More Unconnected Details about Louisiana Trip

*In Louisiana, they don't divide up the state into counties - they are divided into parishes.

*Louisiana has a few "sections", at least as they are touted to tourists. We spent time in the plantation area and in the swamp area.

*When we visited the San Fransisco Plantation, Lauren's favorite thing was the slave quarters. But her second favorite thing was the boudoir in the "big house". The guide explained to us that the literal translation of "boudoir" is "pouting room" and that it was used for a woman to go into when she was mad at her husband, and he couldn't come in. Also, it was used for kids in time-out. And for women when they were pregnant, if unexpected company came over, and for her to give birth in, and then stay in (with the baby) for two months after. At that time, not much was known about diseases/medicines, so seclusion was used for protection.

*In New Orleans, we visited the Blue Dog gallery. The artist who created Blue Dog is from New Orleans, so there's a big interesting gallery, which was an unexpected perk for us. We also saw an enormous Blue Dog statue in a traffic median in Metairie later.

*On Wednesday, our last morning in New Orleans, we went to a place called Morning Call and had beignets and cafe au lait for breakfast. Well, Stuart had cafe au lait, and Lauren & I had hot chocolate. Beignet are like fried dough squares, and you shake powdered sugar over them and eat them while they're hot. Yummm.

*Lauren got to climb a 300-year-old oak tree at the Audubon Zoo. I've never seen any tree that big and sprawling before, and some of its limbs were so gnarled and twisted that they touched the ground.

*Driving home was like driving backward through the seasons - we left summer behind in Louisiana, and arrived back in winter - it was 30 degrees when we got home last night! Louisiana was so lush and green and pleasant to be outdoors all day. As we drove, the greenery changed over into evergreens for part of Texas, then thick trees, then eventually in Oklahoma, into landscape that looked like Kansas (except with red soil, of course!)
Lauren at the Blue Dog art gallery

Lauren with an alligator at the airboat tour building

One of the balconies (called galleries) on Bourbon Street, still decorated for Mardi Gras. We walked down Bourbon Street for several blocks, until the advertisements and shop owners became a little too risque for little-girl-eyes.

Lauren watching the little alligators, which Stevie had just let her feed with big marshmallows.

All the rest

I have approximately a million other details that I want to share - I think I'm going to try to do this in a few shorter posts, rather than one gargantuan one.
I forgot to share about the City Diner, the diner that was in the parking lot of our hotel in New Orleans (well, technically, in a "suburb" of New Orleans called Metairie). The City Diner has the best food, and every single thing we ate there was bigger than my head. Sandwiches, hash browns, pancakes, everything. On Tuesday, we ate breakfast there, and Lauren got a chocolate chip pancake. She was trying to decide whether to have 1 or 2 pancakes, the waitress said, "They're pretty big - maybe you should just get one first, and then see."

That's the biggest pancake I've ever seen in my entire life. We think that we should nominate their diner for the show "Man Vs. Food", because you can order the pancakes in stacks of 1,3, or 5. We all ate Lauren's pancake, and we didn't even eat half of it. And it was delicious, probably the best pancake I've ever eaten.
We were sitting in a booth near the door, and people would walk in, and then do a full-body double-take when they saw her pancake.
Tuesday was the day we went to the cemeteries. One of my very favorite tombs had a beautiful blue stained glass window in the back of it, and a statue of a forlorn angel who has flung herself over a table/stone, with the blue light falling on her. It was heartbreaking. The tombs are like small houses, with ornate wrought-iron gates and urns full of flowers/plants, and statues and wreaths and ribbons. They were beautifully well-kept, obviously a priority to many families. Some of them had ornate designs of multi-colored marble and stone in front of them, made to look like carpets. And in some of the areas, the oldest areas, the facades were crumbling and we could see the old bricks underneath. On one of the tombs in Lafayette Cemetery, the bricks were broken, too, and we could look inside. Not that I could see anything but dirt and more crumbling bricks, but it took me a while to gather up the courage to look in at all.
Tuesday was also the day that we drove around through the Garden District and looked at all of the magnificent homes. One of the things that I was really struck by is how lush and extravagant the flowers and plants are. Everything is covered with azaleas and rhododendron. There are beds of pansies and violets everywhere, and palm trees (date palms, I think). It reminded me so much of going to Florida, where we were surrounded by lush greenery everywhere.
Tuesday was also the airboat tour day - my very favorite thing. Aside from the sheer pleasure of riding on the airboat, which would have been enough for me, we got to see interesting scenery and alligators and learn about the area.

Stevie, our guide, explained about the places where freshwater and salt water mix - he took us to different areas and showed us how the trees/plants change. Most of the swamp has cypress trees, with their spread-out roots in the water, but that's only in fresh water. In the area where the salt water joins in, the trees change and thin out, and there aren't alligators or as many fish - they don't like the brackish water. He also told us that the Disney Channel sent actors from "The Princess and the Frog" on an airboat tour from his company, and he showed us where they stopped to take promotional photos.

He also showed us orange trees with oranges growing, and he took us out onto Lake Salvator. He showed us how people set up cane poles in the water to catch catfish and come back to check them once a day.
One of Lauren's favorite vacation things is that we got to swim or at least put our feet in the pool at our hotels every night - outside pools. None of the hotels in Louisiana had indoor pools, but it was warm enough to swim outside.

Wednesday and Thursday - Zoo, Shreveport, the horse races and home

I'm typing this from the cozy spot in my front room, sitting beside the heater vent. 'Cause it's cold in here, baby. About halfway home from Shreveport I started shivering, and I haven't really stopped. I'd forgotten how the climate can differ within the U.S. - my body had happily adjusted to Louisiana, with the shorts and the sunscreen and the swimming outside. Kansas is a rude awakening - 39 degrees?? Blech!
Yesterday morning, we got up and headed for the New Orleans Audubon Zoo. I had hoped to go to the Insectarium, but it's located in the heart of the French Quarter, and I just couldn't mentally work myself up to going back - I'm completely not cut out for frantic city driving and stressful parking and jam-packed, hold-onto-your-wallet-so-no-one-steals-it environments. So we went to the Zoo and had a marvelous time. It's located on its original property from 1832 (I think that's the right year), and like pretty much every single other thing in New Orleans, it's gorgeous. Like artistic, graceful, architecturally astounding type of gorgeous. Buildings that you'd never expect to see at a zoo, lovely sculptures, design details, fountains, pavilions, etc. And the animals were good, too. :) They had sea lions, which are almost always my favorites, and an ornate carousel, where Lauren rode the albino alligator.
There are a million more things, but it's midnight, and I'm exhausted, so I'll have to add to this tomorrow.
Carla

Tuesday - Airboat Swamp Tour and cemeteries

Airboats are my new favorite thing. If ever I decide to have a mid-life job change, my first choice in new vocation is to drive an airboat, and maybe give tours so that I can make some extra money.
Our tour was AMAZING. Our guide was named Stevie - a big ol' Cajun man, with a great sense of humor, who sat behind us and chain-smoked while showing us the best of the bayou. Lauren's favorite thing is that she got to hold a baby alligator, named Bud. She also got to feed big alligators - they come when you throw out big marshmallows (which Stevie calls "swamp crack"). Stevie said that they also come over for donuts! He brought chicken along, in case we got one of the big ones to come over, but that didn't work out. We saw 2 of the big ones - one of them was 12 feet long, and the other one was too scared of the airboat to let us get very close, so we're not sure how long it is. The ones that Lauren got to throw marshmallows to were 6-8 feet.

We spent the morning touring old cemetaries. All of the cemetaries here are above ground, since the water table is so close to the surface. I am fascinated by them - many of them are marble and ornate, with carvings and statues and stained glass and wrought iron gates. We went to the Metairie Cemetary, where about half of the tombs date from the early 1800s, and it is still being used today. There's a beautiful one shaped like a pyramid with a Sphinx guarding it. Lauren's excited because she bought a book at the book fair about a girl who lived in New Orleans during the yellow fever epidemic, and is buried in the Lafayette Cemetary. We drove to that cemetery, too, and Lauren and I walked through looking for the book character. All cemeteries in New Orleans close promptly at 3:00, though, and their gates are locked, so we got shooed out before we found it. However, it's kind of magical to see the actual location of a book you've been immersed in, and Lauren was thrilled with the whole experience - she kept touching things and saying "This is just how I imagined it!"
Today we are heading to the New Orleans Audubon Zoo and City Park, and then picking up our trailer from the race track and heading for Shreveport. I'm hoping that we can find something fun to do in Shreveport tomorrow before we head home, but we'll see...
Carla

Monday in Metairie, aka "New Orleans is not where I want to live"

We had a nice relaxing start to our day - didn't have to be anywhere at any certain time. We got packed back up and left Donaldsonville this morning, heading for New Orleans. On the way, we stopped at the San Fransisco Plantation in Garyville, LA. They said that it's the most opulent plantation house in North America. It's right on the east bank of the Mississippi River - in fact, the former front yard is now a levee that holds back the river. It's a really unusual looking plantation - very different than the others we've seen - the woman who lived there was German, and through a series of events, wound up living in Louisiana when she desperately wanted to live in Germany. To make it up to her, her husband let her decorate it however she wanted. It is a Creole style house, accented with turquoise, surrounded by huge live oaks and amazing flower beds everywhere. We took a tour from a costumed guide, but L's favorite thing was the slave quarters. One thing I thought was really interesting was the lists of the slaves (on an inventory of the masters' property) - it listed each slave by name, their race, their specialty (like potter or house slave or field hand) and any health concerns (like asthmatic). Very interesting.

Next we headed into New Orleans. We stopped at our hotel, then went to eat at the diner that is in our parking lot. It's called City Diner and it has wonderful food - I'd seen really great reviews about it on TripAdvisor. We all had sandwiches, and they were literally BIGGER THAN MY HEAD! I had a chicken cordon bleu sandwich, with spinach sprinkled into the swiss sauce that was over it - yummmm! The only down side is that we all had leftovers, of course, and our room doesn't have a fridge.

We headed into the French Quarter for the afternoon. That was quite an experience. I think I'm still processing...definitely one of those things that are part of the "American experience". It was a scary place to walk around with a kid - I was so tense the whole time. One of the things that I want Lauren to know is that there's a big wide world out there, full of people and things she doesn't see in our little sheltered world - but we might have had a little overload of that today. Between the people handing out free condoms, the people accosting us (trying to sell shoe-shines, but yelling the f-word at Stuart when we walked away), really smelly street bands of people that might fall into the category of street people or gypsies, etc, she saw all kinds of unusual types today. On the plus side, we saw amazing architecture, fascinating homes packed into structures that I'd never seen before, street artists, beautiful decorations left from Mardi Gras, and took a horse-drawn carriage ride around the French Quarter. We got to walk beside the French Market to see the Mississippi, and there was a steamboat docking, playing calliope music. (I wanted to stay and watch, but this was when the shoe-shine man episode happened). L hated the smell on the streets - I don't know if it always smells like that, or if it is just because Mardi Gras ended not so long ago. Her favorite part was the carriage ride - we were pulled by a mule named Andy, and the driver let her pet Andy. Our carriage was white with red plush seats, and in a funny coincidence, the people who sat in front of us were from Arkansas, and the people behind us were from Indiana. The man who provided our tour, Max, grew up in the French Quarter, and told us stories about what things were like when he was a kid, as well as telling us about the history of the buildings.

Our pizza just arrived, and I'm starving, so I'm going to go eat!
Carla

Sunday, a day of relaxation

Today was elimination racing day. Stuart's class was the 2nd class to run, and Stuart was the first race in his class. He lost by ONE-ONE HUNDREDTH OF A SECOND. Actually, L and I thought he won - we were jumping up and down like fools in the stands, because he ran his dial-in time exactly, which is really unusual, and typically means that you've won. But the other guy beat him by this teeny-tiny margin. So it was a great run, and he fixed a problem that the car has been having, and it's a good sign that he's able to predict what the car can do in certain weather/temperature/wind situations, but... as Stuart says, "if you have to lose, this is the way to do it - with a good run."
So we hung out at the track until early evening, since the track owner is letting us leave the trailer there for the days that we toodle around Louisiana, so that we don't have to drag the trailer with us. It was actually a really good day - we'd kind of settled in, knew where everything was, etc. L and I made cards and watched a movie and checked on the alligator. We had more wonderful food for lunch - fried balls of crab and of crawdads, fried fresh fish, and tiny spicy rolls with beef in them. Everything was wonderful - I could eat this every day. I ate a truly impressive amount of that fish. :)
I've also discovered Snowballs. I think maybe I mentioned them yesterday. They are like snowcones, in a cup, with really really finely shaved ice. I am now officially addicted to "Strawberry Wedding Cake" flavored snowballs - the lady at the concession stand knew what to make when she saw us in line this afternoon! They have evaporated milk in them and are just about the best things ever!
This morning it was so humid that we could actually SEE the moisture in the air - I've never experienced that before. We could see the water particles floating down - like mist, but different.
This evening, after we left the track, we came back to the hotel so that L could go swimming. They only have an outside pool, but it was really warm, so L got to swim outdoors in the third week in March - that just seems so crazy, but she was deliriously happy.
We went into Donaldsonville to try a restaurant tonight - it had great reviews for authentic local food - Cajun and Creole. However, it turns out that pretty much all of the small local restaurants are closed on Sunday evenings. So we ate at Wendy's. Not quite the same category - but we did have the NICEST man help us, and he was so sweet to L, so everything worked out.
We are heading for New Orleans tomorrow. One nice thing about meeting other racers at the track is that many of them are local, and they gave Stuart the scoop about where to stay in N.O. and where to park, and what attractions are must-sees. So we got a swamp tour scheduled for Tuesday (on an AIRBOAT - I am really excited!), and we're going to the Audubon Insectarium and L wants to tour the famous above-ground cemeteries. I think we're just going to head for the French Quarter and walk around. And we're going to try to toss in a visit to the Gulf of Mexico, too, while we're down here. You know, everything Louisiana offers in three days! Oh, yeah, and another plantation visit, to one that has costumed guides and lots of hands-on demonstrations for kids to try. We're going to be exhausted but happy!
Carla
Sunshine Bridge, which crosses the Mississippi about a mile from our hotel

A tree beside the place from which our swamp tour was supposed to depart - I love the moss dangling from all of the trees!

An enormous boat on the Mississippi

Photos of Louisiana - Saturday

Until now, my posts have been filled with exclamation points - we did this! We saw this! We ate this! Today was a great day, but not filled with quite so many exclamation points...
Stuart's class wasn't listed on the schedule as having any runs today, so we slept in late and lazed around - a really nice change, and it made it feel more like a vacation to me. We got downstairs too late to eat breakfast here in the hotel, so we drove to a small nearby town to McDonald's for breakfast, and then to see a couple of plantations in that town. We went to Houmas House plantation, which was ENORMOUS, with the most beautiful gardens and old sculptures. Then we drove down the road a bit to another plantation whose name I can't remember - it was closed to tours, but we drove beside it. It's amazing how treasured these old plantations are here - I know that's undoubtedly due to the money tourists bring in, but they are so beautifully restored, in such detail.
The plantations that we saw (and there were 2 more in the same area) are all along the levee - the Mississippi River is 100 feet from them. And we can see the unloading docks/equipment rising above the levee, for unloading barges, all right across from the plantations. I'm so interested in the details about how different life is here.
We headed for the track then. Everywhere we drive, we are surrounded by two things: sugarcane fields and refineries. There are refineries here that are larger than Buhler. And not just a few - they are EVERYWHERE and they are HUGE. It's like being in a different country. The farmers have planted sugarcane in every single tiny available bit of land - little snippets beside ditches, little corners of fields, every single bit. And they have a whole different tractor for harvesting - something I've never seen before and can't figure out how it works - I'm going to have to look for a video of it on youtube.
We spent the afternoon & evening at the track, so that Stuart could watch the other racers. The people in his section who won their class competitions yesterday had a special race against each other today. The only way to win it is by going all out and giving it everything you've got, so it's good to watch if you are going to be racing against any of them, since you'll know what their cars can really do. It's very typical for racers to "sandbag it" - not ever run their car as fast as it can actually go until the last day of racing, so that no one knows what they can really do. The whole drag racing thing is way more complicated than it seems. Anyhow, we went to the track - L and I read books and sewed and played with toys, etc for the afternoon, in our shorts and sunglasses and hats, because it is really warm here. In the 80s in the afternoon - which I'm loving. A little glimpse of summer!
This evening, there was a jet car race. We wanted to stay to watch that, so we ate dinner at the track. This was my food adventure #2 - jambalaya. And it was delicious!

Pork, cajun sausage, noodles, onions - it was so spicy it made my lips zing, but it was great! And after that, L and I got a snowball - like a snowcone in a cup, only with sophisticated flavors, and they are amazing. Yesterday, L had a peach flavored one, and today she got strawberry wedding cake. It was so good that I ate almost half of hers - I'm getting my own tomorrow! :)
Then the jet car, which L has never seen before. That's such a cool experience because it's so loud you can feel it inside of you - it actually rattles you. They spray water behind it, so it makes enormous clouds of steam, and it roars, and blows jets of fire. It's one of my favorite things at the track - I've only seen them one other time; they are kind of rare.
Tomorrow is eliminations day, so I'm going to head to bed - we'll have an early day. Stuart's category races 2nd, and he's been slotted to be one of the first 3 racers, so we'll be there super early to get ready!
Carla

All Bug-Sprayed Up, and No Where to Go (aka Friday evening)

As I have mentioned a time or two, I adore traveling. If I had unlimited money, I'd spend vast amounts of it on extravagant, frivolous traveling. So today was my cup of tea.
We got up early, which is pretty much the only thing I don't like about traveling. At least, on trips to the track, when getting up early is part of the plan. I stayed up too late last night, determined to get a run in - we didn't get back here until 9:30, and so I didn't finish running until almost 11, and so morning felt just too darn early to me. At any rate, we got up and at 'em and headed to the track. It was overcast and foggy and so humid, and really looked like it might be a miserable sort of day. I'm learning that maybe it's just like that here in Louisiana, because it turned into the absolutely most gorgeous day. One of those days that makes you celebrate sunshine - not too hot, just perfectly sunny, blue skies, puffy white clouds - just a "happy to be alive and outside" day. I was so glad that I had a reason to be out in it!
We spent the morning running qualifying rounds, and then running for class around lunchtime. We got lunch at the concession stand at the track, and I had a crawfish sandwich - that's practically mandatory in Louisiana, right? Eating a little adventurously was one of my goals for vacation, and so I'm giving it a go. L and I both want to try alligator, and I want to have gumbo and jambalaya, too. Anyhow, we ran class after lunch and Stuart didn't win. However, he ran a good time and nothing is broken on the car, so that's always a good run. And he has some ideas about something new to try that might improve his time, so there's something to occupy his time between getting-to-race times.
After Stuart was done racing for the day, L and I did some exploring around the track. We took the golf cart down to the drainage ditch area where we saw the alligator yesterday and HE WAS THERE AGAIN! Again, someone saw us there and asked what we were taking photos of, and saw it, too, so we have proof that we didn't make it up. Which I felt like I needed, since Stuart pulled up on the mo-ped a moment later, and it was gone. Again. Although it did scare the bejeebers out of me this time, since it thrashed in the water - I think I shrieked like a little girl and jumped about three feet into the air.
After that, L and I went further down to the end of the track, since I'd seen on Google Earth that there was a bigger lake down at the end. We had to drive the poor golf cart through a field to get to it, but there was a pretty little mowed path that ran along beside it, and it was so tranquil - frogs chirping, birds, enormous dragonflies everywhere. If it wasn't for my tense phobia that an alligator was going to fling itself out of the water at us, it would have been very lovely, I think. I stopped about every 2 feet to check out the water's edge.
We spent about 45 minutes or so exploring down there, and then headed back to our pit area. On the way, since we were going past the alligator's area anyhow, we decided to stop and peek, just in case. And yup, sure enough, he was out again. And so was a nutria, which I had never seen before. Essentially a beaver-sized rat with the most disgusting teeth I've ever seen. Day-glow yellowy-red. The stuff of nightmares. I have awesome pictures, which I'll add if I ever find my downloading cord. It's packed somewhere practical, I'm sure.
After all of that excitement, we headed back to the pits, and spent the rest of the afternoon eating Chex Mix and scotcharoos, playing card games, and sewing. (Well, okay, that's what L and I did. Stuart watched other men race.) :)
This evening, we had signed up for a swamp tour, and I was SO EXCITED. A pontoon, in the real swamp - alligators and Creoles and crawdad catching and swamp people, etc, etc - I was really ready to go. So we joined some other racers who had also signed up, a nice group, and headed to the meeting place, along with the woman from the track who had arranged the tour. And the tour guide never showed up. We waited about 45 minutes; L and the woman's son ran around and petted stray dogs and tried to catch lizards, etc. Such a disappointment. I'm hoping that maybe somehow it will get rescheduled for tomorrow night - I'm taking along jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts,bug spray etc, just in case (that's all the stuff they told us to wear tonight for the boat ride).
So we decided to, instead, go see the Mississippi during daylight. There is the scariest bridge EVER at the edge of this town, possibly called Sunshine Bridge, that spans the Mississippi. (I sure hope it's called something more dignified than that, but I suspect that I'm out of luck). I have an absolute phobia of bridges - irrational, but true, so I was nervous about this. We drove over it last night, in the dark, on the way to dinner. Today, however, being able to see the barges and everything made it so fascinating that I wasn't even too scared. And that's good, since we wound up driving over it about 6 times - thanks, GPS. We got a little mislead about how to get to our dinner destination.
We stopped on the far side of the Mississippi, parked beside one of the pylons, hiked through a grassy partition, and put our hands in the Mississippi. I don't know why that was so moving for me, but it made me kind of emotional. L and I collected shells - kinds that I've never seen before, and L found a fish stringer (which she, of course, kept).
All in all, quite a day.
I can't wait to see what we'll discover tomorrow!
Carla

Friday highlights - before I forget

*seeing the alligator again, TWICE, and a nutria
*exploring the pond at the track
*putting our hands in the Mississippi, and gathering shells
*almost going on a swamp tour
*going over a really big bridge multiple times
*having crawfish for lunch

I'm going to add photos and more details later, but I had to mentally unload some of my list, or I'm going to start forgetting things!

Friday morning - how drag racing works

So here’s the thing… I can’t understand a darn thing anyone in Louisiana says.I consider myself to be fairly good at interpreting accents and mumbling – I do teach elementary kids, after all. However, I feel like a foreigner here, which I suppose I am, in some regards. It makes me feel language handicapped – I have to concentrate so hard to understand anything, and I still only get about every 5th word. And I’m trying to figure out what the announcer is saying over the loudspeaker, which distorts words anyhow. The only thing I can get is “nice day” – “naaah-ss dayuh”. Lots of “we gun run dis class now…” To be a biased idiot, I kind of thought that only happened in books. And we are experiencing being a racial minority, which is also an unusual experience for us, and particularly for L. Everyone around us is either African-American or Cajun or Creole – wonderful to listen to, but a little atypical for those of us from small-town Kansas.

Anyhow, it’s Friday. We are at the track, Stuart has had two qualifying runs. That means that they use the racers’ times from those runs to rank the racers. Those rankings are used to pair the racers up for the actual racing tomorrow. Every car has an “index” – the time that the car SHOULD run, based on it’s make/model/engine size. And then racers work on their cars to try to make them go faster than the index.The racers are ranked by how much faster than their index their car goes.There were 85 racers here in Stuart’s category this morning, but more are arriving all day, so I’m not sure what to expect for actual racing (called eliminations) tomorrow. This afternoon they are running class, which is optional. It means that they line you up in your categories (classes), and you race anyone else who is in your category, to set the fastest speed for your class. Stuart is a stock car racer (as opposed to super stock or super gas or super comp). In the stock category, the racers are placed into classes based on their indexes. A is the fastest class, Z is the slowest. Stuart is in D class, so he’ll race all of the other D racers to try to set the class record. He also would have the option to try to set the national record here this weekend. There are only certain races where that is an option – the track has to provide officials to tear apart the car if you do set a record, to make sure that you aren’t cheating in any way. Stuart set the record in 2008 and 2009, but I don’t think that he’s going to try to set it again here (although I could be wrong). It’s too humid and warm, neither of which are good conditions for speed.

This morning, it was overcast and foggy – I was worried about how the day was going to turn out, weather-wise. But I’m guessing that might be a local normal weather thing, so close to the ocean . . .it all burned off after a bit, and now it is absolutely amazingly gorgeous outside. We stopped and bought sunscreen this morning, since I’d brought bug spray, but not sunscreen. And we’re stopping tonight to buy some shorts - I packed for Kansas weather, not LA weather. The announcer said it is 15 degrees warmer than normal here right now.

Tourists in the South

I am completely smitten with traveling to new places.  I know that I've said that before, but days like yesterday (Thursday) just solidify it for me.  We got up early in our yucky hotel, where we didn't set anything on the floor and worried about bedbugs all night long.  We headed southeast from Shreveport, going through Lafayette, and then on to the outskirts of Baton Rouge.  From there, we headed southwest a bit to Belle Rose, a tiny little town that has the track on its outskirts.  So, while that is interesting, here are the real highlights:
*We saw a camel farm.  A big field, filled with big camels, baby camels, middle-sized camels... I'd never even thought about one of those existing.
*We saw swamps, marshes, bayous - you know, just like what I keep in my mental image of the south - cypress trees, white cranes, moss hanging from the trees, etc.  We drove over the most enormous swamp on an interesting raised road.  I have a couple of pictures, but I left my camera's cord in the truck, so I'll have to attach photos tonight.
*We saw people crawdad fishing in ponds created for that purpose with orange markers creating a grid, each attached to a basket.
*We saw a boat, which I'm sure has a specific name, but I don't know it - the one with the big fan on the back that you see in movies used to navigate swamps - we saw people...well, navigating through a swamp, on it.
*And most importantly to L, at the track, we saw an ALLIGATOR!   In a totally fluky-weird twist of events...L and I walked down to the eastern edge of the track in the late afternoon, because I was bored.  And I'd seen on Google Earth that there are little swamp marsh areas at each end of the track property.  So we walked down that way, but I couldn't see it.  It's not very big, and one end of it has a barrier wall made of stacked tires, about waist high.  So we walked through the field toward it, and I figured that it was going to be nothing.  But as we got close, L said, "MOM!  That's an alligator!"  And right in the end of the swampy part, near the wall, was an alligator.  I thought it was fake, since it wasn't moving (in retrospect, I'm so glad it wasn't moving).  I thought the track owner had put it there for fun.  So another man who was pitted nearby came over and asked if we saw anything in there (since I was taking pictures of it) - he freaked out when he saw it, and said it was about 6 feet - its head and most of its tail were out.  So L and I ran back to get Stuart.  He was in the middle of a chore, but it only took us about 10 minutes total, and when we got back - it was gone!  I'm so glad I have photos to prove it!  :)
We have to leave for the track now - Stuart gets two runs this morning, and then has the opportunity to try to set the class record after lunch.  It's beautiful here - sunny, about 80-something yesterday.  My face and arms and sunburned!
Carla

Merrily We Go Along...

So this morning at the crack of dawn (or 7:45, which FELT like the crack of dawn to me today) we piled into the truck along with approximately 1/4th of our worldly possessions and started driving.  Eleven and a half hours later, we plonked ourselves down in a hotel room in Shreveport, Louisiana. Tomorrow morning we are heading to Belle Rose, which is about 30-ish minutes further than Baton Rouge, to the race track. 
I love to travel - adore it, absolutely one of my very favorite things.  And in particular, I love to go to NEW places, to explore new things with my family.  So this is just about as good as life gets for me.  However, I have a fairly strong type-A streak, and I usually have a packing list and a food list and a plan of what we are going to do on what day, and what it costs, and what it's hours are, etc, etc. (And, yes, I drive my family a little nuts). But things have been super-crazy at work and in pretty much every other area of my life, so all of that organization stuff that makes me feel comfortable got tossed out the window.  I finished packing at 1:30 this morning.  You know how sometimes you do things that you suspect might be completely irrational, but you just feel compelled to do it?  (Or at least, I hope you can commiserate with that...)  I made Chex mix in the middle of my packing frenzy last night.  I just really felt like I couldn't go on this trip without homemade Chex mix.  This morning, I realized that my sleep-deprived brain was making irrational decisions...
So we've had a lovely-ish day in the truck - in a "I love to be with you and I love our enforced proximity to each other and our conversations, but I'm kind of wishing that it wasn't all taking place in a moving vehicle without many movement options in rush-hour traffic in downtown Dallas" sort of way. I'm so excited to continue traveling tomorrow and get to the track - I've heard it's in the heart of swamp country and that there are alligators in the pond/swamp at the end of the track.  L is desperately hoping that the alligator business is NOT just a rumor - her goal is to eat alligator on this trip.  :)
I typically indulge my teacher tendencies and research the area to which we are traveling, and then force  my family to learn about the history, native tribes, agricultural products, etc, etc.  I didn't get to that this time, so I don't feel like I know what I'm getting into - I'm not so great at "winging it".  However, hanging out with  my family is just what I need right now, so I can't wait to get started.
Carla