Thanksgiving at the Sunset Inn
Back in Panama City for our annual gathering with our sweet daughter-in-law’s family, we check in at the Sunset Inn on a glorious day in late November. The view that greets us thrills our hearts:
There aren’t too many people staying at the beach, go figure, it’s Thanksgiving and families are gathering, but this is a GREAT time to be here. We have a full kitchen, so I can still roast my garlic-broccoli, make my Mom’s Cranberry Salad and make the topping for the Soused Apple Cake all while having the door wide open and listening to the waves roaring to the shore. This is one of my happiest places on earth.
These small surf boards give a lot of pleasure on smaller waves:
I thought I was back in Kuwait, overlooking the family park in Fintas:
I can see things slipping a little at the Sunset Inn, carpets not being replaced, linens getting thinner from so many washings, small repairs not being made – and I know our days there are numbered. Sigh. What they can’t replace in the personal character of the management – I can run down and beg a couple pieces of tinfoil to cover my broccoli; it is their motel, they manage it personally. There are countless soulless condos and motel rooms in Panama City Beach, but only one Sunset Inn.
Vic’s Touchdown Cafe Near RaceTrack, LA
We’re headed home again, but the day has dawned shrouded in a thick Halloween-y fog drifting up off the bayous and covering the low lying roads. We get on a fast road, and decide to have breakfast, hoping the fog will break.
We exit almost as soon as we got on the road, headed South on a road heading toward the Gulf, looking for something that is not fast food. And there it is, on the left, we just passed it, so we circle back for breakfast at Vic’s, Breakfast Lunch Dinner.
As it turns out, I believe the real name is Vic’s Touchdown Cafe. The interior is full of sports trophies, banners, team memorabilia, and stuffed deer heads. There are other customers, eating breakfast, chatting with a man whom I believe is probably Vic. We ordered breakfast off the plastic menu table mats, and settled back to listen and learn.
People in Louisiana are hospitable, and kind. They asked us questions, shared some local lore and when I asked Vic if he had any milk, he opened a little bottle of milk just for me and put it on the table so I could have milk in my coffee. I was impressed, but I get the impression he thought it was just good manners. My kind of place.
I didn’t take photos of the food; it might have spoiled the mood. It was traditional breakfast; eggs, bacon, biscuit and AdventureMan had hash browns. It was all good, even the coffee, and even better because it was not fast good. This was a great stop.
By the time we had finished, the fog had lifted and we had clear sailing all the way back to Pensacola 🙂
Natural Beauty at Pointe-Aux-Chenes
Pointe-Aux-Chenes was probably one of the most beautiful drives on our trip. You start off driving along a small canal, and you’re going to need your smart phone or a map to make the right turns to get to this isolated location.
We had read there was an wildlife observation point at the Pointe-Aux-Chenes Nature Refuge, but we looked and looked and never found it. Never mind, there was so much to see.
As you go south, and you get closer and closer to the Gulf, houses go up on stilts.
This is still very much a fishing community:
Is this a mistake? A misunderstanding? The area is called Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Oak Pointe, but this sign refers to the tribe as Pointe-Aux-Chiens, Dog Point Indians. Hmmmm.
It is so hard to capture anything that looks like a dolphin, even though at sundown, the place was full of dolphin – or porpoises, I am not sure I know the difference. Even though I didn’t get a good shot, it was a glorious place to be at that very moment.
Can you see the eagles perched in the distant trees?
For a moment, I thought I was in the Camargue with it’s wild ponies, but a local man said he thought these belonged to someone and just cropped on this salty grass at the end of the road.
So many beautiful things to see in one spot!
Big Mike’s BBQ in Houma, LA
Where do you eat in Houma, Louisiana? Just about everyone we asked started with Big Mike’s, so after our swamp tour, we gave it a try.
The place was packed. There are menus near the door; you look at the menus, you go to the counter, you place your order and they give you a number which you place on your table and someone brings your meals to you. The smell is divine.
This is cane sugar country, so of course, the sweet tea is cane-sugar sweet:
Several different seating areas in Mike’s:
The chicken with corn on the cob and jambalaya – delicious!
Pulled pork:
Big Mike’s has it’s own BBQ sauce, rubbing spices, t-shirts, etc>
Swamp Tour With Annie Miller’s Son
Annie Miller was a woman ahead of her time, out trapping, hunting and doing whatever she needed to do to keep her children fed and clothed and going to school. When oil went bottoms up, the town of Houma approached Annie Miller and asked her to start up some tours of the swamp, to attract business to the area. She did, and was so knowledgeable that people came from everywhere to take her tours.
Now her son does the tours, and we liked his approach. We call it “Under promise and over deliver” which we think is a great slogan for contractors everywhere. At one time AdventureMan worked for a giant company whose contracts were called “The Gold Standard.” His company cost a little more, but they delivered on every promise and were good at figuring out problems that cropped up mid-contract and working with the government to support the mission.
As this tour departed from the gathering spot at Bayou Delights restaurant, the guide told us that with the colder weather, he couldn’t guarantee that we would see any alligators at all, but that there were other things he would show us. I love that approach. It prevents excessive expectations.
As it turned out, we saw all kinds of wonderful things, both inside and outside of the Mandalay Wildlife Refuge.
This is a revolving bridge over the Bayou Black. You can see the round base on which it can swing sideways to allow really tall boats up the Bayou. The guide saws he has never seen it work in his lifetime.
Almost immediately, we spy an alligator sunning on the side of the bayou.
Entering Mandalay Wildlife Refuge:
Shooting digital is a crap-shoot. You have that tiny delay, but a tiny delay makes shooting wildlife less predictable. I didn’t even know I had this shot until I uploaded my photos to my computer. It was absolutely glorious to see.
I have never seen anyone call an alligator before. “C’mon Ruby! C’mon b-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-by! C’mon Ruby!” And Ruby came!
So did Little Latin Loopy Lou! She jumps for the pieces of chicken that he puts on the end of the stick:
This is more exciting to me than alligators. These birds are gorgeous.
These two eagles would swoop at the same time for chicken skins; unfortunately, against the dark bayou, you couldn’t see them as they swooped, but I loved catching two of them together as they chowed down on their meal.
Back at the lovely Marriott Courtyard in Houma, I love having a balcony, especially in this weather. Gorgeous sunset, gorgeous weather.
From Lake Charles to Houma, Louisiana And Bon Creole
Another wonderful day to travel Southern Louisiana and the lowlands. We stop at one of our favorite places, Saint Martin’s Lake.
Near the factory burning cane, I see an old abandoned house. There are a lot of old abandoned houses on the backroads of Louisiana; rich pickings for series like HBO’s True Detectives.
The air was so clear you could see every atom of smoke as this factory burned off chaff grinding cane into cane sugar syrup:
Just in time for lunch, we hit New Iberia, where my friend Dave Robicheaux hangs out. Last time we were here, we went to a wonderful Place, Bon Creole, but we remembered it was hard to find. Even with my smart phone, we drive right past it, and have to go around the block and look again. This is not a place that makes itself KNOWN; you have to know where it is, and you have to really want to find it, LOL!
The interior is a hunter’s dream.
At the table near us, a group of local women are sitting and one is holding court, saying “You never know about so-and-so; she is so SECRETIVE!” and I am thinking that she would call me secretive, too, that I would be very careful about telling anything about myself that she could be spreading to all her friends – and everyone else in the Bon Creole who cared to listen.
Thank God, our food is ready, and I start with my gumbo, thick with shimp. Oops, I forgot, the gumbo comes with potato salad.
And more grilled shrimp – this time on my green salad. So many shrimp I couldn’t eat them all!
Poor AdventureMan! “Why didn’t I just order a 6″ Overstuffed Oyster Po’Boy???” These oysters were the old fashioned kind, fresh, dipped in corn meal and deep fried, just the way he likes them, but no, no, he couldn’t eat them all. I had one, and there were still many left, so many fabulous oysters!
As we were leaving, we stopped two residents who were leaving and asked them if we could get to Highway 90 by continuing down the road we were on, and they offered to let us follow them to Franklin. Franklin is like 25 miles down the road, imagine. They were willing to be so gracious to perfect strangers. We gratefully declined, and used their instructions and our smart phone to get us over to 90, en route to Morgan City and Houma.
Holly Beach and Hackberry, Louisiana
AdventureMan knows how to thrill my heart, and just down the road, we find Holly Beach.
“Do you want to walk on the beach?” he asks slyly. He knows the answer to that question will always be “YES!!”
Holly Beach is not Pensacola Beach. I don’t see a single restaurant, not a single hotel. I don’t see sugar white sand. The sand here is golden grey, and the beach is littered – with SEASHELLS! So many wonderful seashells! I could stay here for a long time!
LOL, it’s also an Alaska kind of beach!
On our way into Lake Charles, we make a stop at Brown’s Market, in Hackberry, Louisiana, for a list of items, and they had every item on our list. It is a great little stop, and has clean restrooms, too 🙂
Gigi’s in Cameron, Louisiana
Our friend at the Wildlife Center, Sarah, highly recommended Gigi’s, and we were really really hungry when we got there, so it should have been a really good experience, and besides, Cameron is small and I didn’t see any other options.
Interior:
View out towards Gulf:
Have I mentioned, only a thousand times, how fabulous the weather is? It’s seventy-something and like zero humidity. It doesn’t even matter that we are eating outdoors; the weather is perfect.
We order.
Honestly, when did I become a squeamish woman? Certainly not my early years in Tunis, and Amman, when we had to strain the weevils out of our flour and pasta. But as I watched a fly try to get into the ketchup through the tip of the dispenser, I sort of lost my appetite. The other problem is that AdventureMan and I really try to eat sensibly; we’re not extreme, every now and then we have something fried, but the food in Louisiana is rich, we haven’t seen a lot of vegetables, and when our food arrived – so much food – I couldn’t begin to eat it all. I ate about half my shrimp and an onion ring. The shrimp was really fresh.
AdventureMan had fried shrimp and catfish. He said it was really good. He also couldn’t eat it all.
Cameron isn’t very big.
But this is really fun. A $1. ferry!
And guess which parking space we got? And when we got into the space, there were dolphins, lots and lots of dolphins, no, porpoises, and oh, they were having such a good time in the sunlight.
Dolphins are not that easy to photograph . . . .
We keep seeing these wonderful signs to tell us we are still on the right trail 🙂 This ferry ride was a Louisiana Lagniappe (a little something extra!)
The Creole Nature Trail! At Last!
We were all ready to hit this trail once before, but weather forecasts for the week we had it planned were full of thunderous storms and lots of rain, so we postponed.
This time, circumstances all came together fortuitously. AdventureMan had a conference in nearby Baton Rouge, and the temperature and humidity dropped dramatically. We had clear skies, no mosquitos, and glorious weather. As we left the Coffee Call in Baton Rouge, we were grinning from ear to ear.
You gotta love these smart phones. Better than a map for letting you know where you are and where you can turn off to get where you want to go. We wanted the Creole Nature Trail, which is a loop, Louisiana Road 27.
Shortly after we started down LA 27, we came to a US Fish and Wildlife Station, and there we met Sarah, who was a Student Conservation Associate, working for several months at the site. She had all kinds of good information, and was delighted to share with us. We laughed; she told us she was from “the other LA”, Los Angeles, and she had experienced culture shock coming to the backroads of Louisiana, but she had adjusted, learned a lot, and she loves the place.
This is their website: Southwest Louisiana National Wildlife Refuge Complex.
We started at Cameron Prairie, which had a three mile drive and a stop with a one mile boardwalk. The boardwalk was gorgeous, and beautifully kept.
As AdventureMan focused on some alligators, I enjoyed the birds, and the colors:
We don’t know what this bird might be. It was huge. Maybe a Red Shouldered Hawk.
We had the park entirely to ourselves, except for one car that came – and left! We could have spent hours, but it was after lunch time when we left, and we were hungry!
Coffee Call in Baton Rouge
We are going to grab a bite of breakfast before we check out of our Baton Rouge hotel, when we catch sight of the line, the very very long line, and people are carrying plates of rolls and cups of coffee back to their room; there is no place to sit and eat because the conference room is all set up for the final meeting of the conference.
LOL, no, we are not going to stand in line for breakfast. I know just the place to go; I found it earlier on TripAdvisor, but with breakfast included in our room, I hadn’t a hope of getting there. But it is nearby, and just what we need! We check out, and head for Coffee Call.
The minute we walk in, we love this place. There are businessmen reading the paper, sipping their coffees, there are families with children who have put several tables together, there are all kinds of people just kicking back and enjoying this place.
We figure out that we have to go up to the front to order our coffee, tea and beignets 🙂 but because we are about to hit the road, we also order sausage biscuits for a little protein.
The beignets are loaded with powder sugar. As we get ready to go, I go into the ladies room to wash hands and find another grandmother, trying to get powdered sugar off her two grandchildren, LOL.
The Coffee Call gave our day a great start and sent us on our way with smiles on our faces 🙂
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