Summer Lessons

So, that expression about how experience is the best teacher? True indeed.

Summer lesson #1: Buy new sunscreen every summer. And while you're at it, check the expiration date (not all brands have one, though). If you use last summer's sunscreen, it might not be very effective any more. And if you go to the pool for the first time, and take a group of other people's children with you, you'll ALL get sunburned.

Summer lesson #2: If you go to Grandpa & Grandma's pond and walk around in the grass by the pond, you should take a shower when you get home, NO MATTER HOW LATE IT IS. Really. If you don't, you'll have about 100 chigger bites covering your bra and underwear areas by the next morning. And if you are a kid, and spent HOURS by the pond transferring tadpoles and catfish from one rapidly shrinking puddle to another, you should be particularly vigilant about the showering thing. Because you'll have about 200 chigger bites, and be all swollen and red and everything will itch and hurt. We should buy stock in Benadryl and After-Bite.

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