Have already gone for my walk at Doyle's Bayou Park while Puppy's Pop was flying. His friend Gil stopped in and confirmed my suspicions. This is the best time of year in Southern Louisiana: deep blue cloudless big sky, very bright sun high in the sky, dry and graciously comfortable. And the retirement is easy! We passed by an elegant new home with a hundred year old Live Oak covered with streamers of toilet paper! It is not a prank! The local high school team, the Broncos, is playing this weekend and it is homecoming. That's one of the ways they celebrate! Looks quite odd but it is all in fun.
Our sojourn to New Iberia yesterday was wonderful. We drove over and through the Achafalaya Swamp, the largest swamp in the USA. The engineering of the road above the swamp is incredible. I ooh and ahh all the way. We visited Jefferson House on Jackson Island. I will start my picture show after we return to Connecticut if our photos come out okay. The docent was a lovely young woman and we were the only two people on the tour. The best part of old southern homes is the huge windows across from each other which you can walk through to go sit on the gallery to enjoy the breezes wafting through the gigantic, gnarled live oaks. We walked the gardens through tall stands of bamboo down to Lake Peigneur where we had lunch. Yep, I finally snagged a muffuletta and a margarita to aid the digestive process. I wanted to buy a book about the 1980 calamity that befell Lake Peigneur and the Live Oak Gardens but it is just being published. As best I can describe the accident Lake Peigneur was a fresh water lake about eleven feet deep. Jefferson House on Jackson Island is on top of a salt dome. Diamond Crystal had a huge salt mine in the immediate area. Texaco was drilling test wells for oil which is often found near salt domes. Texaco mistakenly drilled into the salt mine where fifty five miners were working. The drilled hole caused Lake Peigneur to be swallowed into the mine. All of the men were able to escape as the water started to flood the mine. At least eleven boats and barges were swallowed and a channel to the gulf started to run north to fill up the place where Lake Peigneur had been. The accident also swallowed up the new retirement home the owner of Jefferson House had built. Only the chimney remains sticking up in the lake. He lost 65 acres of Jackson Island that had been covered in old live oaks and pecan trees along with a large hot house where he was nurturing rare species of plants. No one lost their life but Lake Peigneur is now a very deep salt water lake and the ecology has changed dramatically.
After lunch we went on into New Iberia to visit Shadows-on-the-Teche an 1834 home that has been restored with the furnishings that are original to the original owners of the home. They made their fortune in sugar cane. Life in New Iberia seems to be wrapped in sugar cane. The fields are truly everywhere. The harvesting has begun but we did not smell the burning of the chaff in the fields because it is too early in the season.
2 comments:
the south is a wonderful place to live i can see you enjoying every min.
Probably too hot and humid in the Summer but Spring and Fall are fantastic.
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