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Slept in a little, far too comfy beds at the Ramada lol We went to breakfast & found they had a distinctly southern twist to it. Aside from the usual stuff there was a Cajun sausage (awesome) and biscuits and gravy. So as most will know biscuit translates to plain scone but down south here they have it for breakfast with what they call gravy, thankfully not even vaguely the same as what we think of as gravy, more a thick white sauce with ham or sausage or something similar through it. Now I know it sounds gross but in fact it was pretty good, I only went a quarter of a "biscuit" but finished the "gravy" with the awesome Cajun sausages which was also very good. I suspect it's not something we should have every day but what can I say? It was there so we had to try lol
By the time we'd had the breakfast & packed the car we didn't get on the road til nearly 11am. The masses of churches we came across on yesterdays drive gave way today to masses of casinos; not entirely sure what this says about the people of Louisianna vs the Texans lol.
We headed straight for Lafayette, checked out the tourist info place which had an amazing, middle of the city swamp walkway. There were lots of fish, dragon flies & plenty of birds; about 10 degrees cooler than out in the sun. It's much like a Queensland summer here, far warmer than it was n California.
15 minutes out of town is Breaux Bridge, a small swamp based community. Here we hooked up with a swamp boat tour and spent two hours in the Lake Martin swamp. It was great fun, lots of interesting bird life like giant blue heron, 4.5' tall! along with cormorants, egrets & white herons. We saw thousands of dragon flies in every hue, expert mozzie catchers so beautiful & as they ate all the mozzies they were very welcome, a number of turtles & 4 or 5 'gators; way smaller than the salties we get at home but still very cool.
It rained while in the uncovered boat so we all got wet but didn't care, we were having too much fun lol
From there we headed along the I10 planning to hit Baton Rouge but we'd not counted on peak hour traffic jams rendering it too late for most of what we wanted to see so by passed it & headed on to New Orleans instead. We went over some amazing bridges some of which were 20 plus miles long, true engineering feats. One spanned a lake, in the middle of the lake were high voltage power lines just strung across the lake as if it were land, slightly surreal but again quite a feat. At Baton Rouge we crossed the mighty Mississippi River, huge & dirty :-)
We got into New Orleans about 6pm, checked in, showered & headed out to the city.
On the recommendation of the hotel receptionist we went to a central city cafe & tried a few of the local foods, red beans & sausage, chilli, shrimp platter & calamari platter. All was very good, other than there being far too much food. Pete reckons the shrimp platter was the best he'd ever had, a big call for a Qld boy! He insisted, as he has before with zero success, that I try the shrimp. It's not something I've ever wanted to try, the concept kinda grosses me out. His argument that I've eaten snails, frogs legs, wart hog etc so there shouldn't be a problem has never swayed me. Until tonight, I suspect I just got sick of saying no but whatever, I gave in & tried a small bite of shrimp, it was ok, still not interested in eating more but it was ok.
We left the restaurant at about 9.45, it was raining again, everywhere was shutting at 10pm so we canned the idea of hitting a jazz bar in favour of returning to our room for the night.
- comments
Dee Sounds like a great day!
Ann I didn't realise that you had never even tried shrimp! Just thought you didn't like the taste. Let me know what the jambalya is like. I have tried it and since looked at recipes but not made it. The maths at the bottom of this is tooo much for me:)
Sue Nope never tried, never wanted to, something about ripping something's head of & ripping out its poop shute before you eat it is seriously unappealing & even when all that it done for you, well, you can still see where it all was. Creepy! Remember, I'm the one who has always refused to eat whitebait cos of all the eye balls lol The maths is to make sure you're a person lol try doing it before the 3rd wine lmao