Today we took a spin from our current RV park in Alexandria north to Natchitoches. There is some question in my mind about how this town’s name is pronounced. Over in Texas, they have a town named Nacogdoches which they pronounce NACK-ih-do-chez. Acoording to the locals over here in Louisiana, the word Natchitoches is pronounced NACK-ih-tesh. There is also a town called Nacogdoches in Louisiana and I have no idea how they pronounce that.
Our route, LA-1, took us through miles of fabulous roadside wildflowers, beautiful rural estates with massive emerald pastures, Dogpatch-like settlements and flooded areas extending to the horizons. Not far from Natchitoches, we pulled into an old plantation estate called Melrose that was owned by freed slaves. They have the original estate residence and a bunch of outbuildings preserved on the site along with a great garden surrounding the buildings. We lingered here a bit longer than we should have but it was very pleasant sitting in the garden and we decided to ignore being bad.
We finally continued up the road into Natchitoches and were pleasantly surprised by the fabulous architecture of the downtown buildings and surrounding residences. There are beautiful massive oak trees on both sides of the residential streets and they form a gorgeous, shady canopy over the road. Natchitoches is quite beautiful, despite the pronunciation of the name. We stopped in at a place called Lasyone’s for their famous meat pies. They are very tasty. They are much better than the meat pies we purchased in 2015 in St. Ignace in Michigan. In Michigan they call them pasties but change the pronunciation to PASS-tees. I guess the eating of nipple tassels was just too much for the folks on the Upper Peninsula.
We returned to Alexandria back down LA-1 despite our policy of avoiding backtracking over routes we have already traveled. It was just as gorgeous going the other way. We did spot some agricultural equipment here that I have never seen before. It is different in that the drive systems are set up to make it so the equipment can get through the seas of mud that are the fields. It looks funny, but useful.
We got a few pix and you can see them by clicking here