You’ll have to wait for the full pictorial review of my trip to Louisiana, because I forgot the card reader for my DSLR, and then Mark brought it to me when he visited over the weekend, but oops, my work laptop doesn’t have the right port. So here’s the ultra-quick summary thanks to the USB card in my other camera. My Louisiana trip, in a nutshell:
My employer did not send me here to look at gators and eat fried food, but those are the parts of the week that I am choosing to remember. The real reason I came here was to shovel rocks. Expensive rocks, but basically rocks. I have shoveled rocks before lunch, I have shoveled rocks before dinner. I shoveled rocks at 4 AM today in the rain, and I’ll be shoveling rocks at 10 tonight. I think they have a name for this in other countries: prison camp.
Actually I can’t complain because the rock-shoveling has taken up relatively little of my time (plus it earns me some street refinery cred), and dining out on my corporate card takes some of the pain away. Maybe ‘dining out’ is too generous a description of picking up fast food, but I had Popeyes for lunch the first day and I was hooked. I’ve had more Popeyes in the last seven days than I’ve had in the last seven years.
You can’t come to Louisiana and not have some local food, though. It’s crawfish season and everyone’s got signs advertising theirs. I generally like my food pre-disassembled so I had some fried crawfish tails and they were delicious. Lots of good fried shrimp around here, too. If you drive the 45 minutes to the beach, you can get just-caught shrimp for $3.50/lb. And the gumbo! I love gumbo and everybody serves it. Tonight when I made my Popeyes run, I noticed that the marquee at Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant was advertising chicken and sausage gumbo. I guess that’s what you have to do to compete in Cajun country.
Getting sent to Lake Charles generally elicits jeers and pity at my office for some reason, but unless somebody can tell me where to get authentic gumbo in Houston, I think I’ll be looking forward to my next visit. I could even see coming out this way on my own time. Just don’t tell my coworkers I had fun or they might want to come, too.
