Crawfish and Rice.
For the past few days we have passed flooded fields, such as those pictured above, and wondered what was being cultivated. The answers, we learned, were crawfish which eat rice stubble, are trapped and harvested from shallow drafted boats powered by what looks like a mini-dredge. The green fields, also flooded, were newly planted rice and benefited from the crawfish droppings.
The ride itself today was a bit of a slog with rough roads, pestering winds and depris. I did gain an appreciation of the difficulty of maintaining smoothly paved roads on sandy wet soil. Several riders, myself fortunately not included, endured small but distressing falls with accompanying scrapes and bruises to body, bike and soul. We did cross a 7 mile bridge with an escort over the Morganza Spillway. This is a massive Corps of Engineers project to divert water from the Mississippi River to protect Baton Rouge and further South, New Orleans. It has never been utilized as consequences are so hard to predict.
This evening we are staying in an old lodge overlooking False River, a lake like body of water, pictured above, that was once an oxbow and linked to the MS Rver. A few of us stopped at a small museum and saw how the Acadians lived upon arrival in Louisiana after being expelled from Canada by the British.
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