Maxie's RV Park, Lafayette, LA

Tues. Nov. 21, 2006
We left Jackson after the repairs and headed south to Lafayette, Maxie's RV Park. It is an OK park for short stays. Right off the interstate, and a lot of highway noise.

Thurs. November 23 – Thanksgiving Day – Very different to be away from family and friends, but don’t miss the preparation of the turkey and side dishes. We did everything we wanted to do at a slow pace and enjoyed a wonderful meal out at the local famous Nash’s Restaurant.

Great shop full of sauces and other items of interest. We toured the world-famous TABASCO® Sauce site and found it very interesting and worth the drive.
Ray's Reflections: We stayed in a very small but nice park south of Lafayette and right next to Rt. 90. Trucks all day and night. Sugarcane trucks surprised me as I had no idea this area had so much cane. Being familiar with cane fields around Lake Okeechobee, Florida where they have abundance of sugarcane. I rode the bike several days here. Cane fields everywhere and cattle and some cotton. Roads mostly flat and straight and bad due to the cane trucks.
Avery Island lies about 140 miles west of New Orleans. It's one of five salt dome islands rising above the flat Louisiana Gulf coast. Geologists believe these mysterious elevations were created when a saltwater ocean covering what is now Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi evaporated—leaving behind a vast sheet of salt.
Over eons this salt layer was covered by thousands of feet of alluvial sediment, the pressure of which pushed numerous salt domes straight up. In five places these domes actually pushed up the topography. Today, these five coastal islands sit above and are surrounded by the swamps and marshes of south Louisiana. Avery Island stands the highest at 152 feet above sea level. The Birth of A Pepper Sauce A food lover and avid gardener, McIlhenny was given seeds of Capsicum frutescens peppers that had come from Mexico or Central America. On Avery Island in south Louisiana, he sowed the seeds, nurtured the plants, and delighted in the spicy flavor of the peppers they bore.
The diet of the Reconstruction South was bland and monotonous, especially by Louisiana standards. So Edmund McIlhenny decided to create a pepper sauce to give the food some spice and flavor — some excitement. Selecting and crushing the reddest peppers from his plants, he mixed them with Avery Island salt and aged this “mash” for 30 days in crockery jars and barrels. McIlhenny then blended the mash with French white wine vinegar and aged the mixture for at least another 30 days. After straining it, he transferred the sauce to small cologne-type bottles with sprinkler fitments, which he then corked and sealed in green wax. (The sprinkler fitment was important because his pepper sauce was concentrated and best used when sprinkled, not poured.) He grew his first commercial pepper crop in 1868. The next year, he sent out 658 bottles of sauce at one dollar apiece wholesale to grocers around the Gulf Coast, particularly in New Orleans. He labeled it “Tabasco,” a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean “place where the soil is humid” or “place of the coral or oyster shell.”

Under the Avery/McIlhenny family's careful management, Avery Island has remained a natural paradise, inhabited by exotic plant and animal species from throughout the world.b:if cond='data:blog.pageType !="item"> >