Drive to New Orleans

Today we hit the road bound for New Orleans. The first part of the trip was pretty uneventful, travelling back through Houston. There was a bit of traffic heading into Houston but traffic kept moving pretty smoothly. We have noticed that Austin, San Antonio and Houston are all smaller in population than Melbourne but have bigger Freeways and some amazing spaghetti junctions. It does make driving around pretty smooth, but it can be chaotic at times. Luckily you normally don't go too far wrong if you miss your entry/exit.
We left Texas shortly after lunch, crossing into Louisiana. We had a little bit of a detour to visit the Pintail Wildlife Trail. It was a little bit further from the Interstate than we first thought but we enjoyed

driving along the trail. It is only a three mile loop around some swamp, with irrigation ditches on each side of the road. There was a lot of water lilies, heaps of birds and we spotted about a dozen small alligators. Despite the trail being only 3 miles long, we spent close to an hour driving it! We crawled along with our eye glued to the water and only the odd glance at the road to make sure we didn't end up in the ditch with the alligators!
As we got close to New Orleans the weather got a bit grey and before we knew it we were driving in some very heavy rain. The rain continued for quite a while and all the traffic slowed down to a crawl. There was an accident in the other direction and a few stopped cars so it was bumper to bumper for a little bit. The rain finally cleared and the traffic got moving again and we made it to our hotel safely.
It was a long day so we grabbed some dinner at a local restaurant and called it a night.