We Sail Up the Mississippi to Baton Rouge

As one should expect, we are learning much about the Mississippi River as we spend time on it.  At its mouth it yields 620,000 cubic feet of water per second into the Gulf.  The river is full of freight traffic as ocean going vessels can go north as far as Baton Rouge to pickup or unload cargo..  Some single groups of barges called tows carry as much freight, (i.e.  grain, oil, coal,etc. )as 2800 semi trucks at one time.

The barge traffic is heavy so our ship has to be constantly diligent, especially at night, as we are under way.  We learned that down-bound traffic always has the right of way regardless of size.  Our ship has a very smooth ride unlike a boat on an ocean cruise.

This is map of our lower Mississippi cruise showing our stops between New Orleans and Memphis as we head north.

The river is very high right now.  The dock at Baton Rouge is four stories tall and we tied up and disembarked at the top dock level.  On our Baton Rouge city exploration tour we passed the Louisiana State Capital Building, above, which is the tallest state capital building in United States.

 As our bus drove us around the city we soon entered the LSU campus area.

Louisiana State University has a beautiful campus, indeed.

Our bus stopped for us to see the LSU live mascot, Mike #7, who is a real male tiger in a pen next to the school's Football stadium.  The Mike we saw was a four-year old male rescue Bengal tiger from India.

The LSU Tiger Stadium holds over 100,000 fans, and their football team was the 2019 national champion.  They take their football very, very seriously down here.

🏈  🏆