Miko and Me: 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.