On Caddo Lake with Janet

My new friend Janet Nimmo took me on the paddle-wheel steamboat tour of Caddo Lake. It was a first for me and I thought some of you would enjoy seeing the views of a Texas bayou in it’s springtime glory. I’ll try to add a video clip too, so you can hear the sound of the steamboat. It was fun! Thank you Janet!


The first week I was in Texas I ended up in a conversation with a lady in the checkout lane at Walmart. I made a comment about the crusty French bread she had in her cart being just the kind my Dad likes to use for his garlic bread, to go along with his homemade spaghetti sauce. Before we got through line we were friends! And Betty Kindred gave me her phone number and invited me to a quilting club she belonged to... At the quilting club, I met Janet Nimmo. We became friends over the ironing board as we worked on lap quilts for the area nursing homes.

We almost missed the boat that morning because Toni got us lost (as usual!).  But the captain pulled up to the dock again to let us on board. The only other tourists were three ladies who rode on the top deck, unbeknownst to us until the end of the ride.

“The Graceful Ghost” was about 30 feet long and had a boiler the same size as my Grandpa’s which he used to heat his old house. It was heated by wood this time, but could use coal too. The captain expertly steared around the trees and gave us the history of Caddo and the animals and cypress trees along the way.

I’m afraid I wasn’t a very fun guest to have along, because I had so much fun taking pictures and looking around that I hardly said a word. But after our hour-long tour of the recesses of the marshy bayou, we went to the State Park next to Caddo Lake and had a picnic lunch together. We caught up on our talking then.

Janet and her husband used to run a restaurant on the bayou. She’s a survivor of many very difficult trials of life. I really enjoyed hearing about her life and how she overcame so much.

 I also found out that she is the Grandmother (by marriage) of the Rachel who was one of those murdered in the Columbine Highschool shooting. She told me that she never even knew that Rachel had become so close to God until she read her 

journals after her death. (because she lived so far away) Rachel had an impact on her Grandma, and even now is impacting people (like me as I hear the story).