Garden District, New Orleans
Lafayette Cemetery
Garden District
Streetcar
On the way to site of Battle of New Orleans, War of 1812
Water snake, Honey Island swamp
Shotgun house, Lower 9th Ward
Bourbon Street, New Orleans
Bourbon Street
Street festival
Avery Island, New Iberia
Roseate Spoonbill, Lake Martin rookery
Louisiana Bald Cypress swamp
Oak Alley Plantation (view from mansion entrance)
Oak Alley mansion
Oak Alley classic view
OK, this place is really different: different food, different architecture, different music, different cemeteries, even different people. Actually, its uniqueness stems mainly from the diverse cultures which settled along the warm, storm-plagued southern terminus of the Mississippi River. The Creoles and Cajuns brought to southern Louisiana from the Caribbean, Europe and Nova Scotia an overlay appealing to all senses: their own fragrant and spicy foods, toe-tapping music, eye-catching architecture, and lyric accents. There were the plantations reminiscent of Tara in “Gone With the Wind,” the oddly shaped shotgun houses, the cemeteries with above-ground vaults marked with scores of names, the Katrina-devastated communities undergoing imaginative rebuilding, the beignets (deep fried dough balls), po-boys and crawfish kickers emblematic of the cultures from which they’re drawn, and humid swamps with Spanish moss garlanding Louisiana Bald Cypresses. What fun!
