One Lap

Date: 11/10/2013

Day: 45

Location:  Houston, TX

Miles Today: 432

Total Miles:  10,394

On the Way Out of New Orleans Westward Bound, Avery Island, Houses on Stilts, Seen on the Road, Tomorrow

On the Way Out of New Orleans

 

As mentioned yesterday, there hasn't been a Streetcar named Desire for more than 60 years.  But when there was, it ran here along the median in Elysian Fields Street.

 

Westward Bound Flatness

The only interesting thing about west bound I 10 is the occasional causeway.  Ones eyes ache for lack of a mountain to disturb the horizon.

 

 

 Above and below and below; Kudzu.  If you are not familiar with Kudzu, you have not spent any time in the south. Kudzu is a vine that was introduced into the United States from Japan at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  It is endemic throughout the south where is spreads at the rate of 150,000 acres annually.

 

 

Avery Island, Home of ...

Tobasco brand pepper sauce.  But you knew that.  The visit to Avery island made the drive today a long one.  It was very interesting, if not quite worth the journey.  This is an admirable organization, still in the hands of the founders family.  They have taken a single simple product, first made in 1868 and turned it into a major brand sold literally around the world.  Fridays production was going to Japan according to a sign on the bottling line.  They sent us Kudzu, we send them Tobasco sauce.

Their pepper Capsicum frutescens (which they claim is unique and particularly wonderful) is grown on this island and in both Central and South America.  The pods are picked then crushed the same day.  The off island stuff is brought to Avery island in refrigerated containers.  On the island all the mashed up peppers are combined with vinegar and a little salt and put in barrels bought from the Jack Daniels distillery.  Isn't recycling a wonderful thing?  The stuff is kept in the barrels for three years, solids separated from liquids and the liquid bottled.  All a simple process.

Avery island is an island by virtue of these shallow channels.  The boundary between the Gulf and the mainland appears a bit iffy to an outsider.

 
 

You pay a dollar to a guard before you are allowed on the island.

 

This is the founder, banker and pepper sauce entrepreneur, Edmund McIlhenny.  The Colonel thinks he looks like Chumlee on the TV show Pawn Stars -- with a fake beard.

 

Does this mean the Queen gets free Tabasco sauce?

 

Bucolic and very quiet on a Sunday afternoon.  It is much like wine making; a harvest of activity followed by months of idleness and bottling.

It is likely that anything you can associate with hot sauce has been branded by the Tobasco people; the product catalog is 32 pages long.  Their blueberry with tobacco ice cream was not half bad.  They do sell the stuff in all its iterations (there are at least 8 versions of the pepper sauce alone) in gallon jugs as reported yesterday.  $38.95 the gallon.

 

Above and below and below, company housing.  There are quite a few boats involved with pepper sauce making, it appears.

 

  Houses on Stilts One; Mystery Explained

The Colonel has been taking pictures of houses on stilts right along.  Above is another, below a house so new to its stilts that the front door is not connected to anything.

 

 

Here, at last is a house in the process of being jacked up on pilings to resist storm surge.

 And these are the people who do the job.

 

Seen on the Road

 

These days in New Orleans and environs, there are not only Hurricane escape directions, there is radio station information as well to help you find out where to go.  If you look very closely down the road a bit, you will see a neon sign for the Faux Pas Prints Embroidery shop.  Not the Colonels first choice in names for a service provider.

 





Classic neon chef for the Crystal Preserves company. 



 This is difficult to read but squint hard.  Apparently people offering foreclosure relief services find it worthwhile to talk like Yoda. 

We don't make this up. 

With Talk Like a Pirate day now an international institution (there are parties on September 19th, arrrr matey, yes there are!) we need a Talk Like Yoda day.  If the Colonel had people, they would be working on this right now.  (Build a website, charge for ads.)

Tomorrow

 The bit is between our teeth, we're headin' for the barn.  Westward!  On to Sonora, Texas, and further if we can stand it.  Another place the Colonel has been that you have not.

 

Wellington Boot, Col.