More From Camp

I haven't been posting here much because we really aren't doing anything interesting.  Mostly just staying here in the campground and taking it easy.  I usually walk the campground boundry every day through the woods here and visit with a few other campers.  It is raining here tonight, but otherwise the weather has been great.  Mom is still feeding the deer and also has adopted a litter of kittens to feed now.  We've been doing a little cleaning and fixing in the motorhome and just relaxing.

Camp Tonkawa Springs

Our campground here at Nacogdoches has a beautiful spring fed lake.  It is shallow and has a sandy bottom.  Swimming is allowed.

 

 The camp also has some resident animals.  A couple of guineas.

 

 A herd of small deer.

 

 Mom enjoys feeding the deer outside the motorhome door.

 

So far it has been a quiet camp.  Its about 15 miles out in the country and we are enjoying taking some days off from sightseeing and doing a little reading.  We even put a puzzle together on the picnic table.

A little more from Louisiana

I am trying to catch up on some things from Louisiana.  In a wet field across from the campground I saw these little mud chimneys.  Mom said that they were crawfish chimneys.  The crawfish dig down to the water table and bring the mud up to the surface and deposit it around their hole.

As we drove around the area we saw a lot of these flooded fields with row of red objects in them.  I assumed that they were rice fields, but could not figure out the red objects.  I had to know, so I asked at a visitor's center.  I found out that they are rice fields, but in the off season, they reflood the fields and raise crawfish!  The red objects are the tops of the traps that they use to catch the crawfish.

 

They wear tall boots and push these little boats around each morning to empty the traps and rebait them.

 



 

One day on the way to Lafayette, we spotted this turtle by the road, so we stopped to check it out.

 

In Layfayette we visited a rebuild acadian village with homes and buildings from different periods of time.

 

Behind one of the houses we spotted this alligator on the dock.  Yes, he's real.

 

And some large turtles on these logs.

 

Back at the campground, mom found some donkeys and a goat to feed.

Arrived in Texas

Very slow Internet here. Won't be doing many pictures from here.

Leaving Louisiana

Tomorrow morning we will be moving over to a campground near Nacogdoches, Texas. I will post some more pictures from here when we get over there.

A Musical Saturday

Saturday morning we got up and grabbed a donut at a local bakery.  Yum, glazed donuts still warm from the oven!  Then we went to a local music store called the Savoy Music Center.  They have jam sessions there all morning on Saturday.  Local musicans come in to play cajun music and the public is welcome to come and listen.

 

It is just a small building on the edge of Eunice.

 

 

Once you are inside, you can see why I liked it.  Boudin (a sausage with rice in it that tastes better than it looks) and cracklins for a snack.

 

 And cast iron for sale!

 

The jam session was fun to listen to even though most of the singing was in Cajun French.

 



 

 

Young and old played side by side and passed down the traditional songs.  The gentleman on the left is Milton Vanicor.  Here is a article about him http://www.jeffdavistoday.com/content/milton-vanicor-94-returns-washington.  We got to visit with him for awhile after they were done playing.  What an interesting man.

 



 

We went from there to the Jean Lafitte cultural center in Eunice.  It was a museum tied in with the one that we went to in Lafayette.  It was supposed to have Cajun dance lessons, quilting demonstrations, and cooking demonstrations Saturday afternoon.  However, because of the sequester, all but the cooking demonstration was cancelled.  We walked from there to the Cajun music hall of fame and the railroad museum.  Then it was off the the Liberty Theater for a Cajun music concert.

 



 

Another long day!

Friday in Eunice

Friday was a quiet day for us.  We stayed at the motorhome most of the day.  I walked around the campground a little.  There is a pond here with a lot of small turtles.  You can see a few of them on this object out in the pond.  It was covered with them right before I took this picture.

 

 They also have thistles here, although they"re not the same as the Iowa ones.

 

 There are a few ducks running around here and a couple of donkeys.

 

Friday evening we went to a local restaurant here in Eunice.  Mom had boiled shrimp (they boil it in seasoned water like the crawfish, and I had a catfish po-boy sandwich.  Both meals were delicious.

Lafayette, LA

Yesterday we moved to a campground at Eunice, LA.  We will be here for at least a week.  Today we drove over to Lafayette, LA.  First we stopped to see St. John the Evangelist Cathedral.  I thought it would be a quick stop, but there was much to see there.  First of all the building itself was beautiful.

 

 Before you enter the building there is a huge old (estamated 300 yrs) live oak tree.

 

The interior is also very beautiful.  The pipe organ was really impressive.

 

 And this is just a small sample of the stained glass windows.

 

Next door is a Cathedral museum.  One of the displays is a collection of over 300 year old puppet type characters arranged in sets built by the two men who collected them.  There were three cabinets of them

 

Mom is standing next to one of the small ones to show its size.

 



 

 The detail of the displays is amazing.

 

After we left the Cathedral we walked down the street to Johnson's Boucaniere (means smokehouse)for lunch.  Smoked sausage with a tasso picante sauce, cole slaw and potato salad.

 

 



Then we headed over to the Jean Lafitte Acadian Culture Center there in Lafayette.  There were many displays showing the history of the Cajun people and a pretty good movie about them.  They were closing at 5:00 as we left.  The owners of the campground here had given us a good place to eat supper.  It is called D.I.'s.  A little place out in the country with a live cajun band and good food.  Mom had boiled crawfish and I had shrimp etouffee and fried shrimp.

 

We enjoyed listening to the band and watching people dance.  But it was soon time for two tired people to go home.