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 …
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 …
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 Schexnaiders are an amazing family, and they definitely need their own section in our writings. We first met Lee when James Thibodeaux took us into Abbeville one day. James and Beth had told us about Lee and Sheila, but without ever really seeing which house they pointed out, and without meeting them, it was …
Now I must say that flying in what looks like a funky go-cart with wings and a lawnmower engine was never high on my list of must-do’s. In fact, flying in anything smaller than a 200-passenger jet was never on my list of want-to-do’s. Suffering from a fairly acute sense of vertigo and fear of …
James Thibodeaux is the guiding light behind the airfield, and is the one responsible for getting it built. Piece by piece, he and Beth (his wife) and close friends built the airfield and cabin and hangar, and it’s his love of the place that keeps it going, along with the amazing crowd of people he …
June 7th, 2008 Shane Stelly is one of James’s ultralight students. He’s learning to fly an ultralight for business – his family owns Stelly Farms, part of which is an alligator farm. They raise and skin anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 alligators each year. The process starts with finding the alligator nests, which had previously …
June 5th – 17th, 2008 Hi Everyone, Sorry about the long silence… on a trip like this we have discovered that there is an inherent conflict with staying in touch – we either go out and have the adventures or we stay back and write about them. We have chosen to be out having the …
Getting out of Centerville It should be no big surprise that we got bed at almost 2 a.m. on our last night in Centerville, considering how much fun we had with Russ and Paul, and considering how much we were getting done. We managed to not only get rested after our hellacious Memorial Day weekend, …
We have died and gone to heaven. We are about 12 miles south of Centerville LA, down Hwy 317, staying with CouchSurfing hosts Russ and Paul. Back in 1989, Russ moved an old slaves quarters house onto his land, now measuring perhaps several acres. The land is bounded by 317 in front and by sugarcane …
