Swamp
With last night but a hazy memory -- we have some postcards I don't remember buying -- we got out of the room not long before the latest checkout time of noon. We left our bags with the hotel and went out for a breakfast, which turned into a lunch, then we fulfilled our tourist duty of buying tat at a gift shop: Debbie bought a little novelty voodoo book (which scares me), and I bought some hot sauce, even though Dan T's Inferno still eludes us.
We picked up our bags and the car, and set off. I'd found a board game shop in the Yellow Pages, and Debbie drove us there. We bought a couple of games we've enjoyed other people's copies of (Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico), and a couple of card games that are new to us: Chez Grunt (a variation on Chez Geek, which I own in theory, but is lost) and Lunch Money, a card game about little girls fighting tooth and nail. There is a "poke in the eye" card....
Incidentally, in case you're interested, our games were bought using the Visa card that's been giving us problems. It worked fine, even though it wouldn't work this morning either in the tat shop or the hotel. The bank say it should all be fine. We now suspect idiots who don't believe us when we tell them to treat it as a credit card rather than a debit card (it has "debit" written on it in big letters, but in the USA it needs to be treated as a Visa card). The games shop guy agrees with us, and claims to a member of some kind of League Against Idiots. He was a bit of a geek (surprise!). The shop was mostly roleplaying and miniatures -- the stuff that interested us was in a small section at the back.
With that point of business dealt with, we set off for Westwego, a suburb of New Orleans, where Lonely Planet recommends a swamp tour. Their recommended swamp tour wasn't manned (perhaps we should have booked), but nearby there was another: Cypress Swamp Tours.
All was quiet when we bought our tickets, and we sat in the waiting area writing postcards and admiring the critters they kept.
Not long before the 3:30 departure time, a busload of kids arrived. This transpired to be a school trip from a Californian special school for ADD sufferers ... at a guess. A man with a spectacular moustache told us a little about the local animals.
He then introduced us to The Captain, a Cajun who would attempt to narrate over the hubbub of the ADD kids. At one point, The Captain explained to us the wide variety of snakes that lived in the swamp. He enumerated the species. He described the problems they caused when traversing the marshes on foot. A minute later, A.J., one of the ADD kids, shouted "Hey captain, are there any snakes out here?".
We saw some alligators (despite the unhelpful directions: "Where is it?" "Under the tree"), many heron, and a whole lot of green stuff.
Alligators do not love the camera. The light was low. Those are my excuses.
After the tour, we went looking for a motel, and ended up in another Day's Inn. It shares a frontage with a seafood restaurant, where we ate. It was a cheap and cheerful canteen-style setup. Locals were chomping their way through enormous shared platefuls of crawfish, but we had catfish and stuffed crab respectively.
At each table, there was a bottle of hot sauce, a bottle of tabasco, a bottle of ketchup, and an unlabelled bottle of brown coloured sauce. It looked like brown sauce. It poured like brown sauce. It even smelled like brown sauce. But, man, that wasn't brown sauce (in the sense of HP). It was lovely. I wish I knew how to get more.