Friendly Louisiana

After spending the night in Baton Rouge, we headed back to Lafayette and the land of Acadiana. The word Cajun is actually a bastardization of the word Acadian - referring to the people in southern Louisiana who were exiled from Acadia (eastern Canada) in the mid 1700's. We had a great time exploring the area and talking with people.

We found a coupon on in a local paper for a great room deal at a casino in Marksville, so off we went. The drive here was beautiful - swampy areas interspersed with rolling hills and forest, great old houses and farms, crawfish ponds and cattle. We couldn't check into the room until 4PM so we explored the town a bit and decided to try something new - a drive through daiquiri place.

There are no "open container" laws in Louisiana and liquor is available everywhere. You can buy hard alcohol at Wal-Mart and they have the same "beer barns" as they do in Texas where you can drive though to get you libations, but they go a bit further here. At the particular barn we went to they advertised daiquiris, shots, and fresh boiled crawfish. Yes, my friends, you can drive up to this place, take a shot, grab a daiquiri, beer and crawfish (and maybe a fifth of whiskey for later) and drive along your merry way. The woman there explained to us that as long as they did not put the straw in the daiquiri for us it was legal. I guess they must give you a shot in a covered cup as well. I don't know about that one - we weren't about to try it. We ended up with a ‘Jamaican me Crazy’ daiquiri as it was the favorite of the proprietor. It was so sweet that we could only drink about 1/4 of it, but it was good experience.

We checked into our room at the Paragon casino ($39.95) and hung out for a while before heading down to the Grill & Oyster Bar. We ordered two oyster shooters and a pound of boiled crawfish. This being our first time eating the mudbugs we asked the waitress to explain to us how it was done – which she did, giggling a bit at our naiveté. They were delicious. We had just finished them when another couple sat down at the table beside us. John and Liz were from the area and told us all about the best places to go, and great not-to-be-missed sights. We had a fabulous time talking to them. When we ordered a second pound of crawfish John showed us a much easier way to peel them – and showed us what we were doing wrong with the head sucking. You see – the part you eat on a crawfish is the tail – it’s pretty small – so a lot of people also “suck the heads”. We had done this, but weren’t getting much. We didn’t realize you needed to crush the head and then suck to get all the juices! It was messy and fabulous. After much more conversation and peeling, John and Liz stood to go. We said our goodbyes and he told us he had taken care of our check!! Not only did we have a fabulous time talking to these people, they had even bought us dinner. Louisiana hospitality can’t be beat.