"Cajun" is a bastardization of "Acadian". The Acadians were French settlers in Nova Scotia, Canada, who were kicked out by the British in 1755 when they were unwilling to swear allegiance to the crown. After some time many of them were resettled in Louisiana and established a unique culture there - distinctive food, music, and language. When I was a lad many of them spoke only a version of French. Today everybody speaks English, but with an accent all their own.
Driving from New Orleans on Thanksgiving Eve, we got caught in the mother of all traffic jams around Baton Rouge. Two hours to go 20 miles, which made it dark when we pulled into our campground, Poche's Fishing Camp in Breaux Bridge.
What a lovely spot it turned out to be! A hundred nice campsites around a series of huge manmade lakes. Great white egrets, mother and child, standing on an island in the center of the lake our motorhome overlooked. Magnificent sunsets across the water.
The next day - Thanksgiving - the owners, who also run a restaurant, grocery, and specialty meat market a couple of miles away, asked some of their camping customers, including us, over to their house on the property for Thanksgiving lunch - deep fried turkey and all the trimmings. This was to be a recurring theme - the friendliness, courtesy, and just plain niceness of the people here in southern Louisiana is amazing.
Cajun country is a different kind of place, foodwise. Poche's meat market sold pork stomach, rabbit, alligator meat, boudin sausage, tasso ham, and a bunch of other specialties. We bought some of the latter, which is the smokiest and most heavily seasoned ham I've ever tasted.
We stayed at the campground for six days and did a lot of tourist stuff. We visited Shadows on the Teche, a plantation house. We went to a restored Cajun village in Lafayette and watched a film about Acadian history. We ate several po-boy sandwiches, all good, but none as delicious as the ones we had at the New Orleans Sandwich Company in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. We ate dinner at Prejean's, which features traditional Cajun music every night. Their menu was spectacular, with at least twenty fascinating dishes listed. The food that emerged, however, was tasty but not exceptional. But whether we were blown away or disappointed by food or attraction, the experience was almost universally outstanding, because of the sweetness of the local people we were dealing with. Incidentally, while most of the country folks have strong accents, many of the younger ones don't - especially in the city of Lafayette. In fact, Nancy insulted our waiter at Prejean's restaurant by saying, "You sound like a Yankee!"
On the last full day in Breaux Bridge, we signed up for a swamp tour. Believe it or not, it was bitterly cold when we arrived at 11 AM, and people had warned us that we wouldn't see much wildlife this time of year. Our leader, Bryan Champagne, is a full blooded Cajun who's been doing these tours for fifteen years. The eighteen of us took seats in a boat with an outboard motor, and before long we were in an almost surreal world, surrounded by cypress trees laden with Spanish moss. Deep in the swamp Bryan spotted an alligator, only its head visible. Bryan climbed out of the boat and began nudging the beast with an oar, causing it to thrash about spectacularly.
Surprisingly, there were lots of birds - great white egrets, magnificent great blue herons, cormorants, and others. It was a great experience.
We all considered ourselves very lucky to have seen a wild alligator up close, but that afternoon, back at Poche's Fishing Camp, Nancy learned from our camp manager that Bryan isn't popular with the other swamp tour leaders - not only because he's financially successful, but because he feeds the alligators to make sure his customers have a good shot at seeing one - which they consider cheating.
The next morning we headed west toward San Antonio. I had seen a lot of billboards advertising boudin and cracklins, which I had never tried, so before crossing the Texas border, we stopped at a truck stop and bought a boudin ball and cracklins. Man, that's some good eating. Cracklins are deep fried pork skin and pork fat, seasoned with cajun spices and sugar. Boudin is a spicy Cajun sausage that includes rice, and a boudin ball is a tennis-ball-sized sphere of boudin that is deep fried. In other words, health food. We liked both so much that it's a good thing we didn't discover them earlier.
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