Our latest big news is that we are leaving Gueydan and southern Louisiana in less than three weeks, after an unbelievably wonderful 4 months in this area. As always, we are very excited about moving on, and we can’t wait to have all those new adventures we know are awaiting us. At the same time, we are going to terribly miss all of the amazing and kind and generous people we have met here.
Sometimes Chelsea and I just shake our heads in amazed and delighted wonder at the way people have welcomed us into their lives and hearts and homes here – we’ve had movie nights with a family at home; we’ve been taken to music concerts, out dancing, out to dinner; we’ve joined in family parties and been accepted as part of the family gathering; we’ve gone to local boat regattas, seen alligators skinned, and toured local hunting lodges. We’ve gone flying in ultralights, done a loop and a roll in an aerobatic plane; had burgers and sweet potato fries and chocolate shakes at the local drive-in, just hangin’ out; and we’ve done laundry in real washers and dryers where the clothes come out really nicely. We’ve attended openings for new collections at the museum, and gotten to know the curator well enough to love hanging out with her; we’ve gone out to wonderful lunches, done yard work and roof gutter cleaning; we’ve become honorary citizens and met the mayor; we’ve had a great article about us in the newspapers.
Chelsea and I each celebrated our birthdays here, and we’ve “survived” two more major hurricanes – Gustav and Ike. We’ve eaten more good food and new foods than we dreamed possible. We’ve attended the Duck Festival and Le Festival Acadiens, and we’ll be attending the Omelette Festival before we leave. We’ve toured the Stansel Rice Mill and gotten our own bag of “popcorn rice”. We visited the Lacassine Wildlife Refuge and meandered by car on down to Oak Grove on the coast, lining up places to stay when we leave and taking time for a beach run on the Gulf. We got to see alligator eggs collected from the marshes, and we went on a mudboat ride and airboat ride.
We’ve managed to get frequent visits to Wal-Mart to restock our supplies; we’ve toured the rice fields with Hansford and we got a ride on a rice combine. We’ve spent time relaxing and watching movies loaned to us, and we’ve negotiated multiple purchases of local fresh-caught shrimp (Chelsea’s gotten really, really good at de-heading and de-veining the shrimp, and we now know how to cook shrimp!). We had nearly a half dozen visits to Lake Arthur and we’ve made a number of trips to Abbeville for groceries, errands, lunches with Elray, Jane and Max, and ultralight rides with Fred.
We saw the movie Dark Knight in Lafayette – only our second movie in a theater in over two years. We’ve learned about rice harvests and crawfish fields. Chelsea went with Lea Hair to Lafayette for a book release of one of her favorite authors, and she and Lea won the book! We both went to the Chicot State Arboretum with Lynn Hair, and we’ve managed to have several “girls’ days out” getting errands done with Lynn. We bicycled over to Pat and Debbie’s home for some early morning breakfasts and great conversation and we’ve had coffee and non-stop food at Millie’s house halfway into our long riding days. We’ve shelved books at Patti’s Book Nook and read our way through their bookshelves, slowly but surely, enjoying the coffee and the conversation. We have fallen in love with Blue Bell Moo-lennium Crunch ice cream, drizzled in Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and we will be taking some Tabasco jelly with us for as long as it lasts (it only lasts a week around here…).
And lest you think we’ve done nothing but eat, have adventures, and party…we’ve done extensive research online and have been able to order things we urgently needed. We finished researching and actually got a new laptop for Chelsea (many thanks to her dad!) and got it all set up; we’ve installed new virus software, upgraded the wireless card for my laptop (a huge difference!), and worked on setting up a network and network cable for our two laptops (not successful yet). We researched all the issues and we’ve already voted in the presidential election – our completed absentee ballots have been in Palm Beach County for two weeks now. I’ve gotten my passport renewed – we expect it back anytime now, and we got extra pages for Chelsea’s passport (hers is already back!). We designed and ordered new business cards in both English and Spanish; updated QuickBooks to the minute, and we reorganized our chart of accounts and reconciled all accounts. We’ve kept up with paying bills; attended an extremely interesting seminar on dehydrating foods for travel; taken hundreds of photos; and attempted to keep up with the often overwhelming task of writing our blogs and organizing our photos. We’ve even done a big cleaning and overhauling of the bicycles.
We’ve had some of the most consistently beautiful bike rides we’ve ever had, and lately we’ve been enjoying some of the most beautiful weather imaginable. We’ve taken time to think things though; we’ve done yoga; we have reorganized our items, sending back things to Alex that we don’t need, and asking Alex to send our winter things. After many years of thinking about it, Chelsea has finally started writing a book about her brain injury, and I am writing a book about our adventures to date, planning on getting it published by Christmas.
We’ve had an awesome place to stay – I know we are going to look back longingly on the space, the privacy, the convenience, the beautiful wood floors and sunshine from the windows, and above all, real air conditioning and heat, and private bathrooms! And never mind the joy of having a real kitchen with a real refrigerator – we have been able to cook real food from scratch, and have luxuries like scrambled eggs and toast, and we can have our Moo-lennium Crunch anytime we want to – we have a real freezer!
As part of our preparation to go, we’ve done research on Mexico, talking to a local resident (Iniani Dietz) who is also a native of Mexico. With her help, we’ve identified our tentative route for Mexico – we’ll be entering through Brownsville and Matamoros, heading down the coast to the Biosfera del Cielo, then heading inland for San Luis Potosi. After San Luis Potosi, we will head for San Miguel De Allende, where Iniani and her husband John have a residence, and we will hopefully use San Miguel de Allende as a base to explore the area, down to Mexico City. After we’ve explored everything we can, we will head to the Yucatan. We may head into Belize and Guatemala from the Yucatan, coming over to the west coast that way, and then spend 6 months or so exploring the western half of Mexico.
Meanwhile, we have done our whole route in detail getting to Brownsville, thanks to Dick Sirmon and his suggestions, and to Max Hungerford’s loan of a detailed DeLorme Texas map. We are prepared for this part!
Chelsea has spent today doing a chart on what adaptors are needed for our electronics and figuring out what adaptor plugs we need, and we are making lists of all the things we need to do to wind down our stay here. We had originally planned on leaving on October 19th, but Elray Schexnaider discovered that we were still here, and was shocked to his core to think that we would leave the area before the 5,000-egg Omelette Festival in Abbeville – one of his special projects. The Festival is on November 1-2, so we decided to stay – after all, we won’t be back here for at least 6 years! Then, just as we had made arrangements to leave on the 3rd, we discovered that Thibs airfield is holding a fly-in on November 7th, and we have been invited for an evening of night flying. We cannot under any circumstances miss that, so we’ll work out the details. Hopefully we will stay at Lake Arthur during the week, and then catch a ride to and from Abbeville.
Right now, we are planning on heading out for Kinder LA on Sunday, November 9. From Kinder we will ride to DeQuincy LA, then Deweyville TX and Silsbee TX. From there we will wind around the scenic areas heading toward Austin. We hope we’ll have the funds to get some things we need at REI and Whole Foods in Austin. If so, we’ll stay there a day or so, then head down to San Antonio. From San Antonio we’ll go to Corpus Christi, and on to Brownsville.
We can’t believe how much we will miss southern Louisiana. I’d heard the term Cajun before, but I had no idea what it really meant. Now Cajun is synonymous with fun-loving, music-loving, generous, hard-working, clever, self reliant, good-food-loving, close families, and all around awesome. Cajun country has certainly raised the bar for our expectations and experiences!