The first concrete indications that tell you that you have you are leaving Creole Louisiana and entering Cajun Country Louisiana, apart for the miles and miles of flowering swamp and verdant bayou flying beneath your wheels under the elevated freeway of I-10 West, are the first large road-side signs on either side of the Interstate that read ‘Drive though boudin, and pork cracklings – Exit here.’ Hmmm boudin and pork cracklings…yummy!
It was kind of a driech morning - unusually cloudy and chilly for late April in Louisiana - when I started the two hour drive towards Lafayette. The outskirts of New Orleans end abruptly - one minute you are driving through suburbia, the next you are ten feet above what looks like miles and miles of water. Broken trees line the I-10 on either side, still scarred and broken by Katrina. The Interstate is no longer a road really; it is more like a long, off-white concrete bridge across the waters of Lake Ponchartrain, and onwards towards the Bonne Carré Spillway, past Dalrymple, Whiskey Bay and the Atchafalaya Basin towards Lafayette.
It’s an easy drive though, a nice, pretty, drive, just like Lafayette is a nice, pretty little town. But it is a pretty little town which each year hosts a pretty, big festival - one that is getting bigger every year.