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The blue line on this progress map shows the Adventure Cycling Southern Tier route I initially planned to take. The green line shows my actual route including a few little diversions.
Biking through Cajun Country and along
Old Man River Mississippi
The desert and Texas are behind me now and I entered into Louisiana’s Cajun Country and the landscape changed to green and lush vegetation. Right away it struck me that there were so many churches here, sometimes five or six in one small town. There are even signs out on the streets advising that a church is ahead. Biking through the heart of Cajun country, I passed through small towns, farms, rice fields and back roads with quaint houses, and some not so quaint ones, shacks actually, although I could see people living in them. I sometimes could hear Zydeco music while biking through the towns. I biked through Opaloosa, LA, the small Cajun town Paul Prudhomme grew up in.
Leaving Cajun country, I biked along the Mississippi river, passing and visiting old sugar cane plantations with their long drives of oak trees covered with Spanish moss.
The pictures below capture some of my impressions.
Back view of St. Joseph's plantation leading out into the lawn.
The detached old kitchen from slave days. The kitchens were always detached from the Big House in case of a kitchen fire, and also to keep the Masters quarters cool in the hot Louisiana summers.
Old slave quarters. When the plantation was purchased by the current family, an inventory of assets was prepared which included the values of the various slaves, amounting to almost 75% of the plantation's value. Our tour guide showed us a list showing an able-bodied 41-year old male slave named "Bill" valued at $1,500 in 1850 dollars. Some, especially the very old, were given a much lower value, for example maybe only $12.
Slave cabins were built like duplexes with two slave families living side by side.
This is an old boiling pot from the slave days (now used as a planter). Slaves, after harvesting the sugar cane by hand with sharp knifes, then boiled the cane in pots like the above. They had to repeat the process three times. Accidents often happened - out in the field they cut themselves, cutting off fingers or hands, and when boiling the sugar cane, they often got burned severely. St. Joseph's plantation had a physician living on site for such accidents.
This is the Oak Alley plantation, also on the Mississippi River. It was named for the two rows of live oaks planted in the early 1700s that form a quarter-mile alley from the Mississippi River to the house.
Down the road, we saw the San Francisco plantation house.
Before the modern day levies were installed along the Mississippi River, the ground water was so high that graves would fill up with water before the casket could be buried. As a result, many old cemetaries contain above-ground graves. The custom still prevails today.
This is a crawfish pond. I decided I wanted to eat crawfish and they come boiled in three-pound boxes which yielded only about one cup of crawfish meat. One can only eat the tail meat and the tails are very small but they do taste almost like lobster.
Ol' Man River - just keeps rollin' along.
