Salt, Peppers, Rice... no pie

It is official. I give up on pie. My pie book is too old and I am tired of being disappointed.

I visited the Atchafalaya Visitor Center (the only peice of land while traversing an 18 mile bridge/causeway from Baton Rouge to Lafayette. Seriously 18 miles of being on a bridge is weird. and yesterday down to new orleans I was on for 12. I found out at this visitor center that there are over 8500 bridges in Louisiana. Interesting, but what I wanted to know was how many miles of bridge there were.) This was the best visitor's center. They has some great displays on the Atchafalaya (which is not as hard to say as it looks - just sound it out) with talking animals (a raccoon and a huge alligator snapping turtle) and a five minute video on the swamp that was great. Plus the people were nice.

I went to look for pie first, but we know how this turned out. Moving on. I poked around at the Jean Lafitte National Historical Museum and learned more about the Acadians. They were forced out of Nova Scotia for religious reasons (I think) and moved to the bayous of LA, now that is a temperature change. I stopped at Vermillionville to see a recreated Cajun (Acadian) Village. It sounded like it was going to be a bit like Williamsburg with people making stuff and the restored homes. It was, but it was small.

Then I headed to Avery Island to learn more about Tabasco. You can smell it when you get there and go over the four biggest speed bumps you have ever seen in your life and pay the $1 toll (used for environmental protection). The tour is very short and starts with some basic info, then a video about the history, a walk through a production line, and a bit more history. Did you know that Tabasco is fermented for three years in oak barrels - that used to hold Jack Daniels? JD will only use the barrels once and then sells them to Tabasco who will use them til they fall apart. Also, they remove the seeds and send them to Michigan where they are crushed and used in icy hot, big red and a few other things. Interesting. I learned some interesting factoids.

Then I headed to the gift shop to try some pepper products. First I tried the sweet and spicy ice cream which was ehhh. Then I tried the jalepeno ice cream which was delicious. I tried the soda, but it was coke based, and lets face it, I hate coke. So I don't know if it was any good bc all I could taste was the awful coke. I also tried several other tabasco products. I took a tour of the jungle gardens next door and kept a sharp eye for gators and they were all tiny. They also have the largest egret colony there and they are currently nesting.

I went to the Konriko Rice Mill, but I was too late for the tour. All I wanted to know was what a rice plant looked like. I vaguely can bring up a vision of a green plant in a bog - but where is the rice? Turns out rice looks a lot like wheat, and is grown, cut, and processed a lot like wheat - they just flood the fields bc it keeps the weeds down bc other plants cant tolerate all that water. I also learned how rice is processed and got some samples. First it has to be hulled (and the leftover hulls are useful in barns like straw and useful as stuffing) and you have brown rice (that can be sold as is). If you want white rice it needs to be scraped and the leftover bran is sold as an additive for cow food, vitamin shakes, etc. bc it is super nutritious. Really, we should just eat brown rice.

And after that I went home to Sun, David, and Zorro. We wrestled all the beads into walmart bags and shoved them in my car (it is getting kind of full) and waited for the monster rain storm that maybe came, but it didn't wake me up - so not so monster.