Tuesday, March 20, 2018

On the Bayou

Thanks for dropping by. I haven't blogged in a while, all's well, just gettin' lazy.

If you feel like listening to a little local music in the background while you read this, just click on the highlighted text above. This is Cajun country. 

We found this little gem of a state park in Grand Isle Louisiana.
It's on the gulf, it's quiet and more than half the sites here are unoccupied, even during march break. A nice change from Galveston, which was a bit of a zoo last week.
This is our spot, the beach is just on the other side of the dunes behind the Unit.



This is the beach, a stark contrast to Galveston, and the weather has been fantastic. We've even had to swat a few mosquitoes at dusk. Not complaining!


Grand Isle is a ways off the beaten track about 50 miles south of New Orleans. The road ends here so it's not on the way to anywhere. We drove through miles of bayou country to get here. The drive was mostly along the Bayou Lafourche which is like a canal that leads to the gulf. Fishing boats were docked as much as 25 miles inland from the gulf, quite a commute to get to work.


Shrimp are big business here as is demonstrated by the countless "shrimpin' trawlers" we saw, moored along the bayou.

There are also miles of "fields" that look like this.


We guessed either rice paddy's or crawfish farms. It turns out they are both. These ingenious good ol' boys have combined the two. The rows of "dots" you see are crawfish traps placed in between the rows of rice. And what goes better with crawfish than rice?

Speaking of crawfish and good ol' boys, we stopped at a crawfish shack to see if we could get a few pounds "to go". We could barely make out what the owner was saying. It turns out (after we got a translation from another customer) that he only boiled crawfish to order and it would be about half an hour. It's a strange feeling when you know he's speaking English but you have a clue what he's saying. We continued on our journey. 

Unfortunately we found there are no such shacks on Grand Isle but they do have a few of these, which makes up for it.



There are pelicans here by the thousands. Yesterday afternoon we walked out to the end of the fishing pier and witnessed a pelican feeding frenzy. I had to zoom in a bit so the video is not too clear.



And here's just one more picture that I think says a lot, not really a food picture, more of a "what it's all about" picture. Who doesn't have fond memories of roasting weenies over a fire.


Tomorrow we continue our meandering drive home, stopping next, near Biloxi Mississippi for a few days. 



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