The Most Delightful King Cake

I finally made it out of Texas. I was lucky enough to get through Texas before all that horrible weather hit Texas. All that I saw was cold windy weather, but the temperatures were still in the fifties. I felt so bad for Texas. They just are not equipped to handle those cold extremes. 

I am a huge fan of state parks. I figure that there must be some really great reason why they built state parks where they do, whether it be historical, cultural or natural landmarks. The problem is that to get into a state park, you usually have to plan ahead many months in advance. That doesn't work very well with the way I travel. Commitment is difficult for me. But sometimes the State Park gods smile on me. I was able to secure a four day spot at Fontainebleu State Park located on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. If you cross Lake Pontchartrain on the Causeway ( I call it a bridge), it is a 23 mile drive to New Orleans. I did not go to New Orleans, although I meant to. I pretty much just hung around the park, did chores, hiked a little bit. It was nice to have some down time. I was at this park the week before Mardi Gras. 

Well, I found water and I found trees.  Now I just have to find green.

But look at this tree - is it not glorious?

There was a pier that you could walk out on

In one direction you could see the New Orleans skyline 
I don't know what that dark blue ridge is - it was a solid sheet of water to the naked eye.

In the other direction was the 23 mile long Causeway

 This year, because of Covid, there were no Mardi Gras parades or celebrations which really depressed many Louisianians. I was listening to the radio and they were interviewing a Louisiana baker. Evidently one of the staples of Mardi Gras is something called a King Cake. It is an oval ring cinnamon cake, almost like a coffee cake. They come in all different flavors: strawberry cream, chocolate, cheese, etc. The cake is iced and then heavy sprinkles are put on top of that in Mardi Gras colors. But wait, there is more. In the olden days, they would bake a plastic baby in the cake. It was considered very lucky if the piece of cake that you got had the baby in it. You would not only have luck for the next year but you would also have to host next year's celebration. Nowadays, they don't bake the baby in the cake, I guess for liability reasons, you don't want anybody choking on the baby. The cake sounded yummy, so I had to go find one and I found one, it was huge. I selected a Bavarian Creme filling. When I got back to the campsite, I immediately went to the camper next door(who I didn't know), knocked on their door and asked them to help me out. I gave them ¾ of the cake, kept a ¼. Once I tasted the King Cake, I was extremely sorry I had given any of the cake away. This cake was incredible. I think I am going to have a King Cake shipped to me every year now to celebrate Mardi Gras.

The King Cake in all it's glory.  See the baby?

Delta Music and Poverty Point

Today was a sad day- my traveling buddies and I are going our separate ways – there are places to go, people to see. It is the end of some epic Happy Hours and hangin' with great friends. See y'all down the road buddies mine.

I tried to console myself with a quick run up to Ferriday, Louisiana – home of the Delta Music Museum. It is located in the original Ferriday post office. When I entered, I asked the guy what constitutes the Delta – it is everything from Memphis down to the Gulf. I thought to myself  'oh, this is going to be good – there are so many absolutely fabulous musicians – I cannot wait'.  I come to find out that there are only sixteen 'inductees' in this museum. Ok, ok – I guess I will lower my expectations a bit. Each of the sixteen had a wall plaque with a little bio and some pictures. There were a few who I knew and loved – Percy Sledge, Aaron Neville, Irma Thomas. There were some I knew and after listening to them a little, found I wanted to know more about – Conway Twitty, Fats Domino and some that I knew their big hits, but didn't know their names.

Conway Twitty's fans were called Twitty Birds

The big three in the museum are the cousins – Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggert, all born in Ferriday. They were all born within a year of each other and they all learned to play piano together. They had a short performance film of all of the performers (probably the best part of this museum) and believe it or not, there were so many similarities between these three guys with their piano playing.  I was particularly surprised with Swaggart's playing - the guy could get down.

Wasn't Jerry Lee Lewis blond?  Just wondering.

Overall, it was interesting, but I probably wouldn't travel a far distance to see this museum.

I moved up to a tiny little out of the way spot in northeastern Louisiana, near the town of Epps. Any of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I might possibly be a tiny bit obsessed with National Park sites. I do admit that I want to visit all 400 plus sites. Up in this little forgotten corner of the world is Poverty Point, which is not only a NPS site, it is also a World Heritage Site. There are only 23 World Heritage Sites in the United States. I think I now have another quest that will have to be done. Yessirreebob – hit all 23 of those sites.

Anyway, Poverty Point was built between 1650 and 700 BC which is amazing in itself. It is a series of earthworks and mounds. It was also a huge city during it's heyday. The biggest mound looks like a flying bird when seen from the air. They think when it was built, it was 100 feet tall. They built this mound by filling baskets with dirt and manually hauling it. Based on the size of the baskets,they estimate that it took 15 million basket loads of dirt to build this mound. I wasn't all that excited about the big mounds, but when you think of 15 million basketfuls - Yup, pretty amazing.

Doesn't look like much, just a hill.....15 million basketfuls!!

I climbed to the top of the Bird Mound - see my little car way down there?

We are staying at the Poverty Point Reservoir State Park. The campground is filled with fisherpeople and by the time I get up in the morning, the campground is completely deserted. Those fish get up early and those people trying to catch them have to be out there in the predawn hours. I was hoping to finally get some hiking done because Miko and I have been doing pretty much urban touristy things. Spring in Louisiana is pretty soggy – nothing but rain, it seems. Unless you want to go wading, hiking doesn't seem to be much of an option.

I guess the trail ends here ....seriously, we are on the trail.  

Off The Beaten Path

I seem to have had a major technological mishap whereas my pictures for the next couple of stops seem to have mysteriously disappeared. Also disappearing were a lot of photos that I took of Andri's last days. I'm a little heartbroke about that, but maybe Google will be able to tell me where oh where they have gone. Not all my pictures disappeared, just a chunk of them. What this means is that y'all (see, I've gone southern) will just have to depend on my dulcet tones and your imagination. Count this as an educational post.

We traveled to a expo center just south of Baton Rouge for a night. This was another scenic view overlooking the livestock pens. It was only for one night, so no big deal. We were here to go to the National Hansen's Disease Museum in Carville to explore the world of Leprosy. Ewww, gross you say. No – it was interesting. The only thing I knew about leprosy was from watching the movie 'Ben Hur' as a child where leprosy sufferers were highly infectious and their fingers and toes would fall off. I guess you could call me well-informed?

The museum is located inside a military base (National Guard) so, after being corrected by the guard on duty as to the correct entrance lane I needed to use (note: it is right in front of the big ENTRANCE sign) and showing my ID, we were allowed to come on base. This museum is dedicated to leprosy patients, once quarantined on site, and the medical staff who attended to them and made medical history.

Falsehood #1

Back in the day, until very recently, leprosy was considered very contagious and there were laws that quarantined the afflicted. It was basically a life sentence for these people. In fact, only 5% of the entire population (all races are afflicted, except for Native Americans) are able to contract the disease. It is caused by a bacteria and is not communicable.

Falsehood #2

Your toes and fingers don't fall off. Leprosy causes nerve damage and you don't feel anything in your extremities. According to the museum, after many times of injuring yourself by banging/burning/etc yourself, the bones in your extremities get reabsorbed by the body. Weird science.

The museum focused on life in the institution and also on the research that was done. A Dr. Hansen found a cure for leprosy that actually reversed many of the outward effects of the disease (although toes and fingers did not grow back) and the name has been changed to Hansen's disease. There is a crusade to ban the word leprosy because of the awful connotations that it has had in the past. Nowadays, people are not quarantined, they are treated and live full lives. This was an interesting place to spend an afternoon.

We moved on to Angola Louisiana, home of the infamous Angola prison. Angola is the second largest prison (in area) in the world. It is a maximum security prison and is the only prison that has a prison museum on it's grounds. There are 5,000 prisoners here of which 71% are serving a life sentence and there are 80 prisoners on death row. Big numbers.

There were the usual? exhibits where you could walk into a typical cell or you could see all the handmade weapons that were confiscated from the prisoners. There was a short movie about how Angola grows all the vegetables that the prison needs. There was a Correctional Officer Hall of Fame room and also an exhibit about Correctional Officers who had given their life at the prison.

We were then walked past double rows of some form of slasher barbed wire into the old death row building. Louisiana now uses fatal injection but they are having trouble getting the chemical so there have been no executions. We saw an electric chair. We then went into the cell block where they kept the death row prisoners and heard about how they spent the remainder of their lives. I felt great sorrow here – it was truly sad.

There have been several movies filmed in this section of the prison – a George Clooney movie, 'JFK' starring Kevin Costner and the horrific movie with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon called 'Dead Man Walking' which was based on a composite of three actual prisoners. I don't remember much in life, but I vividly remember this last movie and how utterly devastating it was. I'm glad I went to the Angola museum, but it was one of the harder places I've been.

I was going to call this post 'Leprosy and Death Row' but thought that would be a bit much.

Kenny Hill, Where Art Thou?

We leave our little oasis among the Palmettos and head down the road for a couple of hours to a small town called Chauvin. There is nothing much in Chauvin, but we are here to see the Chauvin Sculpture Gardens, a rather unique folk art installation by an artist named Kenny Hill.

This place was amazing in a bizarre sort of way.  You sort of have to wonder what was going thru his mind as he created his masterpieces.  Luckily, after he disappeared, the Nicholls State University ad the Kohler Foundation in Wisconsin purchased the garden and preserved it for all to see.  

A little bit about Kenny Hill and his Sculpture Garden:

Hill is a mysterious figure with immense natural talent who showed up in Chauvin in the late 1980s to find work on local construction sites. There, a local landowner let him settle on a little plot of land along the bayou where he first pitched a tent and then built a small cabin from materials he found and salvaged from the local countryside. That is when Kenny Hill’s story in Chauvin begins.
Over the next decade, Hill fashioned his garden of angels and spiritual figures from concrete, mortar and paint that he found or local people donated. All the while, he remained a mystery to his neighbors. They knew little about him, and he never talked about himself or why he created his magical garden. Yet, long after he was gone, they described him as a “genius” but a loner and a quiet person who worked in his sculpture garden from sun up to sun down before and after a day on the job and on weekends. Then one day in January 2000, Kenny Hill walked away with nothing but the shirt on his back, never again to be seen in Chauvin. After the kindly man who owned the property where Hill lived died, the parish evicted him from his little plot. He sat in front of his house for a couple of days and then left as mysteriously as he arrived. Local folks, however, remain grateful for the spiritual but enigmatic gift he had given them.

http://www.myneworleans.com/Louisiana-Life/July-August-2014/The-Mysterious-Man-of-Bayou-Petit-Caillou/

Hot Sauce

We travel about an hour to one of the best state parks I've stayed in on this particular trip – the Palmetto Island State Park. You are camped in a forest of Palmettos and there is a lot of privacy between the sites because of all of the Palmettos. Best of all, there is FREE laundry. I did four loads of wash, just because I could. I washed everything that wasn't nailed down in the RV. What a wonderful deal.

Miko in the Palmettos

Our tourist spot for the day was to head over to Avery Island which is …..drumroll please...where all things Tabasco is made. This is a privately owned family run business which has been creating this pepper sauce since right after the Civil War. The founder was a banker and after the Civil War wiped him out financially, he decided to try something new and came up with Tabasco. They now bottle about 700,000 bottles a day for shipment all over the globe.

The Tabasco ice cream was pretty darn good

All things Tabasco - this was Van Halen's bass player's guitar

There are only three ingredients in Tabasco – Tabasco peppers, salt and vinegar. There happens to be a scale that actually measures how hot a pepper is. Tabasco peppers rate at about 4000 heat units. To put that into perspective – Jalapeno rates about 2500 heat units while Habaneros rate about 350,000 Scofield heat units. Don't think I'm going anywhere near those Habaneros.   I am really not too much of a fan of super spicy food – it seems like if you get too much hot sauce on your food, you can't taste the food. Luckily for me, Tabasco has thought about people like me and have branched out from the standard red bottle we all know – you know, the one you bought decades ago and still have in the back of your cabinet? I'm speaking to you Minnesotans out there – you know who you are.

Some of the many faces of Tabasco

This was a factory tour which caused me great joy. On the day they pick the peppers, they mash them up with a little bit of salt, put them in oak barrels (used barrels supplied by Jim Beam Whiskey – they have been cleaned and de-charred), close up the barrel and put a thick layer of salt on top of the barrel. These barrels are then set aside for three years while the little peppers think about what they are about to become. When it is time, the seeds and skins get removed, more salt is added and then a high quality vinegar. Family members still taste test this for quality assurance and then the sauce gets bottled. This was fun to see – it was the best type of factory tours – bottles moving down the assembly line – getting filled, tops and labels get put on the bottles and then the bottles get boxed for shipment. This is all done by super speedy machines, not much human interaction at all.  Regretfully, I seem to have deleted all the videos I made of this machinery at work.

Barrel warehouse - casks of Tabasco mash covered with salt

Everything you would want to know about Tabasco - placemats in the restaurant

One of the Tabasco family members (actually the family name is McIlhenny) was really into gardening and created a lovely garden which he called the Jungle Garden. You could drive through it and stop along the way to view the sights. Flowers and shrubs were just starting to bloom but the highlight of the Jungle Gardens (besides the 14 foot stuffed alligator) was the Great Egret Rookery. Back in the day, the Great Egrets were becoming extinct because all the fashionable ladies wanted their feathers to decorate their hats. This man built special nesting racks over the water. He hand raised 8 little Great Egrets and from those 8, there are now thousands that return every year to nest and raise their families.

Poor guy on the right, showing off his best chops for the ladies, but alas, no takers.  He finally gave up and flew off to sulk

Bayou, Swamps and Junior Rangers

Today is going to be an exciting day. First I'm moving to a new state park called Chicot (said Chee-co) and new places are most of the time exciting in some shape or form but even more important I am going to meet up and caravan with a couple of my favorite fellow travelers – Lou and Davey. I haven't done any traveling with them for a couple of years and it will be super to reconnect with them.

I get to Chicot, set up and wait for them to arrive. They left Minnesota and got all the way down to Louisiana in three long, long days of traveling. It took me 17 days to get here, just to put it in a bit of perspective. Of course there was the ten days when I sort of got held up at the car lot, but still, they made it in less than half of the time I did. Amazing. Needless to say, by the time they got here, they were perhaps a little bit road weary and needed to have a little down time. Can we say hard core happy hour? It was lovely. We did manage to get in a four mile hike up and down through brown woods – hardly a piece of green to be seen.

We did drive into Eunice, Louisiana. There was a factory tour that I was all excited about doing at Savoy's Music Company. They make 72 button accordions a year there and I thought it would be fascinating to see this. Of course, true to form, when I walk in, Mr. Savoy Music tells us that they only do factory tours on Saturday, not Thursdays. I was a little disappointed - I really need to work on my research, I guess. What is this – maybe the third time on this trip that this has happened to me.

But....we are resilient travelers. We move on to the next spot on my list – the Acadian Cultural Center. Not only was it a Cultural Center, but, much to my surprise, it was also part of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park! Can we say Junior Ranger!! We spent most of the afternoon in the museum, watching the movie – working on our badges. In fact, they had to kick us out because they were closing. We learned a lot about the forced deportation of the Acadians from Acadie (Nova Scotia) and how they became Cajuns.

After several more Happy Hours, we moved on to Lafayette Louisiana where we stayed at the Acadiana RV Park which is a lovely little city park complete with boardwalk nature trails and an actual Nature Center.

View out my front window

We went to Vermillionville which is like a Cajun theme park. They even had a ride – a small ferry across a little creek where you had to pull yourself back and forth using a rope. Vermillionville had brought in Cajun houses dating from around the 1730s to the late 1800s. Inside each of the houses, there was an artisan who, while working on their craft, would also tell you about some of the customs of the people of the time and the history of the house. There was a quilter, a wood worker, a farmer, a basket maker and a Creole fiddle player who just happened to have been born in St. Paul. His people had moved up there and he grew up there before he migrated back south.

We also at at the restaurant there and sampled the buffet. Cajun cooking seems to be pretty heavy fare – lots of frying and heavy sauces. I loved the sausage and chicken Gumbo.

We have Gumbo, biscuits and honey, onion rings, fried shrimp tidbits, crawfish etoufee,  and seafood mac n' cheese

Since I'm down in bayou country, the only appropriate thing to do is a Swamp tour. Originally, I was thinking Air Boat, which was a possibility, but then decided on just a plain old flat bottomed boat with room for about 15 people. We putzed along through the cypress trees, all decorated with Spanish moss. Spanish moss is not Spanish and it is not a moss. Back in the olden days, when the Spaniards were coming through the area, the First Nation people thought the moss looked like the straggly beards that all the Spaniards seemed to sport. Hence the name.

We were on the lookout for alligators and boy, did we find them. There were little baby ones, there were medium sized ones and there were some that were huge, maybe 12 feet long. We also saw snakes, lots of turtles and birds. It was one of the first really nice spring days in the area and the wildlife were all out enjoying the day. Now that I've seen all these alligators, I can place a check mark in the 'been there, done that' list.

This one looks like a serious guy

This big guy just looks happy to be out in the sun

Meet Stella.  They have named her because she always builds a nest in the same area. There were baby alligators behind her.  

Pretty Swamp

Swampy Swamp

Southern Rain

Miko and I spend our last day in Natchitoches in the Kisatchie National Forest. It looked like there were some nice trails, not to mention that there was a Scenic Vista Byways – a 17 mile super scenic drive. The trail I picked was supposed to have a waterfall which was reason enough to go, but also some scenic overlooks. It turned out to be easy rolling hills, no scenic overlooks and a tiny little waterfall. All is ok, at least we were outside and we were not knee deep in snow.

Waterfall ( I guess) - even Miko looks a little underwhelmed

It is time to move on. The problem is that it is Saturday on a holiday weekend (President's Day) and I'm planning on moving to Sam Houston Jones State Park down at Lake Charles. I checked the online reservations for the park and there are only two sites available. The whole campground is full beyond that. The other part of the equation though is that it is raining. It was supposed to rain all day and all night. It started on Friday night and I'm not talking a light little drizzle, we are talking a continual downpour. The good part about that is that maybe some of those weekend campers are going to throw in the towel and leave early. The bad part is that I will have to drive in this downpour. Oh, did I mention that there was a lot of fog and my route is down a pretty rural road which means Louisiana probably hasn't spent a lot of dollars on road maintenance. Never you mind, I'm heading down the road, hoping to score one of the last remaining campsites.

When I got to the park, I was able to snag the last site and set up in the pouring rain. We walked once around the campground and even though I was wearing my rain gear, I got a little damp. Mostly we just hung out in the RV, drinking Hot Chocolate and playing video games.

Miko gets a weird coat pattern when her fur gets wet

See the satellite dish on the left? 

The water was so deep during the downpour that it was almost up to the white part of the satellite

The main reason I had come to the Lake Charles area was to go to the Mardi Gras Museum of the Imperial Calcacieu. Being as how it is Mardi Gras season, I thought it would be especially appropriate to check something like this out. With all my advance planning, I seemed to have neglected finding out what the hours were for the museum. Turns out that the museum is closed for all of the days that I was going to be in the area. Oh well. Next time.

The next day, it did stop raining. The soil here seems to drain pretty quick so we decided to hit a trail.

The trail I picked did not have any alligator signs posted so that was good. It wandered between the Calcacieu river and a swamp ( I guess you are supposed to call a swamp a bayou). It was a little muddy and a little dreary, but not too bad. Again, it was pleasant to be outside after our forced rain out.

Nope - not going down this trail

You say Bayou, I say swamp

Some color