urban bicycle journeys

I got up at five something on a Saturday morning, driving to Charlotte airport for the nonstop flight at nine something to New Orleans.  I had a free frequent flier ticket, and took the folding PBW bike in the suitcase.  Upon landing two hours later, I found great lunch advise from Yelp, to help with the two hour drive to Lafayette and the Cajun part of Louisiana.   Yelp advised of Harbour Seafood and Oyster Bar in a dingy strip shopping center in Kenner, right under the New Orleans airport runway.   It is an informal family seafood place with wood paneling, friendly bar, and all kinds of seafood.  It is the kind of place that is rare now in New Orleans proper.

At 11:25 AM, it was already pretty much filled with a lunch crowd.    An old man was eating raw oysters on the half shell.  The hefty young bartender in a Duck Dynasty sweatshirt was asked by someone when was the last time she went the fifteen miles into the New Orleans city limits.  She proudly proclaimed that she had not been “down there” in months, maybe years.   Too much crime.   I purchased a delicious oyster poor boy “to go”, and enjoyed it while while steering the rental car across the swamps on the I-10 causeway towards Baton Rouge,  ninety miles away.  Lafayette is another sixty miles past that.

Lyman was to drive from Austin TX to meet me near Lafayette.  He has discovered a key benefit to a Bike Friday folding bike, that it will fit in the front trunk of his Porsche Boxster.   He was not going to arrive until much later in the day.   

At 2:00 PM, I parked the car next to the Walmart in Breaux Bridge, twenty miles before Lafayette.  The bike got together in minutes,  and I bicycled off by myself towards New Iberia, thirty miles to the south.  Lyman met me that evening in another seafood restaurant in New Iberia.  

That night, we saw the first of three great live music acts which we would see on this trip.   Maybe it says something about the growing cosmopolitan nature of the area, but none of the bands were  Cajun or Zydeco music.   That did not stop them from putting on a good show.

For the next two days we enjoyed cycling around the very flat countryside of South Louisiana.    Along the way, we saw these people harvesting crawfish.    That was one of many colorful sights.