8:14 AM |
Woke to my private bayou with no refineries. Yes, the Holiday Inn Express has a lovely bayou out behind it, and there are nothing but trees and water as far as you can see. This is off an I-whatever exit.
Today is the day I get to go to the king cake festival. I have been planning my last few days so that I could make the 1-3 p.m. event at the Metarie Regional Library. Checked the address to add to my GPS that I made certain to fully charge. Pulled up the website. It was yesterday. I now have a reservation in New Orleans and nothing to do until check-in time. Well, this is plantation country so on with it.
I did really want to see Laura, a Creole plantation. Hit the non-highway and on my way looked for ATMs. There were plenty of payday loans and CASH NOW places, but no place to get the money you actually have. Kept driving. This is absurd. No banks. No ATMs. Checked convenience stores attached to gas stations. No ATMs. Kept driving. Conoco station on left has real gas, no ethanol. Too bad I had just fueled up. Kept driving. No banks. No ATMs. After 10 or so miles (which is a long way on a road that has lots of stoplights and a Target), I found a bank. It is Sunday. Went to drive-through tellers. There is usually one lane for ATMs. No ATM. Drove to front door. When a bank doesn't have a drive-through ATM, it usually has a walk up one on the front of the building or just inside the vestibule. No ATM. Pulled out to get back on non-highway. There it was. Three lanes of ATMs, just like drive-through tellers, but in the next parking lot. Same bank. Got money.
Passed bad juju refineries. Passed Marathon oil plant that looked like plantation with xenon christmas tree lights on it. Smell gas. If I can smell gas how much more is there that I can't smell? Wonder if temporary insanity last night was due to gas fumes. Passed chemical factories. Drove river road. Passed casino size of convenience store. Checked to see if big building behind it. Nope. About 15 cherry pickers behind it. I wonder if they have slots. The cherry pickers can pick the cherries on the rollers. D&G Seafood with a huge alligator on its sign. Say No To Petroplex, Save Our Health sign. No shit. Deckhands Wanted sign. Yes! I want to be a greenhorn. I want to practice putting on my survival suit. I want to find those opelios. Oops. This isn't the Bering Sea, and American Lines sure isn't the Northwestern, or even the Cornelia Marie or Time Bandit. I heard some guy in New Jersey bought the whole haul from the Time Bandit. Man, oh, man. This is the lousy Mississippi. Note to self: next road trip to Alaska.
Drove toward Laura. The great river road, once home to hundreds of plantations, was lined with shotgun houses made of bleached cypress and in various states of disrepair. This is really what I expected in plantation country. One had donkey in front yard (although it was really the front foot). Laura was easy to find, as the sign is quite large. As in many of these places, the entrance was through the gift shop. To my surprise, the gift shop carried tons of books. I love books. Bought my ticket and noticed that I had missed the tour by about two minutes. What else is new. However, that tour was for the people on the Cajun Experience bus. waited for the bell that signals the start of the tour for the rest of us. Didn't take long. While we were waiting, I noticed a troubling trend in my fellow travelers. Tevas. You know, those polypropylene sandals that were originally made for kayakers and serious hikers who just cannot take three pairs of socks in their Vasques during the summer for one more minute. Then Land's End started selling them. And Merrill. And, well, everybody. Suddenly, Tevas and their ilk were on every big adventure-going tourist. Even if the adventure was walking on paths at plantations in Louisiana. They showed up on cruise boats because you have to have them to walk up that waterfall in Jamaica. Plus, the velcro makes it really easy to get on over your bunions. I studied the sandal-wearing for a moment and noticed a parallel phenomenon. These tourists were wearing those shirts that are made for bone fishing in the Exumas or mountain climbing in Tanzania. These are the ones that you can supposedly wash in the sink in your hotel and dry them on the shower rod so you can wear them for the whole trip. Here is the problem. If you are using these shirts for their appropriate excursions, you could care less if you are dirty or not. If you're in the Exumas, you are carrying your own fresh water in your kayak, and you really want to drink it, not wash in it. You can wash your shirt in the sea, but it gets pretty white and crusty, and you just give up doing it. My honeymoon was in the Exumas. We primitive camped for a week. Believe me, there was no consummating going on there. Plus, they had to start our puddle jumper with jumper cables to a pickup truck. On the other hand, if you are mountain climbing it is so dirty that you can't keep ahead of it no matter how many special shirts you bring, so you dump all of them on your porter and just wear the one stinky, ashy one because by that time you are freezing, sweating and exhausted, and, well, who gives a shit anyway? So. These tourists do not need special shirts. They will put them in the wheelie you have to check with their dozen t -shirts and a few extra just in case. They also wear special pants. They don't need sp... you get the picture. Here are some fellow tour-goers waiting for the bell. She said it would be a sweet picture, her rocking in her chair and the cat in the other. She uses real film and so she had to tell everyone that her grandchildren want to see how the picture turned out on the camera, and she had to explain that they couldn't see it. I couldn't hear our tour guide. Jasmine (min not meen, I know because I asked) is studying political science, with a minor in history and also one in acting. She is hoping to be swept away by Hollywood, but will practice law if she has to. I think she would make a great trial lawyer with all that acting.
Laura is pretty cool. They call the place Laura because they have lots and lots of her memoirs and photo albums that they got in France. They are in English, which is kinda strange. To make a long story short, Creoles are a mix of European, Native American and Senegalese slaves. They speak French, kind of. The Americans had white houses. French-speaking houses were much prettier. They are funky colors. You had to put those brick-colored Spanish tiles on the roof to comply with fire code. Creoles painted their cypress red. Women did business with women, men with men, on either side of the house. By the way, these plantations were business places. The houses were in New Orleans. The offices had beds in them. This annoyed some Americans, so the women made a new office without a bed. However, you had to go through the room with the bed to get to the one without the bed. Anyhow, after your business was conducted, you all met in the center room and were commanded to dance until breakfast, which was served in the dining room next door. A lot of the owners' sons and daughters were major partiers. Hey, these guys lived in New Orleans, for god's sake. Oh, you weren't allowed to go in the doors in the middle of the house because those were strictly for ventilation. Sometimes cats and assorted rodents would go in and out. Americans wanted the Creoles to walk through their front doors. The Creoles thought this was barbaric, treating them like animals. One of the women married a guy from somewhere in France that made wine (she had a good pre-nup). She did a brisk business selling 100,000 bottles from her cellar. They also used these big Mediterranean clay jars for milk and butter. They put them in the ground to stay cold. They got the jars by importing olives and olive oil and then dumping them in the river.
The slaves still weren't treated so well, even though their owners were Creole and basically part slaves themselves. Some of them cost $25,000. There was a Code Noir governing the treatment of slaves. No one cared. Laura's grandmother or something was known to be particularly cruel. One of the former slaves, 72 years old, visited Laura (I think) when she was 73. She put her hand on his forehead and asked him what was there. He had been branded by her grandmother. The children 6 to 12 got up first and carried breakfast to all the other slaves. The cabins ran for 3 and half miles. The slaves also told the stories of B'rer Rabbit. We are to buy it in the gift shop, and the stories are not for children. Ditto Laura's memoirs. Very juicy. Ditto the documentary of the restoration up through Katrina. It won a first prize in a documentary awards thing, out of 149 entries. Bought B'rer Rabbit. Bought the memoir. Bought the DVD, even though my Macbook Air doesn't have a DVD drive. They were all thoughtfully arranged at the cash register so you could just grab them and go. Presumably you did your other shopping before the bell rang for the tour or afterward until the bus left. What is it with rubber ducks?
Getting hungry (yes, this is a theme). Pretty sure there is a restaurant at Oak Alley plantation which is just down the road. You need to go to Oak Alley because it is the one that looks like Tara. Drove there. Plantation closed. Are you kidding me? We have all these people in the Cajun Experience who need to see Oak Alley. Well, I saw their little bus go up the levee that screws up our viewing of the Mississippi that made these plantations situated here in the first place. The road up the hill was kinda narrow, and the bus was sitting there forever, and Woody needs to get up some serious steam to do that grade, so I just flew up next to the bus to the parking place at the top. Except there was no parking place. I was going full bore to the edge of the levee with nothing between me and the mighty river. I mean one foot nothing, 12 inches nothing. One third of a yard nothing. Oh shit. However, due to my superior driving skills, I managed to make a turn and drive along the top of the levee just like I meant to do that in the first place. I just sat there in my car taking pictures. When I stopped pretending all was cool while the Cajun Experience was there, I got out and shook. Here are the pictures I took of Woody on the ledge. Note boat. Note other idiot lying on the ledge trying to look cool. Group of motorcyclists buzzed by. They are very good drivers. Or do you say riders? How can you be a good rider if you're not driving?
Backed up along levee ledge so that I can get the front of Woody facing down. I would have backed down the hill, but Woody is 2 tons of steel, it is a steep grade, the road is gravel, and I just don't trust the transmission to hold me in. Certainly the brakes won't. Felt like tight-rope walker except I wouldn't just fall in a net. I would fall with those 2 tons of steel on top of me. In the river. Luv ya Woody, but we don't need to be that intimate. Make it to road. See white fence ahead. Maybe that's another plantation not on the map that Dot at the visitors center gave me. Drive there. See signs for Oak Alley. It was the other one that was closed. Parked next to bikers in parking lot. Ended up eating lunch at the table beside them. Not very bikery bikers. More like those middle aged weekend kind except a bit more bad ass when you meet them. I asked them where they were from. Gobbledygook. Oh, I said perkily. Where should I go next? Grand Isle. That's where they just came from. Take 81 to 22 to 1. Hey, they give good directions and they're not even black. Checked it on the map. I really want to go to Angola. How far away is that? A little over an hour. They always go for the rodeo every weekend in October. The inmates are very good, and it always sells out. Now they have it in April too, although the bikers haven't been yet. They are going this year. Even though I know the museum pretty much only has Old Sparky in it, and The Judge from Tunica told me that people kill themselves before they go there, and you can buy the t-shirts online, I still want to go. Wonder if I have time after Oak Alley. Had a lemon julep which is supposed to have less of a kick than the usual 3 parts bourbon to one part mint syrup and some ice. I want the heavy duty version but I have to drive. Innkeeper wants to know when I'm getting there. I don't know. I never know. I have to commit, and it's making me mad. I also never talk on the cell phone in restaurants. I told him I don't answer when I'm driving (true- my kid has been dissing me for my hypocrisy so I quit), but relented and picked up this time as it is only rude and not dangerous to talk in a restaurant. Had famous buttermilk pie. You can get the recipe in the gift shop. Went for tour.
Oak Alley is like all other alleys but it has young guides dressed in hoop skirts. The Cajun Experience went before us. We used the other door. I was glad. But what's this? We don't get a girl with a hoop skirt. We get a teenager with a voice which cracks on occasion. This is Michael. It turns out this plantation is also new but a whole lot less new that the one with Carol storytelling in it. Only learned one new thing. Dad would burn candle while guy was courting daughter. When it went out, date over. Dad decided how much of the candle he would expose, demonstrating how much he hated the guy. Thus, getting the short end of the stick. I thought that was what they did with those fairy light things I saw at plantation-that-shall-not-be-named. I guess fathers had nothing better to do than invent incendiary devices to screw their daughters (or not screw them, you get the picture). Yesterday at the big brown sign plantation, I learned that they had those fire screens to keep the makeup made of wax from melting off their faces. Thus, mind your own beeswax. At Oak Alley, master has conscience. Gives slaves wages. Lets them buy their freedom for the amount he paid for them. I'm not sure this was the greatest thing for great slaves. Better workers fetched more at market, so they have to pay more for their freedom. The law of unintended consequences: it's better to be a lousy slave. At least that's what I think. Mistress made island in circular drive the shape of a tear, supposedly for the suffering of the slaves. I think it's because she was so sad that the guides aren't all in hoop skirts. Just a theory. By the way, the plantation owner bought this land to build his house because of the nice oak alley. It was over 100 years old. Who planted it? No one knows. I think this falls under crop circles. Concession stand at end of tour has juleps. Really want one. Or two. Or three. Had lemonade in souvenir cup. Europeans had smoke. One was wearing Mardi Gras beads.
They don't smoke in Louisiana, just in Europe (and West Virginia and Kentucky and Mississippi). Probably because all those refineries are doing it for them. They have these billboards with really gross teeth from smoking. I've met a lot of those teeth during this trip, and it doesn't make one bit of difference to them. Or to me. Not my teeth (which are gorgeous and expensive and maintained by vigorous water pik'ing), theirs. My sister's lunatic husband always made fun of her expensive metal dental work. After he beat the shit out of her, she sold the diamond and got her teeth fixed in a more modern, lifelike manner. Also, he had loosened some of them, so it was time. It worked. She got a great boyfriend who doesn't beat the shit out of her.
Oak Alley has farm equipment (remember, I looooove farm equipment). This is a Single Row Soldier Sugar Cane Harverster. The sign said it preceded "awesome" and "magnificent" newer models. Whoever wrote this is a man of my own heart. I am in heaven. Now if they only had scissors.
Annoyed at nice innkeeper making me get on the road and go to an actual place at an actual time. Hit the road. Select Saved Places in GPS and tap on the address I had put in this morning (pretty organized, huh?). Even though the I-whatever was very close, GPS took me on some empty well-paved alternate road. I love GPS. Forty minutes to The Big Easy. Get in middle of city. GPS quits. Hate GPS. Eventually found B&B. Nice innkeeper put his car in driveway so he could move it out when I came. Asked for recommendation for locksmith. Woody and I are doing maintenance tomorrow. He needs his doors locked again, a bath, some Marvel Oil, and hopefully a flathead guy who can grease his transmission and adjust his brakes. I need a mani pedi.
Today is the day I get to go to the king cake festival. I have been planning my last few days so that I could make the 1-3 p.m. event at the Metarie Regional Library. Checked the address to add to my GPS that I made certain to fully charge. Pulled up the website. It was yesterday. I now have a reservation in New Orleans and nothing to do until check-in time. Well, this is plantation country so on with it.
I did really want to see Laura, a Creole plantation. Hit the non-highway and on my way looked for ATMs. There were plenty of payday loans and CASH NOW places, but no place to get the money you actually have. Kept driving. This is absurd. No banks. No ATMs. Checked convenience stores attached to gas stations. No ATMs. Kept driving. Conoco station on left has real gas, no ethanol. Too bad I had just fueled up. Kept driving. No banks. No ATMs. After 10 or so miles (which is a long way on a road that has lots of stoplights and a Target), I found a bank. It is Sunday. Went to drive-through tellers. There is usually one lane for ATMs. No ATM. Drove to front door. When a bank doesn't have a drive-through ATM, it usually has a walk up one on the front of the building or just inside the vestibule. No ATM. Pulled out to get back on non-highway. There it was. Three lanes of ATMs, just like drive-through tellers, but in the next parking lot. Same bank. Got money.
Passed bad juju refineries. Passed Marathon oil plant that looked like plantation with xenon christmas tree lights on it. Smell gas. If I can smell gas how much more is there that I can't smell? Wonder if temporary insanity last night was due to gas fumes. Passed chemical factories. Drove river road. Passed casino size of convenience store. Checked to see if big building behind it. Nope. About 15 cherry pickers behind it. I wonder if they have slots. The cherry pickers can pick the cherries on the rollers. D&G Seafood with a huge alligator on its sign. Say No To Petroplex, Save Our Health sign. No shit. Deckhands Wanted sign. Yes! I want to be a greenhorn. I want to practice putting on my survival suit. I want to find those opelios. Oops. This isn't the Bering Sea, and American Lines sure isn't the Northwestern, or even the Cornelia Marie or Time Bandit. I heard some guy in New Jersey bought the whole haul from the Time Bandit. Man, oh, man. This is the lousy Mississippi. Note to self: next road trip to Alaska.
Drove toward Laura. The great river road, once home to hundreds of plantations, was lined with shotgun houses made of bleached cypress and in various states of disrepair. This is really what I expected in plantation country. One had donkey in front yard (although it was really the front foot). Laura was easy to find, as the sign is quite large. As in many of these places, the entrance was through the gift shop. To my surprise, the gift shop carried tons of books. I love books. Bought my ticket and noticed that I had missed the tour by about two minutes. What else is new. However, that tour was for the people on the Cajun Experience bus. waited for the bell that signals the start of the tour for the rest of us. Didn't take long. While we were waiting, I noticed a troubling trend in my fellow travelers. Tevas. You know, those polypropylene sandals that were originally made for kayakers and serious hikers who just cannot take three pairs of socks in their Vasques during the summer for one more minute. Then Land's End started selling them. And Merrill. And, well, everybody. Suddenly, Tevas and their ilk were on every big adventure-going tourist. Even if the adventure was walking on paths at plantations in Louisiana. They showed up on cruise boats because you have to have them to walk up that waterfall in Jamaica. Plus, the velcro makes it really easy to get on over your bunions. I studied the sandal-wearing for a moment and noticed a parallel phenomenon. These tourists were wearing those shirts that are made for bone fishing in the Exumas or mountain climbing in Tanzania. These are the ones that you can supposedly wash in the sink in your hotel and dry them on the shower rod so you can wear them for the whole trip. Here is the problem. If you are using these shirts for their appropriate excursions, you could care less if you are dirty or not. If you're in the Exumas, you are carrying your own fresh water in your kayak, and you really want to drink it, not wash in it. You can wash your shirt in the sea, but it gets pretty white and crusty, and you just give up doing it. My honeymoon was in the Exumas. We primitive camped for a week. Believe me, there was no consummating going on there. Plus, they had to start our puddle jumper with jumper cables to a pickup truck. On the other hand, if you are mountain climbing it is so dirty that you can't keep ahead of it no matter how many special shirts you bring, so you dump all of them on your porter and just wear the one stinky, ashy one because by that time you are freezing, sweating and exhausted, and, well, who gives a shit anyway? So. These tourists do not need special shirts. They will put them in the wheelie you have to check with their dozen t -shirts and a few extra just in case. They also wear special pants. They don't need sp... you get the picture. Here are some fellow tour-goers waiting for the bell. She said it would be a sweet picture, her rocking in her chair and the cat in the other. She uses real film and so she had to tell everyone that her grandchildren want to see how the picture turned out on the camera, and she had to explain that they couldn't see it. I couldn't hear our tour guide. Jasmine (min not meen, I know because I asked) is studying political science, with a minor in history and also one in acting. She is hoping to be swept away by Hollywood, but will practice law if she has to. I think she would make a great trial lawyer with all that acting.Laura is pretty cool. They call the place Laura because they have lots and lots of her memoirs and photo albums that they got in France. They are in English, which is kinda strange. To make a long story short, Creoles are a mix of European, Native American and Senegalese slaves. They speak French, kind of. The Americans had white houses. French-speaking houses were much prettier. They are funky colors. You had to put those brick-colored Spanish tiles on the roof to comply with fire code. Creoles painted their cypress red. Women did business with women, men with men, on either side of the house. By the way, these plantations were business places. The houses were in New Orleans. The offices had beds in them. This annoyed some Americans, so the women made a new office without a bed. However, you had to go through the room with the bed to get to the one without the bed. Anyhow, after your business was conducted, you all met in the center room and were commanded to dance until breakfast, which was served in the dining room next door. A lot of the owners' sons and daughters were major partiers. Hey, these guys lived in New Orleans, for god's sake. Oh, you weren't allowed to go in the doors in the middle of the house because those were strictly for ventilation. Sometimes cats and assorted rodents would go in and out. Americans wanted the Creoles to walk through their front doors. The Creoles thought this was barbaric, treating them like animals. One of the women married a guy from somewhere in France that made wine (she had a good pre-nup). She did a brisk business selling 100,000 bottles from her cellar. They also used these big Mediterranean clay jars for milk and butter. They put them in the ground to stay cold. They got the jars by importing olives and olive oil and then dumping them in the river.
Getting hungry (yes, this is a theme). Pretty sure there is a restaurant at Oak Alley plantation which is just down the road. You need to go to Oak Alley because it is the one that looks like Tara. Drove there. Plantation closed. Are you kidding me? We have all these people in the Cajun Experience who need to see Oak Alley. Well, I saw their little bus go up the levee that screws up our viewing of the Mississippi that made these plantations situated here in the first place. The road up the hill was kinda narrow, and the bus was sitting there forever, and Woody needs to get up some serious steam to do that grade, so I just flew up next to the bus to the parking place at the top. Except there was no parking place. I was going full bore to the edge of the levee with nothing between me and the mighty river. I mean one foot nothing, 12 inches nothing. One third of a yard nothing. Oh shit. However, due to my superior driving skills, I managed to make a turn and drive along the top of the levee just like I meant to do that in the first place. I just sat there in my car taking pictures. When I stopped pretending all was cool while the Cajun Experience was there, I got out and shook. Here are the pictures I took of Woody on the ledge. Note boat. Note other idiot lying on the ledge trying to look cool. Group of motorcyclists buzzed by. They are very good drivers. Or do you say riders? How can you be a good rider if you're not driving?
Backed up along levee ledge so that I can get the front of Woody facing down. I would have backed down the hill, but Woody is 2 tons of steel, it is a steep grade, the road is gravel, and I just don't trust the transmission to hold me in. Certainly the brakes won't. Felt like tight-rope walker except I wouldn't just fall in a net. I would fall with those 2 tons of steel on top of me. In the river. Luv ya Woody, but we don't need to be that intimate. Make it to road. See white fence ahead. Maybe that's another plantation not on the map that Dot at the visitors center gave me. Drive there. See signs for Oak Alley. It was the other one that was closed. Parked next to bikers in parking lot. Ended up eating lunch at the table beside them. Not very bikery bikers. More like those middle aged weekend kind except a bit more bad ass when you meet them. I asked them where they were from. Gobbledygook. Oh, I said perkily. Where should I go next? Grand Isle. That's where they just came from. Take 81 to 22 to 1. Hey, they give good directions and they're not even black. Checked it on the map. I really want to go to Angola. How far away is that? A little over an hour. They always go for the rodeo every weekend in October. The inmates are very good, and it always sells out. Now they have it in April too, although the bikers haven't been yet. They are going this year. Even though I know the museum pretty much only has Old Sparky in it, and The Judge from Tunica told me that people kill themselves before they go there, and you can buy the t-shirts online, I still want to go. Wonder if I have time after Oak Alley. Had a lemon julep which is supposed to have less of a kick than the usual 3 parts bourbon to one part mint syrup and some ice. I want the heavy duty version but I have to drive. Innkeeper wants to know when I'm getting there. I don't know. I never know. I have to commit, and it's making me mad. I also never talk on the cell phone in restaurants. I told him I don't answer when I'm driving (true- my kid has been dissing me for my hypocrisy so I quit), but relented and picked up this time as it is only rude and not dangerous to talk in a restaurant. Had famous buttermilk pie. You can get the recipe in the gift shop. Went for tour.
Oak Alley is like all other alleys but it has young guides dressed in hoop skirts. The Cajun Experience went before us. We used the other door. I was glad. But what's this? We don't get a girl with a hoop skirt. We get a teenager with a voice which cracks on occasion. This is Michael. It turns out this plantation is also new but a whole lot less new that the one with Carol storytelling in it. Only learned one new thing. Dad would burn candle while guy was courting daughter. When it went out, date over. Dad decided how much of the candle he would expose, demonstrating how much he hated the guy. Thus, getting the short end of the stick. I thought that was what they did with those fairy light things I saw at plantation-that-shall-not-be-named. I guess fathers had nothing better to do than invent incendiary devices to screw their daughters (or not screw them, you get the picture). Yesterday at the big brown sign plantation, I learned that they had those fire screens to keep the makeup made of wax from melting off their faces. Thus, mind your own beeswax. At Oak Alley, master has conscience. Gives slaves wages. Lets them buy their freedom for the amount he paid for them. I'm not sure this was the greatest thing for great slaves. Better workers fetched more at market, so they have to pay more for their freedom. The law of unintended consequences: it's better to be a lousy slave. At least that's what I think. Mistress made island in circular drive the shape of a tear, supposedly for the suffering of the slaves. I think it's because she was so sad that the guides aren't all in hoop skirts. Just a theory. By the way, the plantation owner bought this land to build his house because of the nice oak alley. It was over 100 years old. Who planted it? No one knows. I think this falls under crop circles. Concession stand at end of tour has juleps. Really want one. Or two. Or three. Had lemonade in souvenir cup. Europeans had smoke. One was wearing Mardi Gras beads.They don't smoke in Louisiana, just in Europe (and West Virginia and Kentucky and Mississippi). Probably because all those refineries are doing it for them. They have these billboards with really gross teeth from smoking. I've met a lot of those teeth during this trip, and it doesn't make one bit of difference to them. Or to me. Not my teeth (which are gorgeous and expensive and maintained by vigorous water pik'ing), theirs. My sister's lunatic husband always made fun of her expensive metal dental work. After he beat the shit out of her, she sold the diamond and got her teeth fixed in a more modern, lifelike manner. Also, he had loosened some of them, so it was time. It worked. She got a great boyfriend who doesn't beat the shit out of her.
Oak Alley has farm equipment (remember, I looooove farm equipment). This is a Single Row Soldier Sugar Cane Harverster. The sign said it preceded "awesome" and "magnificent" newer models. Whoever wrote this is a man of my own heart. I am in heaven. Now if they only had scissors.
