Exploring Acadiana

Sunday began with worship. The pastor had gone to St. Louis, so there was a lay person who read his sermon. I have told him in the past that I would help him when he might be absent. Perhaps he forgot. Regardless we were blessed with Holy Communion. We took Roland to lunch at the Piccadilly Cafeteria and enjoyed the usual crawfish etouffee. We had a nice visit with Roland but learned about all of his ailments. We realize how blessed we are to have been given the measure of health we enjoy. We left him at his home and drove to Vermillionville, an Acadian type village. We danced a bit and visited an old house before taking a boat ride on the bayou. It was not completely in the dense swamp but was close enough. We didn’t see any alligators there but did learn about the area. The guide/driver was a young man, a Cajun, who sang a bit and played his “squeeze box”. He provided some drinks but were nothing we liked—except water. The real highlight of the trip was a visit to a man made swamp built in the middle of what was the USL campus when I studied there in 1969. It had been built with cypress trees, hanging moss, algae, and small islands around 2 ½ acres. It was very impressive and contained some 5-6 foot alligators. The young guide drew them to the edge of the area and fed them marshmallows. He had trained them to come to the music. We decided we had danced enough and went to Popeye’s for a light supper before returning to the motel. There had been many predictions of storms and rain overnight, so We packed all we could into the back of the car in case we had to leave in the rain.

We were up and found that it had not rained and was not raining now. We had breakfast and finished packing in the dry. We had an uneventful trip to Hattiesburg where we split a Subway 6 inch sandwich. We had driven through several rainstorms on the way but no violent ones. We arrived in Meridian early and were disappointed to find that I couldn’t log on to the free WiFi at the hotel. I was even more disappointed that my Verizon Myfi wouldn’t work either. I am going to complain when we encounter a Verizon store. We walked to an Applebee’s for a light supper. Actually it was for Evelyn since I had eaten my leftover gumbo. I had taken an umbrella from the car and was very glad because it began to rain quite hard. We didn’t get nearly as wet as we could have. We returned to watch the ever attractive Dancing with the Stars. We called Stacy to reminder her that we would be arriving tomorrow. I had misinformed Evelyn when she told her we would arrive Wednesday evening.