Back on the Road
Posted May 7, 2007 by James E. Nelson
We finished our week of volunteering with IOCC on Saturday, deposited the other two members of the team at the airport and then started home. We made a fateful stop at a state tourist information center just off the interstate. It was closed, but there were a few brochures out front. One brochure provided highlights of the “100 Mile Main Street,” a shipping channel that cuts many miles off the trip from the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans for shipping. We decided to head down that road and ended up on Grand Isle, straight south of New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico.
A barge pushed by a tugboat on the shipping channel. I was struck by the narrowness of the channel and the size of the boats.
My experience of marinas and coastal communities is very limited, but this community seemed pretty typical. There was one or two nice restaurants and a number of dives. The motels were all pretty seedy and very expensive. It surprised me that May was still the off season for Grand Island, so we were at least able to get off season rates.
Houses on stilts overlooking the levee toward the Gulf of Mexico.
There is a levee built on the south side of the island to keep storm surges from flooding the place. As a result, the stilts the houses are built on serve two purposes, not only do they keep the houses out of the flood waters, they also lift the houses high enough so that the residents can see the Gulf over the levee.
Houses on stilts as seen from the beach.
Of course we had to go wading in the ocean. We also watched the fishing boats in the distance.
Grand Isle is also the location of ExxonMobile’s Gulf of Mexico operations, so there were helicopters flying over quite regularly. I assume they were headed for various off shore oil rigs.
The extra day in Cajun Country allowed us to try all the Cajun foods that we’d missed while we were on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain. We ate crawfish, shrimp, crab, and a lot of seafood in general, gumbo, etoufee, Po’ Boys (just another name for a sub sandwich), and got a taste of jambalaya. We even tried deep fried soft-shelled crab (very good!) and ‘gator (can’t recommend it—it is remarkably full of gristle and very tough). I was struck by how mild the food was. The gator was prepared like hot wings and was the hottest thing I had, but not particularly hot on a hot wings scale. Most of the other foods were mildly spicy, but we added hot sauce to almost everything because the food was surprisingly bland.
But we’ve been on the road for a long time, so it’s time to turn the car northward and head home.
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