Sunday May 25
We woke up in the morning eager to check out Pierre Part. The first thing we did is walk out to Todd's front yard and check out the crawfish traps that Todd puts out in the bayou located just across the street from his house. The kids ran from trap to trap eagerly waiting to see what would be caught. There were only a few crawfish. Todd says that they come in "runs" and you never know when they're going to be running and fill up your traps. However, we did catch a turtle and a couple snakes. Todd let one "good" snake go, but decided to shoot the other "bad" one. For days, shooting the snake was all that Derek and Adam talked about. Todd let the boys shoot the gun at some other targets as well, which they thoroughly enjoyed.
Then we borrowed Todd's uncle's boat to ride around the bayou. Todd has a lot of family with houses along the bayou. The area is a system of interconnected waterways, which lead into a big area of water called Lake Verret. Todd took us into a number of the secluded waterways looking for wildlife. We saw bald eagles and lots of other birds, turtles, and a nutria, but no alligators. Todd and Katie said that it's actually fairly rare to see alligators since they have so much area, inaccessible to boats, in which to hide. On the boat ride back we stopped at Todd's uncle's house. He's an artist and has an incredible menagerie of driftwood sculptures that covers the front of his house. I would say covers his front yard, but his yard is really just the bayou. His house is built in the water.
In the afternoon, the boys helped Todd clean the crawfish for the crawfish boil. Todd had purchased several large potato sack size bags of live crawfish from a friend of his and threw a big party for his family and friends. He has a nice big covered porch area attached to his house that was perfect. Katie also invited a number of her friends from Baton Rouge. One of Katie's friends brought some delicious boudin sausage. We couldn't get enough of it. There were lots of nice interesting people and we really enjoyed meeting everyone. There were all kinds of kids and dogs running around. We played volleyball . It was great. We felt so privileged to experience an authentic cajun crawfish boil.
They were also having a fair at the local Catholic Church, which in Pierre Part means that was the place to be. So we headed over to the fair with a bunch of people from the crawfish boil. Helen and I were pretty beat from the long hot day, but the kids kept right on trucking. Derek ran all over the place with one of the kids he met at the crawfish boil. They must have rode "The Flying Dutchman" swinging boat ride 10 times. All the kids kept pressuring Katie to ride and she kept giving them excuses until she finally gave in and was quickly whisked away in a whirlwind of kids.
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