Avery Island

The first order of business once we got settled into our camping site was to find someone to fix our refrigerator! It's rough camping without being able to keep anything cool. So we found Good Shepard RV Repair in Scott, LA. Mitch Bellard was very knowledgeable and was able to get it serviced and running again in one afternoon! Thanks for a great job done expeditiously, Mitch. The freezer is cold enough now to keep ice-cream!

After a couple days at the KOA, and the nice little lake, we decided it was time to tour the pepper factory...  you're heard of Tabasco Sauce? :)

                        The Restaurant                                                                                            The General Store
The factory

Every kind of pepper sauce you can imagine in the store. They even had samples of 

Tabasco Ice Cream! 

 We found the bear later...      

Avery Island provides everything they need to produce the pepper sauce. They grow the peppers on the island and there was a salt mine that produced all the salt they needed, but it was collapsed in an oil rig accident in 1980 (https://www.damninteresting.com/lake-peigneur-the-swirling-vortex-of-doom/)

There are extensive gardens at the Tabasco factory on Avery Island and we toured them in our air conditioned car, making forays into each special garden site.

 
It's said that Grover Cleveland came to Avery Island and hugged this tree, thus it was named after him. He was an original all right...

 

 

There were places in the garden that reminded Larry and I very strongly of PNG, and places that reminded us of Hawaii.

 

One of the owners of the factory took it on himself to restore the snowy egrets which by the end of the 19th century had been almost wiped out in the United States (the plumes and feathers were used to make lady's hats), and built a bird sanctuary for them. He started with 8 birds! Look at them now. It's amazing to see, stretching out across the water. The birds are so beautiful.

There are now over 100,000 egrets that use this reserve as their summer nesting grounds.The reserve has been so successful in restoring the Snowy Egret that Theodore Roosevelt once called 'Bird City' as they refer to it "the most noteworthy reserve in the country."

 Sanctuary

 

Everyone is so kind in Louisiana, and we're enjoying our time here. The only down side is the hot muggy weather. But almost every afternoon we have a nice hard thunderstorm that clears the air and cools everything down. The first afternoon of heavy thundershowers, we were out and had left some of our roof vents cracked open. We came home to a flooded bathroom, and a wet bed. :(  Lesson learned; always close the vents when you leave the camper for any length of time!

Here are a few more, just for giggles:

 
You could actually buy alligator heads in this gift shop (yikes!)

Bear found! LOL

It's a bayou... there are bugs. This grasshopper was at least 3 inches long, and there were dozens of them! The cicadas sing you to sleep every night, and as Adah pointed out, there are teeny tiny ants so small you can barely see them and there are ants that are a half inch long! They all live happily side by side in Lafayette.