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>
AOL Termination Scam
I keep getting these; it’s just annoying:
And here is the return address – of course, not AOL at all:
Confuse, Confound, Devastate and Dissipate ISIS
When I was a kid, I did not like reading the Old Testament, all those old-timey people, and it all seemed very confusing to me. As I grew older, I find I like the Old Testament part of our readings very much, the people come alive in all their faults and bad decisions, and God’s mercy shines through as we continue to rebel against him and follow too much our own devices and desires of our hearts.
I love Genesis 11, where mankind, in all our pride, decides to build a tower, and it must have been pretty good because it got God’s attention and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it so much that he created confusion among all the languages spoken, but I bet it was also confusion and dissension among the decision makers, too, to scatter the mighty population.
As the wandering descendants of Abraham began to settle, they often went up against armies and peoples much larger than they were, and God always told them not to worry, he would confuse the armies. He put fear in their hearts, in the confusion, mighty armies collapsed and scattered.
And why am I bringing this up, you might wonder?
This ISIS Army, it seems to me, is already cobbled together. I hear people people talking, people who know, they say ISIS is smart, fights smart. I believe they have some smart leaders, but I am willing to bet that they have some fatal flaws, also. They have overstretched. They are trying to enforce their will by violence and killing off the opposition, which might encourage the appearance of cooperation, but in reality breeds legions of those who will turn on them in a heartbeat.
Yes, we mistakenly dropped weapons which they were able to access. Mistakes happen in war zones all the time, with modern communication we just hear about it a lot sooner, not like 40 years from now when it is declassified and someone writes a book about it. Frankly, it’s not that big a deal.
What I believe is a big deal is their lack of cohesion. Lacking any strategic direct line to important decision makers, I am praying, and what I am praying is this, words from Psalms:
Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech
Disintegrate ISIS from the inside.
Create, Great and Merciful Father, miscommunications, misunderstandings, competing agendas and internal strife among the ISIS force.
All Mighty, All Powerful God, create a massive collapse, let their foot-soldiers drift away, drift home to their mothers and fathers and their families, and leave the Iraqi villages and the Syrian villages in peace.
Dry up the wealth of the Gulf, funneled through corrupt money changers in Kuwait, let it be mishandled, go missing, be stolen, be diverted and find its way to true charitable organizations providing a means of survival to those thousands of refugees who have been displaced.
Oh God! Collapse this abomination, the Islamic State of the Levant and Syria, collapse it utterly from within, strip it of all its power, devastate it like a virulent plague from within!
Oh God, bring good out of this downfall. Teach the remnants who return to their homes to live together in peace, to form peaceful and stable communities and then nations whose lives honor you!
All this is possible for the God who can do all things. Confound their speech, Lord, confuse them utterly, devastate and collapse them utterly from within. You are the one true God, there is no other God.
We are not without resources. We have the mighty fist of prayer.
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.
Famous Foods in Lake Charles, Louisiana
Here’s the problem. We really like good food, and we know there are a lot of good places to eat in Lake Charles, but we are starting to feel a little fooded-out, a little stuffed. We decide on a nice plain BBQ for this night, and the desk clerk at our hotel knows just the place, Famous Foods.
When we get to Famous Foods, it is self serve, and there are three lines full of people. Some people are ordering to eat in, but others are ordering food to take out, and others are ordering bulk food – they sell prepared food, but they also sell Cajun meats, boudin, sausages, all kinds of foods. It is a learning experience for us, but we finally get in the right line and order.
I order chicken, and ask if I need to choose sides, and the cashier just laughs and says “Oh no, all the sides come with it!”
When they call our name, we get our food, served in fast-food containers, nothing fancy or pretentious about this place, it’s all focused on the food. So much food. Again. This time, I make a mistake, I try the rice. It is rich. It has a spicy sausage in it; it is absolutely delicious. No, I don’t eat it all, but I probably eat more than I should. I only have a bite or two of the potato salad, it’s not my weakness. The baked beans have a peculiar taste, not bad, but I am guessing, as we are in cane country, they are sweetened with cane sugar instead of molasses, as I am used to. I can pass on the beans; so I stick to the chicken (delicious) with a sneaky bite of this fabulous rice now and then.
AdventureMan has the smoked brisket and pulled pork, and again, all the sides just come with it. He says it is pretty good.
Many of the folks coming in and out as we are eating are buying Cracklin’s, which I think are made with deep fried pig skin, and I just can’t even give it a try. I might even like the taste, but the whole idea is just so repugnant to me.
The food at Famous Foods is GOOD!
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!
Recent Comments
ExpatAlien on What Country am I Living … intlxpatr on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Michelle on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Cathy on No Grown-Ups in Charge intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 