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.
The first night or so that we met Fred, he took us over to Wal-Mart for food shopping and then gave us an after-dark tour of the layout of Abbeville. It was amazing how much we managed to take in, and how useful it was later. We stayed at the airfield for the first 10 days or so, and rode our bikes everywhere to get around. From the airfield to Wal-Mart was about 14 miles roundtrip, and from the airfield to the downtown area was about 16 miles round trip. We would frequently head in to the Courtyard Café and hang out for a while, and then head off to Wal-mart for groceries, and head back. That gave us a good 18 mile round trip. The roads were great – Hwy 82 was much more heavily trafficked, but it was all local traffic for the most part, so people drove reasonably. The other back roads had a clear enough sight line that it wasn’t a problem, and there was very little traffic. We loved the curving, tree-lined atmosphere of Hwy 82, lined by beautiful homes and smaller horse farms.
Courtyard Café and CCs
We really liked the Courtyard Café. It was very European (or you could call it very California), with an outdoor look to the interior decorating, shelves of books that customers can borrow and return, wrought iron chairs and tables, Internet access, and a good menu of various coffees and sandwiches. We’d head into town and go there first, eating a croissant breakfast sandwich and having coffee and then working for a number of hours, using the internet connection. Sometimes all we did was sit and drink water or a coffee and read the books. It was a perfect situation for us, as we love to read, and this was just like a library without needing a library card. We’d load up with several books for the week (or at least the next few days), read a bit while enjoying the café, and head off to Wal-Mart for our shopping, or just head back home. It was a great place to do Internet research or to do some brainstorming.
One day we were working intently on the wireless Internet and should have left before the rains hit. We didn’t, however, as we weren’t finished yet, and the rains started in at about 10:30 in the morning. We just kept working and waiting until the rain stopped, but it never stopped! At one point in the afternoon, the rain really poured down, so Chelsea ran like mad to get the bikes inside – the manager had given us the okay to roll our bikes inside out of the rain. By 6 p.m. we were still there waiting for the rain to stop! By 6:30 it looked like we might have a short break in the rain, or at least it wouldn’t be too heavy while we rode the 8 miles back home. Meanwhile the restaurant was closing down, getting ready for a meeting of a local motorcycle group, of which the owner of the Café was some kind of leader.
While preparations were underway, some of the staff started fooling around with a game called Guitar Hero 3. It works on X-Box 360, Playstation 2 and 3, and Wii. Participants hold a controller that acts like a guitar, guitar sized, and each one plays chords as the chords scroll by. The player has to hit the right colored buttons as the buttons show up on the computer screen, thereby playing a song. Players compete with each other by playing the song most accurately. While I packed up our things, Chelsea was invited to play this with the staff. Now mind you, Chelsea has only played Playstation once, with a joystick, had played Wii bowling once for a few minutes, and has never played the guitar, so it wasn’t a surprise to her that the other player won. But she was asked to go another round and guess what? She won! It was a great way to end a long (and fun) day. We did manage to make it home the 8 miles with only a slight drizzle, after a record 9+ hours at the coffee shop.
We got a big chuckle out of the bookshelves at the Courtyard Café. Of the 5 bookshelves in the main room, averaging 7 feet high and 3 feet wide, three were devoted to romance books, and only two to mysteries, and even here romances were sprinkled liberally throughout the other books. Also among the mysteries were a number of religious texts, along with a smattering of cookbooks and dieting books. So, romance novels were by far the order of the day, and the romance novels were either the “bodice rippers” – with liberal references to “hard furry chests” and “heaving bosoms”, or Harlequin romances – not our style of reading. But it was certainly obvious what the local community reads!
Comeaux’s Café, CCs, attracts the business and courthouse crowd. It’s a classic diner, with good food at good prices and fast efficient service, with not much attention to interior design. This is the kind of café that has signed photos of famous folks and a few picture frames loaded with photos of regular patrons. Everyone knows pretty much everyone else. You’ll find the clerks from the various offices having lunch, the attorneys from the courthouse will pop in for a fast lunch, the farmers come by for breakfast and/or lunch when they’re in town for supplies. The food is basic but good, and one of our favorite things about CCs is that they serve beignets. Mmmmm…. We had the good luck to have lunch there once or twice with Elray (we think he is the unofficial mayor of CCs) and breakfast once with him and a couple of times by ourselves. We’ve been back since, too.
Schexnaider’s house
We spent much of our time around the Schexnaider house working on article research and research on things we need to buy, both clothing and equipment. We researched and bought the RoboCut (more later); we researched articles on sunscreen and hospitality exchanges; we researched computers for Chelsea; Chelsea typed up some of our paperwork and entered contacts to our database; and we did a fair amount of looking at maps and brainstorming ideas for our writing.
We joined the family at Elray’s birthday party, where I got a chance to talk with Kerry about his medical practice (very enjoyable talking to him!) and we went to Phillip’s third birthday party. Lee and Sheila invited us in to have dinner with them several times a week, which we always enjoyed – the conversation and food were both excellent, and they felt very much like our own family. We got to see a bit more of Neil, one of Lee’s older brothers, when he came by to help with fixing the refrigerator in our part of the house, and we got a big kick out of him. He is outspoken to say the least, and really, really bright (like we came to expect from all the Schexnaiders). Neil was interested in our trailers, and we spent a fun hour or so brainstorming a fix for our front sections of the trailers, and designing a kickstand (more later).
Neil had spent nearly five years gradually working on a boat of Elray’s that had needed a major overhaul. Hoping to have it done by Father’s Day, it was finally ready by the day of Elray’s birthday party, so it was decided to have the inaugural launching with the family. Talk about funny! There was a whole crowd of people who wanted to go on the boat ride – it was being launched into the Vermilion River – and it was somewhat organized chaos. There were kids everywhere, two of the boys got left behind at the house and had to be retrieved, and then there were too many people to actually ride in the boat. Added to all of this was not knowing if the boat was actually going to run! When all was said and done, the boat was loaded to the maximum, and we headed out upstream right into the teeth of a big rainstorm. We hadn’t gotten more than a quarter mile and the engine died. The “engineers” got it going again, but it died right away, and it was clear that we weren’t going to have a long boat ride. So after all that, we headed back to the launch, getting the boat out of the water just as the rain was hitting.
There was another attempt a few days later, on a gorgeous day, but there were still some hiccups, and the ride ended up being aborted early. We all had a great time, with lots of teasing and laughter. The good news is that Lee and Neil figured out all the glitches, and it was ready and working for Elray and Nancy’s Fourth of July holiday.
Getting to know the area
Not only did we have our bike rides to get to know the area, we also had the ride out to the alligator farm down near Freshwater Bayou. We had an extensive opportunity to learn the area from the rides in the ultralight – we saw an unbelievable amount that we would never have seen by car or bike.
Elray was awesome. Early on in our stay at Lee and Sheila’s, Elray picked us up for a lengthy tour of the general Lafayette area. We went to St. Martinville and toured the museum there, reading about the history of Acadiana, and seeing and reading about the Evangeline Oak; we saw Lake Martin, cruising the shoreline slowly checking for birds and alligators; we had a driving tour of Breaux Bridge, stopping into a delightful coffee shop for an awesome cup of coffee in the pouring rain (we even got an Everything bagel with cream cheese!); we saw a bed and breakfast that is a series of Cajun cabins on the Bayou Teche, where they have a hilarious giant crawfish; we had alligator nuggets and seafood gumbo (shrimp, crab, oysters) at Mulates ( a famous local restaurant), where Elray got us out on the floor dancing to Cajun music; and after seeing more sights on the way, we finished the evening by having dinner at Randol’s, another well-known restaurant. The food was excellent, but by that time we only had time for a few dances (another live Cajun music band). We sure slept well that night!
Yet another day, Elray met us over at the airfield. After our ultralight rides, he took us by the asphalt plant we had seen so many times by air. Tucked away in the back of the acreage is a 150-200 year old original Cajun cabin that one of the owner’s sons is painstakingly rehabilitating, step-by-step. He is hand-hewing the beams, mixing the Spanish moss with mud for the insulation, re-creating the original cabin in the original ways. He’s got a classic Cajun garden outside, set up the way the original gardens would have been. It’s absolutely impressive. Since he lives there, he has put in a modern stove and modern plumbing, and it’s quite funny to see the hand-hewn beams, low ceilings, and this amazing original cabin complete with a claw foot tub with gold fixtures, a gas stove, and a washer/dryer. The Cajun cabin was one of the best things we have seen so far.