Aug 20 - LA/TX

By April | August 23rd, 2005 | 2 Comments »

Day 19 – We took route 90 (future interstate 49) down along the southern part of Louisiana, the Cajun area. Stopping outside of Houma at Bayou Black Airboat Swamp Tours (www.bayoublackairboattours.com 504.628.2508) for a tour of the southern Louisiana’s wetlands given by Wayne Ponthieux Jr. It was a very informative and excellent trip through all the different parts of the wetlands that they have, though we learned that non-of them are what the swamp use to naturally be. He also was very informative with providing information about the history of the area and it’s lifestyles. The pictures below show some of the animals, plants, and landscape that we rode through.

baby gator

riding through the swamp weeds that are taking over the open water - they were accidently brought up from S. America

A lily field

Lily flower

a gator protecting her nest, but unknown to her - the hunters already took her eggs for farming the babies - they release 1/3 of the eggs caputered back into the wild after 2-3 years - the other 2/3 used for meat and leather.

Gator being fed a veggie - didn’t make him too happy…

more swamp

and more swamp

an owl - really cool … watched one try to land on the top of a tree and fall sideways down to the next branch - they are very big birds and I find them very fascinating.

pretty gator

an alley of trees

going back into the main canal

Behind the boat - it looks like a hurricane as we drive by…

Our guide and boat

Our swamp tour took a bit longer than we expected so we hightailed it to Texas that night to make sure we were in Austin by the next day. We decided to take our first night sleeping in the car at a rest-area right across the Texas boarder.