Suddenly the climate, the culture, the food, the music, and the weather scratched an itch we didn't realize we had. Maybe this picture of Joan, moving us out of New Orleans, should have been a clue that we might be getting a wee bit tired of the road.
Moving on from New Orleans, we had a week to get to Houston, and had no idea where we were going, but we ended up finding so much. Most interestingly though, each step started to feel more and more like home.
Highlights included:
The Whitney Plantation - one of the only plantation tours that's focused on the experiences of the enslaved people.
Lafayette, LA - Camping and forest bathing
Cajun Country - Bird watching, hurricane destruction, and Tabasco Sauce
Lake Charles, LA and yet another great little town museum
Running stadium stairs at college and high school facilities to start our training program to get back in shape
As we transitioned from the "South" to Texas, we had to first pass through Louisiana . . . which makes cajun country really feel like a "border state". It's more than just the west-of-the-Mississippi geography though. As you hit Louisiana there are suddenly fewer churches, (and they're suddenly all Catholic!). The buttoned up charm of Southern culture gives way to that mardi gras vibe (party time!). Even the music changes tempo as the Delta Blues gives way to New Orleans jazz and Cajun zydeco. It's just a very different vibe.
And of course, as soon as we crossed the border into Texas, all of a sudden there were latino people, culture, food, and music. We knew that we'd missed it terribly -- I think the last good burrito we had was in Idaho -- but we didn't realize how much it makes us feel like we're "home". Maybe we just can't separate latino culture from the California culture these days? Maybe they're just too intertwined in our heads? At any rate, it made both of us really happy to feel just that much closer to home.
So, Louisiana was the door we walked through into the west. It was as if, after 10,000 miles of zig-zagging the gracious warmth and lurking anxieties of the Southern culture, suddenly mother nature turned up the lights, the volume, the wind machine, and the food. And, bam, we're in a new world. :-)
Whitney Plantation - Edgard, LA
This first graphic, which is in the entryway (near the bathrooms oddly) at Whitney, really stuck with both of us. It shows the Mississippi river snaking from left to right, towards New Orleans in 1858. Each little color you see is a slice of Mississippi waterfront representing 1 plantation. The Whitney is just one of those little slices, but represented about 1800 acres. The prisons of enslaved agricultural workers were literally stacked shoulder to shoulder for this 100 miles of river front, on both sides.
The Whitney Plantation is one of the few (only?) plantations to really focus on the experience of the enslaved peoples who lived there. It's been written about extensively (Clint Smith's How the Word is Passed is a good resource), so we were excited to visit. The tour seems most commonly done as an solo audio tour which also was a great way to be in your own world, really engaging with the moment. Additionally, they've dotted the plantation with a wide variety of sculptures that help bring it to life.
A big part of the tour covers the 1811 slave uprising led by Charles Lalonde. They were inspired by the successful 1804 revolt against the French in Haiti where the Africans gained their freedom. Although this revolt was the biggest ever attempted, in the end the slaves were defeated, their bodies were decapitated, and their heads were put on poles all along the river to frighten and intimidate the remaining slaves. Thinking back on the Lost Cause mythology we first encountered in Georgia it still confuses & astounds us how those Believers can continue the fantasy that enslaved people preferred slavery to freedom.
Lafayette, LA
From the plantation, we crossed the Atchafalaya river and headed into Cajun country. (FYI, we asked about the difference between Creole and Cajun and the best answer we got was "Creole is city and Cajun is country" . . . so we're going with that. ) In Lafayette we found a lovely state park in the swamp. There had been a little too much rain, so the running was too muddy to be fun, but Joan really liked the "Forest Bathing" she got to do.
Forest Bathing is an idea that her friend Purvi got her interested in. And lo and behold, in the middle of this bit of rural Louisiana there's a series of signs in the woods that make a great guided bathing experience! Joan will fill you in on her experience......
Forest bathing is a Japanese practice of relaxation named "shinrin- yoku" or absorbing the forest atmosphere. The practice encourages you to live in the present moment while immersing your senses in the sights and sounds of a natural setting.
I was ready to put on my headphones and crank out my 10,000 steps when I encountered a sign that asked me to stop and look at the trees around me, pick out a tree that catches my eye and notice its bark, its bend, its limbs and inhabitants. I turned off the music and instead spent time with my surroundings, listening, smelling, seeing -- using all of my senses. Then, as I walked further and there was another prompt to have me use specific senses to to relax and take in my surroundings. "Try just listening here" or "Stop and really smell there". Forest Bathing has been shown to improve recovery from stress by lowering cortisol, improving attention, bolstering immune function, lowering the pulse and BP, and even helping to alleviate depression. I was tickled to have stumbled on this in rural LA. Since the terrain was so different from ours in the Bay Area it made even more sense to stop, look around and get bathed in this forest.
Lafayette turned out to be a cute little town. Very cajun/creole, complete with downtown street signs in french. We stumbled on an AMAZING breakfast place called the Scratch Kitchen. It was a little Creole and a little Berkeley. Very hippy dippy, but with an adventurous, veggie-heavy menu dotted here and there with the mandatory southern bbq and pulled pork. Needless to say, we loved it so much that we ate there twice.
Since we scored so brilliantly with Scratch Kitchen, we pushed our luck and for Valentine's Day dinner we found a "Southern Restaurant" that rated highly on Yelp, but which turned out to be the Southern version of Denny's. Joan's face says it all as she rates the Alligator bites and the brutally overcooked brussel sprouts. Oh well, you can't win them all.
Avery Island, LA - Home of Tabasco
When Joan was a little girl, if her language got too colorful her mom would put Tabasco sauce on her tongue as a punishment. (Knowing Joan, you might guess that this happened more than once :-) . . . . So of course we had to visit the home of Tabasco brand pepper sauce. The tour was simple, but fun. Certainly less corporate than the World Of Coca Cola in Atlanta.
It's amazing that this business has thrived for over 150 years, consistently employing generations of folks in this remote part of Louisiana. Say what you want about company towns and how they can go bad, but without the McIlhenny family I'm not sure what this little corner of the south would look like.
Lake Charles, LA
On a whim, we pulled in for the night at a brew pub in little Lake Charles, LA. -- The Crying Eagle Brewery and restaurant. And we got way, way more than we bargained for. For starters, the brewery has both good beer and amazing food. Chef Thibodeaux's pizzas are out of this world. I just wish I'd had the presence of mind to get his picture. There was even a mid week running club finishing up their jog with a pint at the bar. So Randy was smitten.
Lake Charles is a little town of about 85,000 people several hours west of New Orleans and pretty much evenly split between black and white, which sounds good, but the southern pattern of poverty rates being about 3x as high for blacks as whites still held. Nevertheless, the town history museum -- which was so good we missed the closing of the local cookie company -- had a terrific exhibit on black celebrations of Mardi Gras. In the same Mardi Gras spirit as New Orleans, the costumes were over-the-top fabulous and the history of black leaders (interestingly always couples) was detailed and inspiring.
The two gals working the museum, one of whom was a "4th generation Cajun", were thoughtful, gracious with their time, and so happy to share the history of their little town. They also turned us on to the art exhibits at the historic city hall which Randy especially loved. Joan managed to stop him from buying some, but we have to put a few pictures here and a link to his favorite of the artists. (Troy Guilbeaux) . . . just in case you like them just as much! ;-)
Although it was raining, at times quite hard, on the last day of our stay in Lake Charles, we had to get out for some exercise. Joan had the brilliant idea to go run some stadium stairs. In spite of the weather, it was great! Thanks to the folks at McNeese State University for leaving a little hole in the fence near the football stadium . . . and also for not kicking us out. :-)
Joan looks pretty hard core in her headphones!
The Louisiana gulf coast, Hurricane Laura, & Alligators
On the advice of the gals at the Lake Charles museum, we decided to head south to drive along the ocean and then take a ferry across to Texas. Yet again, they gave great advice.
The gulf coast, from here all the way down along the Texas shore, is a great sanctuary for migrating birds. We saw thousands and thousands of geese, ducks, and others dotting the marshes. At one point, we spotted a dirt road heading off into the marsh and just couldn't resist. Then, thanks to a young man we bumped into, we discovered how to look for and spot alligators. We must have seen 30+ of them, ranging from about 4ft to 12ft. Yikes! But at least we were safely inside of Doris.
After the bird watching, we drove along the part of the coast that was smashed by Hurricane Laura in August of 2020. Laura is tied for the record of strongest hurricane to come ashore in Louisiana (and 10th strongest nationally) and hit dead on the town of Cameron, LA. 2.5 years, as you can see from the pictures, Cameron is still building back. There are houses that are still sitting there, brutally ripped apart by the winds, and some that have clearly been rebuilt. What was most surprising/interesting to us was, well, that they were being rebuilt at all. I suppose folks from here find it weird that we don't mind living in earthquake country, but given the destruction we'd be terrified to live there. . . even if we did raise our house up 20 feet off the ground. There was even a nice, new community center and new Cameron city school building.
And this was the local Baptist church . . . 2.5 years later.
Beaumont, TX
We crossed into Texas on the Cameron-Holly Beach ferry and headed towards Beaumont, which our son Matt calls "the OG Texas oil town" and it turns out he's right. The Spindletop oilfield discovery just south of Beaumont kicked of the oil bonanza that continues to this day in Texas. As a result, Beaumont is home to a seemingly never ending series of GIGANTIC oil refineries and natural gas processing terminals. We spent the night in Beaumont and took in the Texas Oil Museum -- which had everything from weirdly animated storytellers to exhibits on the chemistry of petroleum processing. It was oddly engrossing, but I had to text my friend Joe Sinner, the ex-petroleum engineer, to get some translations.
And of course, on our way out of town, Joan persuaded the Beaumont school district office to open their football stadium so that we could run some more stairs. (yes. you read that right, they unlocked the doors for us!) No kidding though, this stadium rivals Stanford's, right down the the 2 story press box. And we had it all to ourselves. We're just kicking ourselves that we didn't get to Texas in time to see a high school football game.
Lastly, we had a couple of hours to kill before we had to be in Houston to meet Matt for dinner, so we stopped at a little Reflexology salon in a strip mall in Beaumont and got foot massages. This is TOTALLY going to turn into a trend. :-)
Thought for the Day: Outsider'ism and Home
Passing from the Deep South into Cajun Louisiana and then on into Texas was almost disorienting. The over-the-top Christianity, the racial tension, the polite Southern culture that makes you feel welcomed while being held at arm's length, it all created a sense of "otherness" in the two of us that was weirdly stressful. I know that every town is someone's "home" and that it's natural for them to feel foreign to us, but especially when we'd see these 50 foot crosses, Christian billboard messages, and sparkling mega-churches, we'd get this very strong sense that there exists an "Us" and a "Them". I know christianity is supposed to be an inclusive religion, but when it's advertised in such an energetic, in-your-face sort of way it seems to demand that we think about changing our beliefs and join them. Given that we're pretty comfortable with our own spirituality, the end result was that the energy of this "Christian Advertising" became symbolic of the sense of "otherness" that we felt all across the South.
Perhaps that's why the transition to Catholic Louisiana felt so comforting. Suddenly there were places we belonged. And there was much less advertising. Combining that with the spirit of Mardi Gras and all the great people we met meant that this little Cajun/Creole state dredged up a bit of homesickness for that place where we really felt like we belonged. Home. And that feeling only got turned up higher when we crossed into Texas. With its ever-present reminders of Latino culture and its wide open, Western spaces, the Lone Star state felt like family.
Suddenly I felt myself dreaming of home, and friends, and teaching, and running, and our dogs. And I kept coming back to the question:
"What will we be like when we get home?"
On the road the two of us are constantly talking about everything new that we see. We get time to process life and come to terms with whatever we ran into that day. At home, those times have always seemed so hard to come by. When we return, will the days seem repetitive? Will the pace seem overwhelming? Will the bed seem way too big? Or will we find a way to bring the spirit of Doris and the road to our home in California?
That's food for thought.
Lastly, I couldn't resist including this statue from outside the Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. :-)
It was the inscription that I particularly liked. Probably something we should remember more often as we visit the places that other people call home.
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