Swampy Southern goodness

Well hello there! You look nice today. Here’s what we’ve been up to in our week and a bit in Louisiana and Florida:

It's a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes and try to keep up

• After some truck-related pain in Texas, we were hoping for a change in fortune as we headed east, and our start to Louisiana life couldn’t have been more charming. Just up the road from our campground in Lafayette was a visitor centre which hosted a Cajun musician jam session every Friday night. The musicians and local crowd seemed quite chuffed to have visitors from across the globe, especially ones who danced (Kitty) and enthusiastically played along on the triangle, spoons, and weird washboard thing shaped like a fish tie (Mo).

Hot (sauce) for teacher

• Close to Lafayette is Avery Island, home of Tabasco, the world’s greatest condiment (don’t even try to argue with me on this one) and one of its greatest brands full stop. The recently revamped self-guided tour is a really good one, with a nifty museum spanning the history of the sauce through to displaying Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony’s choice Tabasco guitar, and a walk through the production process from greenhouse to bottling. Seeing the oak barrels where the pepper mash ages for three years was pretty cool (and explains why my homemade Tabasco clone, which I got bored of ageing in a glass jar after a month, wasn’t quite up to par).

• Lafayette is known as a great food town, and one of the local specialties is boudin, a flavoursome pork sausage. Also next to the KoA was a boudin butcher, with a drive-through that was rammed day and night, and it tasted pretty good in caravan-made jambalaya. We had a great meal at the café at Avery Island: red beans and sausage, gumbo, and crawfish etouffe. Keen to experience more Lafayette goodness, we went out for lunch on American Father’s Day (I’m going to milk it and get both this year) to an old school seafood restaurant called Don’s. Dining with small children can go two ways: it’s a little bit harder, but you feel good for not letting parenthood stop you from doing cool stuff; or it’s a bloody shambles. This was option two, although deep-fried okra stopped it from being a complete disaster.

• Next stop was New Orleans. We’d visited the Big Easy on our Southern roadie in 2011, and really enjoyed it. This time we stayed on the opposite side of Lake Ponchatrain, at a really great state park called Fontainebleau. This was the first state park we’ve camped at, although there are a bunch more coming up. They’re a great option: the facilities are fewer and less fancy than a KoA, but they’re cheap, peaceful, and are often in amazing locations.

• After a couple of weeks in the dry, desert heat of Texas, Louisiana is quite different. There’s much more greenery and water – half our motorway driving seems to be on stilts over one bayou or swamp or another – and it’s humid as anything. Auckland humidity is a bit niggly in summer, but 100% humidity in the mid 30s is another thing entirely. Muggy, swampy, sticky, fetid – whatever you call it, it definitely feels like nowhere else in the US, and contributes to the laidback, slightly loony vibe of the place.

Excited about powdered sugar!

• The tropical climate also means summer thunderstorms are common, and our day in Nawlins was full-noise hot and wet. Our first stop was sensibly to get some beignets and coffee: beignets are a local delicacy, a light and fluffy little thing liberally doused in powdered sugar. Mo was less impressed by the lack of chocolate coating and sprinkles. After refueling we went for a wander through the French Quarter in a thunderstorm, up Royal Street, home of some of the loveliest wrought iron balconies in the city, and a lot less frat party than its neighbour Bourbon St. The Big Easy’s French and Spanish influence through history makes it a really unique place in the US, with cobbled streets and mysterious alleyways giving it a very European feel. The geography, climate, and fascinating Creole and voodoo influences give it a singular vibe too: everyone seems simultaneously poised for a natural disaster and a week-long bender. It’s a bloody cool place.

Mork? Is that you?

• New Orleans also boasts an urban park even bigger than New York’s Central Park: City Park, home to a hundred-year-old carousel, which was unfortunately closed, and Storyland Park, a great collection of nursery rhyme locations enclosed under Spanish-moss-clad trees. It started bucketing down again just as we arrived, which added an extra air of surreality to proceedings. Mo absolutely loved it, and Kitty was a big fan of walking inside the giant whale mouth, and shaking hands with the gnome that may or may not have been Robin Williams.

• Getting to Nawlins from Fontainbleau was worth the price of admission itself. I likes me a good bridge, and driving 23 miles across the Ponchatrain causeway is a really cool experience.

Don't you just want him as a pet?

• Our campsite was right by the lake edge. As well as a heap of deer and squirrels, a pond by the lake was home to plenty of alligators. The kids loved watching a little one slide out of the pond, trot across the beach with his chubby legs and outsize tail, and go for a swim in the lake.

• Louisiana also gets bonus points for an excellent accent (Frank Underwood in House of Cards being the most obvious pop culture example), and a step-up in the genuine friendliness of folks. Oh, and you also gave birth to Popeye’s, the best fried chicken fast food chain a man could ever hope for. We like you a lot, Louisiana.

• After Louisiana, we headed further east, highwaying through the bottom of Mississippi and Alabama, and into the Florida Panhandle. Florida is best known for the pan itself - Disneyworld, Cape Canaveral, the Keys, Miami, NASCAR pointlessness – but the Panhandle is pretty cool too, with some cracking beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, although many beach towns have been badly damaged by recent hurricane seasons.

Give us a wave

• We had a couple of days on the Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola. The Gulf Islands are a series of barrier islands: skinny strips of sand between the mainland and the sea proper, sometimes only 20 or so metres across, and the road is often flooded with overwash. The National designation is mainly to protect a series of historic forts built as military defences, but it also helps upkeep some fantastic campgrounds by fantastic beaches. We stayed at Fort Pickens, a state park within the National Seashore: apologies to the military historian segment of our readership, but I can’t tell you what the fort was like, as we just went to the beach a lot.

• The beaches round here are stunning: exactly as you’d expect a Florida beach to be, with gleaming white sand as far as the eye can see, and picture perfect sunsets. The sea itself at Fort Pickens was pretty rough, with some nasty rips that very nearly got a few fellow swimmers into trouble. The kids had an absolute ball splashing and paddling in the shallows, with jet fighters from the nearby Air Force base buzzing overhead adding an extra bit of excitement.

Less keen on this guy as a pet

• Next stop was Tallahassee, the state capital, home of not much of note but close to Wakulla Springs state park, where we hoped to see manatees. The park is hugely popular as a picnic destination, and a good place to swim in a city a few hours away from the beach. You can take a boat tour along the Wakulla river: the spring-fed water is crystal clear, but the flora and fauna are classic swamp, with cypress trees, gators, and turtles aplenty. Manatees are common in winter, and occasionally in summer, but unfortunately they gave it a miss on our visit.

Let the good times (spring) roll

• You’re allowed to put sauce on your Bar-B-Q round here, which is clearly a better option (whoa, lighten up, Texans, I’m just teasing). Sonny’s Real Pit BBQ also offer the utterly genius Redneck Egg Roll: a spring roll with pulled pork, coleslaw and cheese inside. Mind blown.

• Our truck seems much happier, and is doing a sterling job pulling the trailer through many hot and muggy miles (although Bo still holds her breath every time we turn the ignition key). You’ve got this, truck, we believe in you!

• Next stop: like a reverse Lewis and Clark, we’ll finally make it to the Atlantic when we reach the Georgia coast, roughly the halfway point of the trip distance-wise…

BEERWATCH: After some underwhelming brews in Texas, the standard has been much higher in LA and FL. Bronze goes to Louisiana’s Abita Brewing: their Wrought Iron IPA is very nice, but the medal goes to the even nicer Andygator: a helles doppelbock, an 8% German lager which is such a weird, and weirdly tasty, thing to quaff in a hot and humid climate. We tried two beers from Baton Rouge’s Tin Roof Brewing and both were excellent, but this is clearly a very serious column so only one can win a prize: hence the well-named and yummy Juke Joint IPA can be commended, but takes a back seat to the very smashable Voodoo American Pale Ale. And after sneaking into the last edition as an out-of-state white knight, it’s Tampa’s Cigar City taking gold again with the tremendous Jai Alai IPA: these guys are seriously good at making suds.

Slide down Mo, stop dragon the chain

MOMO’s PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: The Lafayette KoA scores very highly for having two pools, a playground, and a mini golf course, as does the Fontainbleau State Park splash pad which was strongly endorsed by Kitty. But the clear victor is New Orleans’ City Park Storyland Park, even if the Jack and Jill and big green dragon slides would probably not fare very well in a modern health and safety assessment.

SUPERMARKET SWEEP: We visited our first Wholefoods of the trip in New Orleans. If Trader Joe’s is a hipster cliché in a good way, Wholefoods is the quintessential bourgie grocery store: you can be snippy about it if you so choose, but there’s so much nice food here, including an outstanding beer aisle, and some awesome ready-to-eat options.