For some, the Deep South USA conjures-up images of cotton plantations, white mansions and big dresses (as in… ‘Frankly my dear… I don’t give a damn’). Or maybe some thing jazz and blues marching street-bands. For us, it turned out to be lots of great creole food, some ‘fake-news’ Tabasco sauce and failing miserably with a GPS and fake American accents.
Creole… or Cajun?
We can’t deny it… leaving Texas was a wrench. But we are forever ‘onwards and upwards’, looking for the next curiosity. Louisiana promised to be a different kettle of fish to Texas, and it had the added bonus of a bucket-list tick: New Orleans! We entered the state about half-way up from the coast and spent a while mooching around inland. Of course, we did the obligatory plantation visit (giving a somewhat disingenuous nod of agreement when a building of a mere 150 years is described as ‘historic’ 😉) but Louisiana’s best stuff is mostly on down at the coast.
La Fayette is famous for its creole/cajun food. Apparently there technically is a difference between the two, but only a foodie-geek would notice. Traditional dishes like ‘Jambalaya, crawfish pie, file gumbo’ are everywhere. I must admit to once wondering what Karen Carpenter was warbling about on the bayou in the ‘70s croon-tune, but a stop in La Fayette explains all that and more. Crawfish pie is now one of my favourite ever foods (it was like a spicy prawn Cornish pasty 😊). And pork boudin… a kind of sausage or meat-ball, with rice included in the spicy stuffing. Most particularly yum. Also yummy is etouffee, a pink, spicy crawfish sauce served (as is almost everything around here) with rice. Go there and try not to get fat!
Tabasco – Fake News
Continuing the food theme, we next tackled the enigma that is Tabasco. One year ago, we drove across the state of Tabasco in southern Mexico, finding no mention of the famous condiment🤔. It doesn’t take the investigative genius of Holmes and Watson to work out from the label that it actually originates from a certain Mr McIlhenny of Avery Island, Louisiana. So what’s the ‘Tabasco’ name all about then? Aha!… we thought… we’ll ‘do a Sherlock’ and sleuth it out! We’ll visit the factory and museum and find the missing link between Tabasco: the sauce and the State.
Unfortunately, the matter turned out to be more than merely ‘elementary’. Although the museum’s display of the family and product history are comprehensive, there is no hint of the name link. The staff also had no idea why old Mr McIlhenny made the link. So our sleuthing has been inconclusive… so far. Enjoy a splash on your food if you like, but be under no misplaced illusion of Mexicanness! As far as we can tell, Tabasco sauce is ‘fake news’… a culinary imposter. Unless you know otherwise 😉
The (Tallest) Red Stick
Baton Rouge, we’re told, is named after the coloured post left in the ground to delineate a land boundary. Okay. The stick isn’t there anymore, but the State capital of Louisiana is still worth a stop. The history of the French colonisation here and its sale to USA under the Louisiana Purchase to fund Napoleon Bonaparte’s wars with England, makes for a very different history to neighbouring Texas with Mexico. We did a tour of both the old and the ‘new’ (1932) Capitol buildings to learn about these things.
In Baton Rouge it started to dawn on us how Americans seem to ‘lurve’ a comparative superlative. Not just in Louisianna. In the USA, everything (yes, almost everything) is qualified in scale: the ‘biggest in Turtle Creek’, the ‘second widest in the county’, the ‘fifth longest west of the Rockies’, or in this case… the tallest State Capitol in the USA!! It’s kind of impressive. So Baton Rouge has that to brag about.
Cheerio Wallace
Next, we’re off down the I-10 to New Orleans and have a bit of ‘Cuthbert Navigation News’ for you! So far on this trip, we’ve been navigating with the able assistance of our GPS with Wallace and Gromit voice. He’s been our constant companion over 180,000 km keeping us entertained with random off-the-cuff comments: “Has anyone seen me quarter-inch spanner, I need to make an adjustment”, “Are we nearly there yet? Only Gromit’s got his Tai Chi class later and I’m ready for me tea”, or one of our all-time faves: “Enter the roundabout. Careful though, I’m about to cut the cheese”. Wallace has many more gems in his repertoire.
The bad news is, that after almost six years of loyal service and friendship, Wallace started having a few memory lapses and his screen kept crashing. Even worse news, we’ve found it’s not possible to install ‘Wallace and Gromit’ voice software onto the new generation of GPS devices. Gutted! With a heavy heart, we’ve had to send our Wallace, in his Wrong Trousers, to find his Wendsleydale in the Great GPS Playground in the sky🙁.
Our new Garmin RV785 GPS investment for the USA is a bit fancier than Wallace. Less ‘down to earth’, with a swanky voice-command system. Problem is, it doesn’t like commands in English. Well… not real English anyway 😉. As we bought it in the USA, the software doesn’t recognise our English accents! It is a source of much amusement as we drive along, taking it in turns to try a range of terrible, cheesy, fake US accents instructing the GPS to take us places. “Okaaay Gaaarmin… faaand place… Miaaami…“. Some of our attempts work, many don’t. So we have a dubious new navigation capability in the front cab and source of fun, but it will never replace Wallace in our hearts. Gone but not forgotten, old bean.
NOLA
New Orleans, Louisiana is known to the Deep South USA’s ‘kids on the block’ as NOLA. She’s a legendary spot of the Deep South and has been on my bucket list for a long time. Did she meet expectations? Well, yes… and no. We can’t deny having a fun time there for a few days, wandering the endless streets with beautiful architecture. Oh… and the most delicious beignets (tiny fresh-fried doughnuts) – we ate a lot of those.
Downtown NOLA, perhaps more than almost anywhere else we have ever been (and that’s a lot of places!) really suffers from excess tourism. Prices are astronomical, music is much more modern rock than jazz/blues, food is often a ‘fast’ version of the traditional stuff and service in restaurants is mostly surly. Night-time Bourbon Street is now reserved for hen-party and stag-night groups. That’s where the money is. Here, it’s crucial to have the local knowledge, where to go to find the authentic NOLA.
Not wanting to be at all negative about NOLA… there is much to see and do and it’s definitely worth a visit. The authentic side is surely still there somewhere… it’s just that for a passing tourist, it takes some hunting out. The tourist area is there to be enjoyed, it just feels a bit less authentic that we were expecting.
Stepping on the Gas
As will probably become a reoccurring theme with our USA blogs, our visa time limitations mean we’re having to skip through many parts of the country with indecent haste. The ‘NOLA to Florida hop’ is a classic example.
We left New Orleans in Louisiana (our US State No.2) in the morning, crossed Mississippi (State No.3), then into Alabama (State No.4) in the afternoon. In Mobile we stopped to tour the USS Alabama (‘Lucky A’ due to its extraordinary military history) and we still made it into our State No.5 – Florida by evening. Four States in a day is definitely a change of pace, but Florida is a big destination for us. Not for what’s there (we’ve been before to see The Mouse and other major attractions) but for who is there. We have five different friends from our previous lives to visit here, most of whom we haven’t seen for years. We’re so excited to be seeing them all and catching up with the odd beer or four.
