Now we get to play in the swamps

Day 2: October 3, 1999.

Day 2 started badly, as we really wanted to get a good night's rest, but the air conditioner in room 124 was not putting out anything but the natural night air. So the day started with us ready to go for a swamp tour with Jean Lafitte's Swamp tour. We let the Days Inn people know that we would return in about three hours and they should have another room ready for us.

We drove to the swamp tour site (most people take the bus from the downtown area, but that adds $18 per person just to ride their bus). It was about the same distance from the hotel to the swamp tour as it would have been if we would have gone into New Orleans and grabbed the bus anyway. We found the place early, then went back on our course to the closest McDonald's to get breakfast before the tour started.

Surprise, Surprise, the McDonald's there has some new thing called a Cajun chicken sandwich, which Craig got. It was actually spiced very well -- I wonder if that's something they have available anywhere else. After we ate, we were still a bit early for the tour, so we chatted with the lady who runs the "shack" at the tour site and poked around her animals that she keeps.

One animal in particular is the nutria, or the largest darned rat I've ever seen. It has the same skinny, bald tail as a rat and is definitely in the rodent family. Unfortunately, this huge rat is mainly a vegetarian and is the only rat that is commonly found in the swamps. What a bummer! That means that the tale from the night before about the huge carnivorous swamp-rats that burrowed through the soldier's tummies was mostly a fake (I have to assume). Well, at least the nutria has two big, curved teeth in the front of its mouth, so if it had to eat its way through a human, I suppose it could...

The other pets were two caged raccoons and a wild raccoon that was always stealing the ducks' food.

The boats started to return from the previous tour and we waited to get aboard and start our tour. We waited for the busses to start arriving from the city and people from every place on earth joined our expedition. We had people from the far east, England, and everywhere around the USA with us on the boat. I suppose that New Orleans draws a lot of different people from lots of different places.

The remainder of this page and the first of the next page is going to be littered with pictures from the swamp tour, but I can only tell a small story to go along with it, so enjoy the pictures and I'll narrate as best as I can:

To start, we headed down the canal from the tour-shack and started towards "Gator Country". Our guide (and the "captain of the boat") was a young guy who had one of the most pronounced Cajun drawls we had heard in our time in New Orleans. The first leg of the trip was rather uneventful, as we had to get a bit away from the canal to find the alligators!