge. They also educate people about the importance of trees and how to best take care of them. Suzannah invited us to bring Big Easy to this stop on the event and we gladly accepted. It was so nice to have people so interested in learning about we what we were doing while we were so excited to see what they were doing. After about an hour, we decided to head out on the scooter and meet some of the other awesome people who were involved in the crawl. We got to meet some cool people from businesses like Gulf South Solar as well as stroll through some vintage shops like Noelie Harmon and Honeymoon Bungalow that use recycled materials to create new masterpieces of clothing and other neat things (Not to mention the adorable kittens that Honeymoon Bungalow lets you carry around while you shop!). Furthermore, there were some great organizations involved that ranged from doing great things for the community, such as ConserveBR , to expanding their helpful reach globally, such as Falling Whistles. We wish we had more time to get to know everyone and their organizations even better, but we did get some great contacts and plan to go back to some of these places again next week to collect even more information from these people who certainly have a wealth of it.

We finished out the week with a Halloween Parade and an afternoon in the kayaks on the LSU lakes. The parade was fun but apparently rather short compared to most Louisiana parades. Jackson, our 4-year-old host here in Baton Rouge, was quite happy with the parade though because of all the candy they threw! Also, the lakes we went kayaking on were really calm and seemingly alligator free. Maybe one of these days we will get lucky and run across a real Louisiana gator… hopefully not too close though!