When you think of Louisiana, I'm sure the first thought is of New Orleans. So once we left the city, we weren't entirely sure where we should go next. After Winston's nervousness in the city, we decided to head out for some nice calming outdoor space and ended up at a nice little site at the Attakapas Wildlife Management area. The space was all ours, and it was great for some decompression time... and to try to fix our wheels.
While we were driving along the Gulf the week before, a piece of errant sheet metal in the middle of the road popped up under us and made quite a bang and dented our front door. There was no other obvious immediate damage and we figured we'd escaped with just a cosmetic scrape. But over the following week, we were hearing some strange grinding while driving, which Craig eventually diagnosed as missing lugs on our rear wheels - 4 out of the 8! He gave them a solid tightening, but we needed to fix them ASAP. To make life easier for the dogs and remove the stress of waiting, we set up a tent at our campsite for me and the boys and Craig headed to a mechanic. Unfortunately, the original appointment we made misunderstood the issue and wasn't able to help. After searching around for a bit, Craig realized we weren't going to be able to fix this today and came back to problem-solve together. We eventually decided to make an appointment at a mechanic in Natchez, MS, where we were generally heading after Louisiana. As a result, we had to keep our travels through Louisiana on the shorter side. So with a little research, we found some great places nearby and headed out on what turned out to be a gorgeous garden tour!
Our first stop was Avery Island, where Tabasco was created and still made today. Avery Island is actually an entire dome of rock salt, an upwelling of salt that lives beneath the Mississippi River Delta region, measuring an enormous 3 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. It’s one of five salt domes in southern Louisiana, created when pressure within the Earth forced pockets of salt up to the surface from a bed of minerals miles below the Earth’s surface.
Avery Island is best known as the home of Tabasco (or for hipsters, as the title of Neutral Milk Hotel’s debut album). But what also lives on Avery Island is a 170-acre garden and bird sanctuary started by Edward Avery McIlhenny, heir to the Tabasco throne. McIlhenny’s conservationism began when he returned home to Avery Island after an expedition in the Arctic, and he noticed a decline in the population of local snowy egrets, due to hunting. He scoured the Gulf coast, looking for survivors, and brought them back to his estate. McIlhenny released them to migrate for the winter, and as he hoped, they returned with more egrets. And thus, Bird City within McIlhenny’s Jungle Gardens was born.
We started our tour of Avery Island at the Tabasco factory, where we took ourselves on a self-guided tour through the buildings that display the manufacture and history of Tabasco. It started with a detailed museum, highlighting the origins and process of Tabasco, and then led to the greenhouse. While peppers for Tabasco sauces are now grown elsewhere, they had previously all been grown on Avery Island and even still, key seed stock plants are grown here for distribution to other growers. The next stop jumps ahead in the process, to the barrel aging room, where a peppery mash sits aging for up to three years in old whiskey barrels, topped with a thick layer of salt. The salty top provides a natural protective layer while still allowing release of the fermentation gasses brewing inside the barrel. Next up on the tour is the blending room, where the mash is freed from the barrels and mixed with vinegar to form the perfect blend of sauce we know as Tabasco. The final stops on the tour tell you a little bit more about Avery Island, the history of the salt mines, a look at the bottling process, and a display showing the many flavors and uses of Tabasco.
After the delicious hot sauce smells of the blending room, we decided to head back to the gift shop for a taste test of Tabasco’s current offerings. We started on the mild end, both enjoying the chipotle sauce, and then inched up to the middle spiciness range, with the star being the original Tabasco reserve sauce, with peppers aged 15 years. The final sauces were quite fiery, but the scorpion sauce was still pretty tasty. At this point, even as a lover of spice, I was feeling the heat, and thankfully the tasting attendant was wise enough to step in and offer us a taste of the hot pepper ice creams they made! I was a big fan of the jalapeno ice cream, while Craig championed the raspberry chipotle. Either way, they were both delicious after trying 15 different hot sauces!
Having seen and tasted all Tabasco had to offer, we scooped the pups and headed over to Jungle Gardens. The loop around the grounds was a 3 mile road, and we opted to walk it in order to stop and savor whenever we wanted. It was a stunning loop, starting with a stroll under live oaks along the Bayou Petit Anse and amongst the wide varieties of bamboo. The road then comes along to the Venetian gardens, a series of lagoons to display aquatic plants, where we saw a little baby alligator! We passed the Buddha statue and continued under an arch of wisteria, still brown from the winter, and made our way up to Bird City, where dozens of white egrets sat resting on their platforms. My favorite spots, though, were the sunken palm garden and the collection of camellias, one of the largest in the nation. These gorgeous blooms ranged from bright pink to white to ones speckled in between, and I thought they were the most stunning things. It was about here on our trip that we started smelling the most lovely aroma, drifting through the air. It was sweet and fruity, like mangos or apricots, and as much as we sniffed, we could not identify this mystery plant.
We finished up our tour of Avery Island, in awe of all this strange little place had to offer, from tasty hot peppers to stunning blooms to the booming egret population, it surely was a fascinating place “where salt meets pepper”.
The next day we decided to keep up the trend of “gorgeous gardens on salt domes” and headed to Jefferson Island, home of Rip Van Winkle Gardens. The island gained its name when Joseph Jefferson bought the island for his own private use and built a stunning mansion on the property. Jefferson was an actor who gained popularity in the role of Rip Van Winkle in stage adaptations of the Washington Irving tale. After his death, the land was sold to John Lyle Bayless, who designed the gardens on the site that were aptly named after the island’s former owner.
The island is home to a fascinating and unusual disaster. Alongside Jefferson Island lies Lake Peigneur, formerly a 10 foot deep freshwater lake, popular with outdoor sportsmen. Beneath the island and the lake was a salt mine, owned by Diamond Crystal, with caverns and mine shafts erected to source salt. Very nearby, Texaco oil company was doing exploratory drilling when a drillbit inadvertently pierced the roof of the mine, causing a massive sinkhole as water rushed from the lake down into the tall rooms of the salt mine, like pulling the drain out of a bathtub. As the lake rapidly drained into the caverns below, the resulting whirlpool sucked down eleven barges that held oil drilling equipment, as well as surrounding trees and 65 acres of surrounding terrain, including parts of the Jefferson Island gardens. The water poured down, and as a result, the Delcambre Canal that connected the lake to Vermillion Bay changed direction, pulling salty water up from the Gulf of Mexico and back into Lake Peigneur. This temporarily created the tallest waterfall in Louisiana, as the lake sought out equilibrium with its newly brackish water. Despite the insanity of this occurrence, no lives were lost, although the ecosystem was permanently altered as a result of the newly deepend saltwater Lake Peigneur.
With some love and restoration, the gardens were eventually restored to the beautiful Rip Van Winkle Gardens. As we meandered the trails, we came across a bunch of roaming peacocks, including an all white one, and we marveled as the peacocks attempted to woo the peahens with their vibrant feathers and shaking behinds. Unfortunately for these lads, none of the ladies seemed impressed by their twerking, but we thought they were beautiful nonetheless! There were so many stunning flowers here, including our now familiar camellias, and a new favorite, snapdragons, blooming in a whole warm rainbow of colors. The azaleas were in the midst of their bloom, brightening the landscape with pops of pink. There were a few succulents dotting the gardens, including the delightful and fun ocotillo cactus. Near the beginning was a small plant, with strange flowers that looked like an ombre of pink leaves, hiding a small white bud. Thanks to image identification on my phone, I was able to identify this little oddball as the aptly named shrimp flower! It was a peaceful and colorful and beautiful place to stroll, with views of Lake Peigneur alongside, peacocks roaming throughout - and things weren’t even in full bloom yet! And again, that sweet smelling plant that hung in the air that we weren’t quite yet able to identify…
While we had been quite excited to see New Orleans, I think these fascinating salt islands and the gardens they housed were the highlight of Louisiana. I learned a ton of new flower names, and even found some new favorites. The geology of the salt islands was something I had never heard about, and was delighted to get to learn about them. And the delicious hot sauce tasting really was the spicy cherry on top of it all!
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