Lethea & Les Travel (or 'Life in Camelot'): Lagniappe

On our way through Houston, we were able to have dinner with Tara, the remaining Texas gal that I had met on my Thailand trip. Fun evening! It was wonderful reconnecting with these fabulous women. I would love to travel with any of them again!

The Painted Churches of Texas

There are about 15 of these painted churches in Texas. From the outside they look like many other churches, but on the inside nearly every surface has been painted with beautiful colors and the stained glass windows are breathtaking. Built by 19th century immigrants, inscriptions on the walls read not in English, but in the mother tongue of those who built them: German and Czech.

You can read more about them here: http://www.klru.org/paintedchurches/

We spent about 4 days in Beaumont, hanging out with Deborah & Jeff. Unfortunately, they had to work (bummer) and so we spent some fun evenings together, until the weekend rolled around. We pitched in to help with some home maintenance, while they were working. Les installed an electrical outlet outside and I did some painting in the bathroom. It was actually kind of fun to have some projects to work on.

Salt & Pepper ~ AVERY ISLAND - Land of Tabasco!

Just outside of the town of New Iberia, Louisiana, is Avery Island. Considering how Les appreciates a good hot sauce, this side trip was a no-brainer for us. We had the misconception that the island part of Avery Island meant we'd have to cross some major water source to get there, but really it is just surrounded by bayous, salt marsh and swampland.

Tabasco was created by Edmund McIlhenny in 1968. The basic recipe, the process by which it’s made, and the ingredients remain unchanged. (Basically peppers, salt and vinegar). All Tabasco sauce is still made on the island, but the peppers are now mostly grown in Latin America (however all the seeds come from the island). The peppers have to reach the perfect stage of red before they're picked (they start out green and then go through yellow and orange before turning red). The pickers even have a small wooden dowel "le petit bâton rouge" painted the correct color to compare against the peppers. After they're picked, they're mashed and mixed with salt and placed in white oak barrels to ferment for up to 3 years. The barrels come from Jack Daniels, who by law can only use their barrels once! The history is fascinating and you can read more here: http://www.tabasco.com/tabasco_history/mcilhenny.cfm#targ

Here's the most impressive fact about Avery Island: it's really a SALT DOME. This 6 mile island is the tip of a mountain of salt that is 8 miles deep; one of the worlds largest salt mines. Picture it this way: if you fashioned of pure salt a lifesized model of Himalayan Mt. Everest, it would still be so much smaller than that plug of salt that there would be room to add a dozen or so of the major mountain peaks of the Allegheny range. (Taken from the Avery Islands Jungle Gardens brochure.) Wow! The salt is mined by through a shaft 530 feet deep. Oil was discovered on the island in 1942. Five generations later, the McIlhenny Company is still privately held by direct descendants.

Son, Edward Avery McIlhenny, or "Monsieur Ned" as he was affectionately known, is credited with saving the snowy egret from extinction. He founded this bird colony—later called Bird City—around 1895 after plume hunters had slaughtered egrets by the thousands to provide feathers for ladies' hats. Monsieur Ned gathered eight young egrets, raised them in captivity on the Island, and released them in the fall to migrate across the Gulf. The following spring the birds returned to the Island with others of their species, a migration that continues today.