We slept well at the Saint Francisville Inn, despite the garishness of the room’s decor. After a fairly filling breakfast, we left town. To see a little more of the state, instead of going back towards Baton Rouge, we took the ferry across the Mississippi.
We came first to the town of New Roads. It had little I could see to recommend it other than the False River, an old oxbow lake created when the Mississippi changed course at some point. We continued on the highway towards the small city of Opelousas. John was in a pretty cranky mood by the time we came there, so after a brief stop at the information center and its small cluster of old Acadian buildings, we went to the Palace Cafe opposite the courthouse where he had some coffee and a piece of cheesecake topped with crushed pralines.
Despite its historical significance – Opelousas was the capital of Louisiana in waning days of the Confederacy – and its importance for Cajun culture today – it is the hometown of Paul Prudhomme and the site of the celebrated Cajun joke telling competition – it really does not have that much to offer a visitor. So we pushed on a little further to the town of Grand Couteau.
Grand Coteau is an odd little place. The name itself refers to a hill formed by a river, a kind of natural levee. It is one of the few rural communities with a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. The Catholic Church dominates the town. One of the first Academy of the Sacred Heart schools in the country was established there in about 1820 and about 15 years later the Jesuits established their first seminary in the South in Grand Coteau. The town is mostly black, though almost all the students we saw at both Sacred Heart and Saint Ignatius school were white. The students at Saint Ignatius were having some kind of religious assembly using the steps of the church as a stage. As it was breaking up, John saw one of the students who had a cross to bear (quite literally).
After Grand Coteau, we went on to Lafayette. Almost everyone in Louisiana loves Lafayette, and I am sure it probably has an appealing “laissez les bons temps rouler” quality of life. But as a casual visitor, the city is not particularly appealing. Like so much of Louisiana, it is dominated by hideous commercial development along long streets. Lots of parking, lots of billboards, and not a lot of charm. We were stuck in some miserable traffic to equal what you can find in Los Angeles other large cities. We finally made it to our destination in town, the Acadian Village.
This was interesting, but probably not worth the long trip in bad traffic. It is a collection of historic buildings from the area arranged around an artificial bayou. It was almost deserted when we arrived there. The information provided on the handout and in the buildings themselves was reasonably informative.
John liked some of the folk art we saw there.
As we walked around, we saw this man doing maintenance work. As a Californian, I was appalled both by the quantity of herbicides he was spraying on every stray weed he saw and also by the message he had sprayed on his cart. Just looking at him I knew that he liked Sarah Palin.
John, of course, can’t resists a cheap kitschy souvenir like this alligator head.
We left Lafayette and went east to Breaux Bridge. Now this is the kind of small, charming town that immediately appeals to a tourist. We were not immediately charmed, however, with our accommodations. The bed and breakfast was charming enough, but it was located in a fairly commercial neighborhood just up the street from the water treatment plant. We did like the back yard of the building, however, which has a little deck overlooking the bayou.
We walked around town. There are a lot of antique shops here, just as there were in Saint Francisville, though I wonder how many people are really buying “junque” these days. The local Roman Catholic parish was an odd building which vaguely looked like it had been a converted synagogue (though apparently it was not). Next to the church was the cemetery. This was the almost the Chelsea Flower Show of fake flowers, and the graves themselves were also fairly entertaining. I liked this one where the monument to the Champagne family seemed to turn into the suggestion that bubbly wine was the beverage of choice for the discerning Messiah who liked a fine last supper.
Speaking of suppers, we had perhaps our best meal of the trip at the Cafe Des Amis. We enjoyed live music as you can see in the picture below. John invited Gordon and Judy, two retired teachers from Michigan who are also guests at the hotel, to join us for dinner.
On the way home from dinner, John snapped this shot of the bridge that gives the town its name.
