back from the bayou!

...go for the music, stay for the food!

i cannot believe we're halfway though the year! goodness. seems like just yesterday i was chopping off my hair, and now it hits my shoulders and i can't wait to get it cut.

so! we're back from the magical land known as loosyana and we had an absolutely fantastic time. my wonderful mother and i have gone to bayou country superfest every year since its inception - this was year three - and every year, we perfect the trip a little bit more. - by "perfect," i mean we find another delicious place to indulge because it is vacation, after all. this is our general itinerary: leave houston in the early afternoon and head east! this year, we ran into the joads before we were even out of houston. (yes, mother, that's the joads, with a d, not the jobs like in the Bible.)  these nice folks, bless their hearts, had a u-haul, with a trailer attached to the back, with a canoe strapped to the trailer holding, i can only imagine, what wouldn't fit in the u-haul. the first real stop we make is in jennings, la, at the boudin king.  even though we've been going for three years now, we still haven't quite figured out how to say "boudin" correctly, but we have come up with some creative ways to avoid pronouncing the word at all, and despite the fact that we can't say it, we are pretty comfortable declaring that this is quite possibly the best boudin in the state of louisiana. it at the boudin king, after all.

once we've gotten our fill, it's on to the other side of the mississippi. once we get to baton rouge, there's usually a trip to walmart because we've forgotten something. this year, it was my pajamas. whoops. i did, however, become the proud owner of an LSU t-shirt. then it's back to the hotel. last year, there were some mysterious buses with tennessee plates parked in our hotel parking lot - turned out they were billy currington's band's buses. billy himself was in mississippi, but we met a nice young man named doug who played guitar for billy and was kind enough to entertain our star-strucked-ness for a few minutes. logically, this year, we were hoping for the same sort of dumb luck...didn't happen. so we stayed upstairs and did our second favorite thing to do at the hotel - you know, when we can't hang out with almost-stars - lie in bed in my LSU pajama shirt, eating reese's, watching "swamp people." i was a happy gal. (there was some sort of marathon going on, so we saw lots of gators and lots of "chootin'") i drifted off to sweet dreams of gators and toothless cajuns (and believe me, i say that with all the love in my heart). when we woke up saturday afternoon (that's right, afternoon), we got ready and headed off to christina's for breakfast. my mother had read a piece on christina's in southern living last year and we wanted to go then, but we waited until sunday to try it out, and christina's is closed on sunday. next time you're in baton rouge, eat at this place. oh my goodness. these may have been the best biscuits i have ever had in my life ever. and they were gigantic. and buttery.
they came that way, so there was no worrying about making sure you get the butter on while they were still warm so it would melt. carbohydrate perfection. then when we were leaving, or paying to leave, momma asked the lady at the register if she was, in fact, christina - and she was! it was almost as exciting as the time we were leaving the kenny rogers show and saw kenny getting on his bus and momna said, "great show, kenny!" and mr. rogers looked right at her and said, "thank you." okay, it was not almost as exciting as that, because when that happened, she called everyone she knew and told them about it. this was only enough excitement to make her forget to tip our waiter. never fear, i reminded her and we took care of it. we had a few hours to kill before bayou country day one, so we went downtown to the old capitol - there is some really interesting louisiana history to be learned there, among it a certain diary of a confederate woman (sarah morgan) that really begs some more looking into - she talked a lot about those horrible yankees who came to burn her city...i do plan to read it at some point in the not so distant future. so! after our history lesson, it was time to go to death valley. and it's true what they say, there really isn't anything quite like a saturday night in death valley. saturday was definitely my favorite day of the festival - jerrod niemann, little big town, eric church, carrie underwood, and keith urban!
(also, this was the day we had jambalaya at the festival that i swear is made with alligator sausage but momma eats it anyway and somehow convinces herself it's not alligator). i loved sunday, don't get me wrong, but since for me, the main events were eric church and keith urban, it was a tiny bit anticlimactic. jerrod niemann, LBT, and carrie were all great - but eric church and keith urban were absolutely amazing! this is the third time i've seen keith urban live (twice at bayou country), and he always puts on an incredible show - actually gets up in the crowd and everything! you can't help but love him! and after seeing eric church at an up-close and personal event at our radio station, he stole my heart. he's such a rocker, but still so country, sings about blue jeans, jack daniels, and bruce springsteen - what more could you ask for? love, love, love me some eric church! and keith performed late into the night - seriously, after midnight. that's late for us. so we slept in late on sunday (yes, later than the "afternoon" when we woke up on saturday) and went to another of our favorite spots to eat, boutin's, where you do not, in fact, eat boudin. if you are a seafood person, you get the...i've forgotten what kind of fish, with a crabmeat stuffing, topped with a crawfish etouffee. a-mazing.
or, if you're more of the same persuasion as my momma, you get this chicken that's wrapped around a sausage in a rotel cream sauce. it is all so bad for you, but i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's worth every. single. bite. oh yeah, and there's often life music and dancing. i really wanted some bread pudding when we were done, but i seriously could not manage to fit it in, so we waddled off to the mall. did a little bit of shopping, then back to LSU - it's really a beautiful campus. lots of giant trees, old buildings...i see why people love it. the show on sunday was joe nichols, sara evans, dierks bentley, jason aldean, and rascal flatts. we missed joe nichols by a little bit, but everybody else put on a good show. dierks and jason were my sunday favorites. much for the same reason that i love eric church. they don't seem - to me - to be quite as hardcore as eric, but they're on the same side of that country-rocker spectrum. i had an alligator sausage (not in jambalaya, by itself) for dinner on sunday. with creole mustard. if you know me, you probably already know i have an insane

aversion to mustard. even in those lay's chips that are the carolina barbecue flavor. just can't eat 'em. but this creole mustard...they're onto something there. after rascal flatts, we went back to the hotel, straight to sleep, and these two tired girls made their way back to the great state of texas on monday (and one of us went straight to work!) it was a fantastic weekend - i'm not wishing my life away or anything, and i intend to enjoy every minute between now and then, but i can't wait for next year!

♥ whit