Arrived in Hammond, LA Safe & Sound 3/28/2008

We left Bay St. Louis about 10:00 am and drove to Hammond, LA and Punkin Park Campground. It was a very uneventful trip but the traffic was unbelievably heavy going west on I-12. We got here about 11:30 and were all set up by noon, then we ate lunch and decided it was still early so we loaded a few caches into the GPS and went caching. The GPS was acting very strangely from the start but I attributed it to the fact that maybe it didn't know the roads. Well we found 4 caches, one in a small cemetery, one at a Wally World, another at an Penquin Ice Machine and the last was in a lovely park under a wooden walking bridge. We did have a few more but the GPS was acting up so we did go look for them but we couldn't pinpoint them and then it dawned on me I hadn't loaded the state of Louisiana into the GPS when I did it when we bought it. So we decided to go back to the RV and load the states we will need into the GPS. Well that was just the start of the problem it wouldn't load them as I tried over and over, as it kept giving me a error message that the unit wasn't connected. Now I have nothing in the unit as when you reload something it deletes everything you had in there. I called Garmin and they said it might be I needed a program update which I downloaded but that wasn't it. Then they said it could be a bad sector on my Micro SD card and I should get a new one. So we went to Office Depot and bought another card, came back and started over but I was still getting the same error message. Well I played around with it till about 10:30 and still couldn't get any maps loaded so I went to bed. In between all this we did have dinner and watched some tv. Well time to say until tomorrow and we love you all.


Picture List:1,2,3,4-Peter Hammond Cemetery....Peter Hammond is buried under this oak tree and was born in 1798 and died in 1870. He founded Hammond, LA in 1813. Nearby are the graves of his wife, three daughters and a favorite slave boy, whose marker is picture 3 and it is inscribed "unnamed slave boy"....really nice. 5-Dr. Walter Reed the first African-American physician within Hammond and its vicinity, 6-Joe DeMarco, as a young man he immigrated from Italy to Americaand settled in Hammond, LA. He began picking strawberries and eventually started one of the areas three strawberry associations. With his success he developed a reputation for his honesty and generosity to those less fortunate. 7-An old home being restored, 8,9-C. E. Cate and Cate Square, who first settled in Hammond in 1861 and erected a saw mill, a tannery and a shoe factory which supplied many shoes for the Army of the C.S.A. After the Civil War he played a major role in planning and promoting the town and in establishing its first school and church.