Sunday morning was catch up time and we slept until 9:30, caught up on texts and Facebook when we woke, and finally climbed out to face the day. We found beignets and iced café au lait a block down Decatur at Café Beignet, which rivals Café Du Monde as the original beignet shop. For the uninitiated, a beignet is a deep “fried square of sweet dough, covered in several inches of powdered sugar. They are served fresh, right out of the fryer. They tend to get doughy as they cool off, so one is left to seek the prime balance of heat and time … eat too early and burn your taste buds off…eat too late and you have a mouth full of sugar and soggy dough. I opt for boldness and risk seared taste buds.

Our plan was to take a tour of a plantation followed by a swamp-boat ride. This late in summer the tour group was small, only fourteen of us, so the bus was not crowded and the conversation was quiet, with the exception of our tour guide. Don’t get me wrong, she was nice enough, but I’m not the kind of person who enjoys sharing another person’s life story in the first ten minutes of having met them. It’s just not me. Once she got down to business her narration was excellent, though she is the only person not in a movie or on television that I have heard use the word “youse” as in “youse will love it.”

The plantation house had been restored and most of the out buildings brought from other locations, but it felt authentic. The original owners were quite short and the doorknobs were just above my knee level. I couldn’t comfortably negotiate the steep stairs, so I was sent to the cistern (a water tank on a small tower) where they had concealed an elevator. I was grateful and delighted at the ingenuity.

It was nearly 3:00 by the time we left the plantation for the swamp and the boat ride. It was 90 degrees and 110 % humidity. The swamp was apparently owned by a family, not part of some State park or such. Feral cats ran everywhere. Other tourists queued up in the store for beer to take with them out on the water. Our captain seemed very knowledgeable about the swamp and its denizens. I say seemed because his Cajun accent was so thick I had no idea what he said the entire trip. The highlight of the trip was near the end when an alligator decided he was going to eat me. El Capitan had been feeding raw chicken parts to a large “gator” (I feel acclimated enough now to call them gators). The gator was jumping up out of the water to obtain his treat. Leaning on the rail, my hand must have looked like a savory bit of chicken. Lyd told me to pull my hand back a second or so before the gator rose in front of me. In that second he gave me a look. I was just meat and he knew it.

The ride went on too long for us older folks and by the end I knew that we were really in a zoo, a well-kept zoo, but still a zoo. The Captain paused at one point to throw marshmallows to some raccoons and suddenly at least a dozen more appeared. By the end we were hot, tired and a bit sad. It was a bit like finding out…spoiler alert…that Santa wasn’t real all over again.

Dinner was down the street at Bubba Gump’s, a crass commercialization of an odd movie. The ribs were good and so were the shrimp, all completely spoiled by a mother and three loud, self-centered, out of control middle-school girls. It took the mother at least half an hour to become embarrassed by her daughter and her friends.

What can you do? It’s China Town. (Okay, I swiped that from a really good film noir and I should have said New Orleans, but then it loses the impact of its literary reference). So…What can you do? It’s China Town.

The Road