Category: Louisiana

Our ceremony in Gueydan to become honorary citizens was brief and to the point. We posed for a photo with the mayor, Bob Hensgens, while he handed us our Gueydan lapel pins and our honorary citizens certificates. We had a few minutes to chat with Bob, and before he left he let us know that he’d arranged for us to have a mudboat ride with Wildlife and Fisheries down at White Lake. We were definitely excited about that idea!
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July 9th, 2008

Getting Here

Our day of arrival in Gueydan was really memorable. We awakened by 5:30 or before, as we had to load Lee’s truck and be on our way with Lee to meet Elray for breakfast at CCs at 6:30. We had stayed up much too late, as usual, getting things done, so we were really tired. We were completely packed except for last minute things, and I finished off cleaning the bathroom while Chelsea vacuumed the front room. I will never forget seeing Lee’s face as he asked “What she doin’ in there?” When I replied that she was vacuuming (at 6 a.m.), he rolled his eyes in exasperation, and told me that she should quit that. I assured him there was no chance of that, as we were going to leave them with a clean house. 🙂
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July 6th, 2008

With our preparations for leaving Abbeville pretty complete, we hung out with Fred on Sunday, watching him do our famous kickstands, and add a GPS to his ultralight. Kevin came by with a buddy, and they went up for several flights. Chelsea went up with Fred to take photos of Kevin’s plane from the air. Chelsea and Fred covered quite a distance in their time in the air – they went all the way to Vermilion Bay and saw the menhaden factory from the air. The photos are great – check out the photo gallery. They also saw a huge flock of roseate spoonbills in flight, so Chelsea was on cloud nine. My flight with Fred was really uneventful, but it was so perfect that I felt melancholic almost the entire flight, thinking this would be my last flight with Fred. The winds were really calm for the first ever for us, and it was heaven. Neither Chelsea nor I will forget the peacefulness and the beauty of our flights.

July 6th, 2008

As always, the bikes and trailers are an integral part of our experience. They are our lifeline to our adventures. And just like our adventures, the experience with the bikes is always unfolding.

Bikes

We are getting more and more comfortable with our REI Safari bikes. The best part about them is how much easier it is to ride with them, especially given how truly awful is the condition of most of the roads here in Louisiana. The wider tires and sturdy feel of the bikes, and the shocks in the seat posts, make our riding lives a lot easier and more comfortable. We are finally getting brave enough to jump curbs, head through deeper patches of gravel, ride over grass, and tackle difficult dirt roads – things we would never have done with our Dolces. Our bike handling skills are improving noticeably for this type of environment, which is a good thing, considering how much we will need those skills south of the border. We both really like the disc brakes so far, and Chelsea finds them infinitely easier to adjust and to keep adjusted.
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Sheila’s family

Sheila’s extended family held a big family party for the 4th of July out at one cousin’s house just outside Rayne LA. They had an awesome set-up – an above-ground swimming pool, a separate tent for the barbecuing, a covered car port for the food and chairs, out of the sun, and a huge industrial fan under the carport to keep the hot humid air moving. There was a big lawn for the kids, and a small climbing structure, with hunting camouflage hung in streamers on it. There must have been several dozen people there, not counting all the kids, and Sheila assured me that this year was a small gathering – they have been known to have up to 50-60 people and more, all related!
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After all the wandering, and after saying our farewells to Melissa, Ernesto gave us a ride back to Abbeville. We took that opportunity to quiz him about Peru. He told us that his sister, much to his amazement, had recently chosen to go to Colombia on holiday. He couldn’t understand why she would want to, given the current conditions in the country. Again much to his amazement, she came back enthused about her experience. She told him that the country is beautiful and that everyone was extremely friendly – it was clean, quiet, she felt safe, and she wants to go again. We were delighted to hear that, as it matched exactly what we had read recently on a cyclist’s blog. Now we are more excited than ever to visit Colombia.
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We were so wound up after the zydeco dancing breakfast that we needed to walk around and cool off, literally and metaphorically. It’s a good thing that Breaux Bridge is such a fun place – we had a good choice of nice quiet air-conditioned stores to wander around. Our favorites were the antique stores. They weren’t like the antique stores in the French Quarter in New Orleans, where everything is deathly quiet and the tab on most items will run you in the high 3 to 4 figures range. These places were more like museums, with an amazing variety of goods on the shelves. Even the shelves were antiques. The displays were wonderful, and it was more like getting an interactive history lesson than being in a store. We spent quite a bit of time examining things and learning about the eras.
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On our way to Broussard originally, we had written to another couchsurfing host in Lafayette, Ernesto, hoping to stay with him after Broussard (thinking that we would only be in Broussard a night). We never heard from Ernesto, but it didn’t matter since we had gone to the airfield and Abbeville. About 2 weeks after we had written to Ernesto, he wrote us back and explained that he’d been out of town. We did want to meet him, as he was from Peru, and we had hoped to get his ideas and comments on traveling through Peru. Ernesto was very interested in the ultralight flying so we invited him to the airfield one Saturday. He got to go up with Fred, and loved it.
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June 27th, 2008

A chronic issue for us on the trip is getting decent haircuts. First is finding someone to do it, and next is hoping that it turns out okay, and third is paying for it. I was so frustrated in December of 2007 when I was in Santa Ynez, California, that I asked my good buddy Gary Whalen to use his RoboCut on me. For those who don’t know, the RoboCut (www.robocut.com) is a device that looks like a hair dryer, and attaches to a vacuum cleaner. It sucks the hair up into the device with the power of the vacuum, and spinning blades cut the hair. You can do buzz cuts, layered cuts, or an even cut. You can do anyone’s hair, and can even do pets with it. Gary had been cutting his and Kevin’s hair with it for years, and their hair looked great. I had thought it all through, and realized that if my hair were all one length in layers, I’d be fine. It might not be a designer cut, but it should work fine. And sure enough, it did! That haircut was one of the best I’ve ever had!
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Abbeville

Abbeville is a fun and lively town, for only having a population of about 12,000 people. As is true of many communities around here, Abbeville is growing after Hurricane Katrina, when so many were displaced from New Orleans. Many locally consider Abbeville and not Lafayette, a much larger town to the north, to be the real capital of Cajun country. There’s an amazing amount of diversity in Abbeville – it’s got the local farmers, Cajun cowboys, medical centers, and a beautiful courthouse that serves a wide area, drawing in the population from surrounding areas. It’s got a Wal-Mart Super Center, Stines (a large home improvement store), Sally’s Beauty Supply, Quiznos, Radio Shack, there’s a Lowes under construction, and there’s even a small friendly local health food store on the main drag. There are several restaurants that are hangouts for locals – two that we frequented are Comeaux’s (known by the regulars as CC’s) and the Courtyard Café, both right downtown across from the courthouse. And there’s an amazing supply of smaller stores that supply just about anything you could want.
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