Our Latest Adventure--Louisiana

Travelogue--Day 19

We are at the end of our time in Southern Louisiana. Tomorrow morning we will pack it all up and head north and west for our trek back to Oklahoma City.

We have been playing the tourist the last couple of days. Yesterday we drove over to Lafayette to a place called Acadian Village. This is a place where many original Acadian houses and buildings have been brought in to show what a real Acadian village would have looked like. (Acadians are the original French speaking people who settled here in the 1700's after the British ran them out of Canadian Nova Scotia. These folks are now mostly called Cajuns.) The village was very intersting. Although most of the buildings are original buildings that were built in the 1800's (and later moved to this location) the chapel is a replica built by the local Knights of Columbus organization.

From Lafayette we went to the town of Breaux Bridge. This is a unique little town that bills itself as the Crayfish Capitol of the World. (Seems like most of the towns down here are some kind of capitol of the world.) Breaux Bridge has a neat downtown area but unfortunately most of the shops and restaurants are closed on Monday and Tuesday of each week. As is the case in most of this area the Cajun language is somewhat based on French, as the picture of the street sign indicates.

Today we explored the city of New Iberia. This town is just south of Lafayette. We took a tour of the oldest rice mill still in operation in the country. The Conrad Rice Company produces the Konricko brand of rice there.

We also toured a mansion that had been part of a large sugar plantation. The place is called Shadows-on-the-Teche and is located on the Bayou Teche which goes right through the middle of town. This house was held within the family through four generations. The final heir never married or had children so he transferred it to the National Historic Preservation Commission just before he died in the 1950's.

This evening we drove back over to Rayne for dinner and then went to the Civic Center RV Rally Park, where we had the rally last week. It really looks deserted. There is only one coach parked there now. (We had one of our members suffer a medical emergency last Saturday and is now in a hospital in Lafayette. His family has flown in to help him and his wife and assist in getting his coach driven back to Florida. He should be released this Friday to return home.)