You are now entering GATOR COUNTRY

Day 2: October 3, 1999

The first picture you see is of Craig, holding the head of a mean, nasty fish. The fish is the Gator Gar, so named because it tends to feed on small alligators.

In the background of this picture, you can see the nice Cajun tour guide that we had (to the right of Craig at the back of the boat). To Craig's left, you see some of the other people on our tour boat.

Our tour guide would stop when we spotted an alligator and (in his extremely Cajun accent) proceed to call the alligator over to the boat. This was rather funny to us -- to see the guy hanging over the rail of the boat yelling (in a very Cajun accent) "Cuhmow... Cuhhhmow... Kuhmown..." In case you are wondering, that's Cajun for "Come On". Apparently they used to hold sticks out with marshmallows on the end and the gators would come up and grab the marshmallows. Within the last few months, through, they've outlawed feeding the alligators. I guess they assume that it would make the gators automatically approach humans (instead of keeping a safe distance) and could cause problems (like Yogi and Boo Boo, don't feed the animals!).

The first canal turned into another canal and we proceeded towards the more natural swamp areas.

This picture is of a family of turtles sunning themselves on a log.

Supposedly there are great amounts of oil and natural gasses in the swamp.

The alligator here is making his way through the "duck weed" that was all over the swamp.

Some areas of the swamp look like a nice little path through the woods from all the "duck weed" floating on the surface.

The alligators would come right up to the boat and challenge the stick (without marshmallows on it) that the guide poked at them.

This old shack has been kept up so that we could see how the old-timey Cajuns used to live right on the water. In front of the shack (in true southern tradition) isn't a broken-down old car on cinder blocks, but, rather, a canoe that is partially sunk.

Egrets and cranes are all over the swamp (around the egret you see water hyacinths in bloom, which are also all over the swamp)

I caught a picture of this one taking off.

And another of those alligators passing by.

And, finally, a picture of the swamp that we all know and love -- the tree hanging with Spanish moss. All in all, it was a very fun tour.

Back at the Day's Inn, we moved all of our things to room 128. Finally a working Air Conditioner!

That night, we tried to track down some turtle soup (I guess the swamp made Craig feel he HAD to try some). We tried a local "boiling pot" dive, which turned out to not have anything other than crab and shrimp -- but they sent us up the road to a place called Schnell's.

Schnell's is a funny little place due to its slowness. Basically it is nothing but a "greasy spoon" that happens to have soft-shell crabs on the menu. Well, I tried them and Craig (giving up for now on his search for the turtle soup) tried some shrimp. My report back to you is that personally, I feel that soft-shell ANYTHING is just a lousy way of messing up a perfectly good seafood dish. I love crab, but about all I could taste was the soft crunch of the shell. I guess if the crab is too small to be worth spending the time cracking it apart to get at the little bit of flesh in it, they catch it after molting so that it can be munched on shell-and-all. I just don't think of it as anything special.