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

So Sad Shreveport - Nifty Neat Natchitoches

Poor poor Shreveport. Maybe I was only in the most depressed areas of Shreveport but I found Shreveport Louisiana to be a very down on her luck type of city. Everything seemed to be shabby and there seemed to be a hard scrabble feel to the place. At certain times in the past, Shreveport has had it's moments, for example, there was the oil and gas boom in the eighties. All that is gone, leaving a sad little town with shabby casinos as it's main business. Of course I may be wrong and it may be it is a city full of hope – who knows, I didn't see it.

I am staying at Diamond Jack's Casino RV park, one of those Casinos that seem to be just holding on. The reason I am here is to go see the Shreveport Water Works Museum which is a rare example of an intact steam powered water works. It is no longer used, but in it's day it was a technological pioneer. There were a couple of interactive exhibits, but mostly it was a large building with a bunch of old boilers. They did tell me the steps that were taken to purify water, but I found that it was perhaps not on my list of top museums to see. I would rank it behind the Lunch Box Museum in Georgia to put a little perspective on it. Maybe it was the fact that it was a dull dreary day maybe I'm just now into boilers or something.

You could push buttons and make the water flow through the various processes of water purification

See?  Big boilers.

I am now in Nachitoches (pronounced Nack-A-dish) Louisiana, the oldest city in Louisiana. What a difference a few miles makes. Historical Nachitoches is lovely – their Front Street borders on the Cane River and it seems to be a thriving little town. The first day, I do a walking tour of the river front area, mostly I stopped into the various shops and chitchatted with the clerks. It was sort of a nasty day out, rainy, windy and chilly.

Anyplace with a waterfall, even if it is not nature's doing, is my kind of place

Buildings on Front Street, right along the Cane River

Built around the time of the Louisiana Purchase, this house was built with no nails and it is still standing

Day Two is an action packed day. Nachitoches is known for it's Meat Pies, these are empanadas stuffed with 80% beef and 20% pork. My meal came with a salad bar and when I saw their salad bar I was not filled with hope that this would be an outstanding meal. I was wrong – the Meat Pie was really good and spicy – almost made me want to come back and try the crawdad stuffed Meat Pie.

The salad bar in totality

Meat Pie, Dirty Rice, Creole Corn

Lasyone's is known for it's Meat Pies

After my huge lunch, I visited the Cane River Creole National Historical Park which are plantations on three different sites. Another Junior Ranger opportunity.

Oakland Plantation is the most complete Creole plantation in the south. It was occupied by the Prud'homme family from 1788 until the 1960's. What I found most interesting was that the Creole culture in this area was very different from the slave holdings out east. There was a set of laws called Code Noir created by the French when they settled Louisiana. One of the laws was that you could not sell off slave family members, the family remains intact – at least until the children turned 14. This gradually changed as we got closer to the civil war years and as more easterners brought their slaves into Louisiana.

The Big House at Oakland Plantation - Creole architecture

Melrose Plantation was established by a family of 'free people of color' around 1803. In the 1920s/30s, it became an artist retreat. Clementine Hunter, a primitive/folk artist, was a domestic in the big house, took up painting and became internationally known. Some of her work is in the Smithsonian.

The 'African House' where Clementine Hunter painted murals all around the 2nd story

The Big House at Melrose Plantation

The oaks here are absolutely stupendous

An example of Clementine Hunter's work