Day 47 - Lafayette to Baton Rouge: Tabasco Factory, swamp tour

We used the morning to visit Lafayette and the Rêve Coffee Roasters. We ordered almond latte with a honey biscuit. The coffee shop was very trendy and customers were working on their laptops. The WiFi was good. It had been raining all night and yesterday, and it felt good to be warm.
The historic downtown is walk-able and has several small shops and restaurants. Even the neighboring towns seem to have conserved their history with brick buildings with porches and terraces.

We  decided to do the long drive to Avery Island, despite the bad weather, home of the Tabasco factory.

Tabasco factory

We took the tour of the facility. The Tabasco production can be summed up in few steps with only three ingredients: Tabasco peppers, salt and vinegar. The Tabasco peppers are harvested when red, same hue of a little baton rouge (red sticks). The peppers are mixed with salt mined locally, and then put through a grinder. The mash is stored in wooden barrels, covered with salt to seal and stored for three years.
After that, the aged mash is mixed with french vinegar and sieved to remove the solids.
The resulting sauce is bottled and sold.
Around the factory, the air is pungent.

In the Tabasco museum...

In the greenhouses...

Tabasco peppers

We peaked into the warehouse with the stored barrels. Barrels from the last three years are stacked covered in salt and ...they stink.

Mixing the aged mush with vinegar is a slow process

In the gift shop, we tasted the Tabasco oil, mayonnaise, and of course the various sauces.
These samples went from stronger to milder, from left to right. Of course we had to try the strongest one, Scorpion. I coughed and struggled to breath. Bill was sweating. It took a while for the pain to go away. Then the endorphins kicked in and we got a small high. It's highly addictive 😅

After the Tabasco factory, we took a swamp tour at Lake Martin, with the Champagne's Cajun Swamp Tours. I think this is their last name. In fact, everything around here has French names, businesses, streets, schools, squares.
We meet a lot of French Canadians vacationing in this area. Our guide pretends to speak French with them, but then switches to English as soon as he can. Come on! Give him a break. It has been more than 200 years!

On this tour, we saw snowy egrets, nutrias, cormorants and anhingas, osprey on a large nest, turkey vultures, great blue herons, and red fox squirrels. The swamp was amazing. There were tall Bald Cypress trees and Tupelo trees. This last is another tree that can survive in water, also used for special bee honey. Its trunk is different from the cypress', because it doesn't have shallow ridges and narrow furrows.

Bald Cypress

Bald Cypress knees

The oldest bald cypress

Osprey

Anhinga drying her wings. They don't have oil on the feathers