Day 17-Cajun Country

We woke up this morning in a king size bed in a Hilton Garden motel...thanks to termites. Thousands of Formosan Termites were swarming through our campground and somehow hundreds of these annoying little creatures found their way into our van.  It reminded us of a night we spent camping in a tent in the Ocracoke dunes when Nick was a baby.  

Check out this linked video, this is exactly what it was like!  

After continually swatting them for nearly 30 minutes, we surrendered, readied our van for travel and left the campground in search of a hotel.  Fortunately there was a Hilton Garden only 10 miles from us.

All was not lost, our room at the Hilton Garden was right near their laundry so Joni washed and dried two loads.  For breakfast we picked up some beignets and coffee from a nearby Café du Monde, and we were on the road a little after 9:00 AM, heading for bayou county.

Our first excitement was crossing the Mississippi.  Having grown up in St. Louis, there's a special place in my heart for that river.  My dad worked in both the grain and barge business and I often visited elevators along the river with him.  Who do you know that can say they learned how to water ski on the Big Muddy?

Looking north from the Horace Wilkinson Bridge on I-10 in Baton Rouge

Our first stop today was at the Half Shell Oyster House in Lafayette, population 100,000.  We had a delicious meal, knowing our restaurant choices would be non-existent once we approached our campground in Palmetto Island State Park.

Voodoo Cajun shrimp PoBoy

Voodoo Chicken Sandwich with sweet potato creme brûlée

Leaving Lafayette, we headed south to our next stop on Avery Island.  Avery Island stands out from the surrounding wetlands, rising at its highest point 163 feet above the low-lying plain. This salt dome formed as the weight of younger sediment pushed up a column of salt deposited over 165 million years ago.  

In the mid-1860s Edmund Mclenny began growing Capsicum frutescens peppers here using seeds believed to be from Mexico or Central America. Around 1868 he created the first bottles of his now world-famous TABASCO® brand Pepper Sauce. Edmund's son, Edward Avery "Ned" Mcllhenny, grew up on the Island and studied its plants and animals. In 1895 he founded the private Bird City sanctuary to re-establish the population of snowy egrets-a species that had nearly become extinct because its feathers were prized by hat makers. Around that time Ned also developed a semi-tropical garden on the Island. He opened it to the public in 1935 as Jungle Gardens, a botanical wonder covering about 170 acres. It includes the rookery, a seasonal home for thousands of egrets (from February through August) and other migratory birds.

Edmund Mclenny re-introduced the snowy egret to his area with just eight birds.  He didn't know they would return here, so at first he kept them in a giant bird cage.  He finally released them, and to his surprise and delight they returned.  Now there are thousands that return to this area every year!

We loved Avery Island, what the Mcllhenny family has done there and shared with the public is amazing.

Leaving Avery Island we headed to our campsite in the Palmetto Island State Park.  The roads along the way took us through some of the worst poverty we've seen in the south.  To photograph it seemed disrespectful.

Omnipresent sugar cane fields

I wasn't tempted to swim here.  There were too many "don't feed the alligators" signs.

This campground had 96 sites, but only four others were occupied.  

The campsites were very nice; well spaced and private, and the bathrooms were spotless, so I don't know why it was so empty, other than the fact that it's in the middle of nowhere.  Fortunately there were no termites!