Day 7 -- Cajun Country

We ate breakfast in the cabin before heading out. Ahhhhh. For the first time in a week, our meal wasn't deep-fried or bacon-wrapped or heaped with powdered sugar and ice cream. Luna Bar, I missed you.

Our first stop was the Tabasco hot sauce plant in Avery Island, about 20 miles away. All the Tabasco sold in 120 countries is processed and bottled at this facility -- 700,000 bottles a day. Edmund McIlhenny developed the recipe and launched the McIlhenny Co. in 1868. Originally, the peppers for the sauce were all grown on Avery Island; today, Avery Island peppers produce the seed stock, which is shipped to growers in Central and South America. All the peppers come back to Avery Island, where they are mixed with salt from the Avery Island salt mine -- one of the largest in the U.S. -- and aged in oak barrels for three years. After that, the pepper mash is strained, and the liquid is mixed with vinegar and stirred for a month before it is bottled as Tabasco. The brand name, by the way, comes from an Indian word for "hot and humid," the conditions needed to grow the peppers.

We were able to glimpse the work being done on the factory floor, and then sampled the different Tabasco flavors in the Tabasco Country Store, which sells everything from hair combs to boxer shorts to chocolate branded with the familiar Tabasco label. We all walked away with tiny sample-size bottles, which Charlie has taken to stashing in his pocket and pulling out to flavor his meals.

(This is not the sample size.)

Next up was a swamp tour with an outfit that David from Shucks! had recommended. The drive from Avery Island up through Lafayette to Henderson took longer than expected. On the map, these towns are all scrunched together in this little bitty corner of Cajun country. In reality, it takes at least an hour and a half to get around Lafayette, with its main roads choked with strip malls and mattress superstores. Aside from the fact that the places have names like Acadian Mall and Le Bonne Rienne Mattress Outlet, it seems like Anytown, USA. That kind of discourages me; I had been hoping for more Cajun flavor -- you know, crawfish shacks and banjo players.

(Natalie assures me: "Yes, Mom. It's a regular place. Regular people live here.")

Once we got off the highway and found our way to Basin Landing, where our swamp tour was to begin, we found some of that Cajun flavor we were looking for. Our guide, the Cajun French-speaking Tucker, piled us into his airboat and took us out into the Atchafalaya Basin, the country's largest wetland and swamp, covering 1,400,000 acres where the Atchafalaya River and the Gulf of Mexico converge. The ride was spectacular, and unlike anything that I have ever experienced, as the airboat flew over emerald-green carpets of water hyacinth and through groves of cypress and black willow trees draped with Spanish moss and populated with millions of iridescent dragonflies. We cut this way and that, weaving through the trees until we were deep in the swamp. I asked Tucker how he know where he was going. "This is my living room," he replied.  

A few times, Tucker stopped the boat and called out in French, making kissing noises and slapping the sides of the vessel to lure alligators from the spots where he knows they lurk. "Cheri!" "Suzette!" Sure enough, the gators emerged. He discovered 7-foot-long Cheri a few weeks ago -- skinny and sickly and with most of her eyesight gone. He lured her out from under the trees with marshmallows, and she made her way right up to the side of the boat. Once a week he feeds her a full chicken. Suzette, actually, did not appear; Tucker surmised that she is busy building her nest. But a nearby male -- Tucker calls him Max -- made an appearance. He didn't get close, but we could tell even from a distance that he was much larger than Cheri -- ten feet long or so.

We headed back to the cabin for where we found plenty of Cajun flavor in the Tabasco that we poured on our hamburger hotdish.  A full day in Cajun country!