Drive to Houston, TX

We left Port Allen this morning about 8:30 am and drove west on I-10 to Lafayette, LA. There is an Acadian Village south of town that I wanted to visit. It is a project of the Lafayette Association for the Retarded Citizens and is a replica of a latter 1800 Acadian Village. Here is the website: http://www.acadianvillage.org/. The village consists of 10 different homes. I will list the descriptions of each one when I post the pictures.

After I had visited the first home, an older woman with her granddaughter came up the walkway. She asked if I was from the area and I said no, I was from northern California. She told me we were in the heart of Cajun Country and also there was another village located on the other side of Lafayette that had craft people demonstrating and recreating the life of the Acadians. It would have been too much out of our way to visit that particular village. I am going to google it later to see exactly what it is.

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the village and it somewhat made up for not getting to see any other plantations. From there we got back on I-10 and drove to Lake Charles. We then took a cut off and drove down to the Gulf of Mexico to Holly Beach. The gulf is not as pretty there as it was in Florida. We followed the gulf highway and entered Texas that way. There were several huge bridges along the way and miles and miles of swamps and bayous. In one stretch of I-10 the causeways crossing the swamps was so high that the tops of the trees were just a few feet higher than the causeway. They looked really strange. Then along the road to the gulf there were several bayous that were right along the side of the road. We saw two or three boats going up the bayou. There were also some signs with an alligator posted on it. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of that particular sign. So no doubt there were alligators in the bayous. I wanted to do a swamp tour when we were in Baton Rouge, however, they were all too far away and reservations were necessary. We stopped in Baytown east of Houston and had a late lunch at a Cracker Barrel. By that time we were in the middle of commute traffic. We took another cutoff, State Route 8 which is a toll road to I-45 which brought us to Webster, TX south of Houston and half-way to Galveston. This is where we are staying. The hotel is very close to the Johnson Space Center (NASA) and in fact is on E. NASA 1 highway. We are going to visit the space center tomorrow and maybe drive down to Galveston.

We encountered a few T-storms. The lightning from the storm was pretty fierce off to the north. It really didn't rain that hard. We went out for some dinner about 8 pm and there was some really black clouds moving in. It hasn't started raining though so maybe it just passed over. I had watched the weather report last night and it said there would be T-storms. Supposedly it is raining at home too.