Louisiana Lessons

We are seeing lots of live oak trees; they are large and beautiful. Not sure why they call them live oak - are there dead oak trees too? Our rest stop at the 60 mile mark. Beautiful sunny day starting out in high 50's and by afternoon probably low 80's.

I love standing under the oak trees because the branches are so gnarly and interesting to look at.

Rice fields. It appears they purposely flood them as we see open faucets with water running into the fields. Louisiana produces a good portion of our rice.

Remember the crawfish I ate yesterday? Well, there are crawfish farms. Again, they flood fields to the point of making a small pond. They then have these live traps which the crawfish swim into. Now this part I am assuming...will have to go online and check it out. But at some of the "farms" I saw a delapitated boat that I assume they drive around and empty out the traps.

We don't have the beautiful Texas wild flowers in Louisiana, but along the roads there are wild flowers/weeds growing that are very pretty to look at. Our journey today was on mostly quiet back roads. With the exception of 10ish miles, the pavement was in good shape. The wind continues to be our constant companion and really slows us down. Every now and then we make a turn that gets us out of the wind for a mile or two and our mph picks up immediately. We biked 85 miles today and it took us 9.5 clock hours and about 8.5 pedaling hours. Obviously, we stop only for necessities.

Due to the flat, flat terrain, the only time I switched large gears today was when we went over two bridges. Both bridges were quite high and for no apparent reason as below was just a small river. In this picture you can see how brown/swampy the water is.

A heron flew beside us for a while today, landing now and then. Seeing all kinds of red-winged black birds, saw one red-headed woodpecker. Birds are chirping all the time, and often songs/calls I feel I haven't heard before.

Just about every home, regardless of value, has pillars out front and a covered porch - often with rocking chairs. Many tin roofs and most homes are brick. Even farm houses seem to be brick and have pillars. Even saw one or two trailers with pillars. I guess it is a Louisiana trademark?

We are in LaFayette, LA, the Cajun capital of LA. A great majority of the gals went to a Cajun restaurant for dinner tonight and a Cajun band is playing. Me, I'm way too tired for that. Also had to do laundry tonight.

Tomorrow at the 80 mile mark we ferry across the Mississippi; that should be fun. Tomorrow night (and actually Tues. night too) we are split between two different locations. Tuesday is a day of rest for us and I really, really need it. Three 80 plus days in a row has been a lot of pedaling! But then, I guess that is what I signed up for!

The word is we won't have internet service Monday & Tuesday; however the itinerary has been wrong about that before. So, if you don't hear from me till Wednesday, you'll know why.