swamp tour!

  

I'm incapable of thinking about our swamp tour! without an exclamation point. Swamp tour! (I blame this book, which I keep intending to read.) Our swamp tour! was with Champagne's Cajun Swamp Tours on Lake Martin, just south of Breaux Bridge. In addition to the hoped-for gator sightings (we saw three of them, including one that our guide provoked a little with a kayak paddle to improve the photo opps), we also got all kinds of information on why there are no mosquitoes in that kind of swamp (a particular kind of plant that grows in the area keeps them away), why you don't take your dog duck hunting during early duck season (the gators haven't gotten sluggish from the cold yet and are still hungry enough to devour a Labrador), and why kicking your husband out of the house is not a particularly effective punishment when the man owns a houseboat [pictured above] (he'll come out there with a bunch of beer and his buddies and have a good old time).

Something about the word 'swamp' makes it sound like the place is going to be nasty, but Lake Martin was surprisingly beautiful. Perhaps the lack of mosquitoes contributed to our general enjoyment. Unfortunately, you really, really don't want to go swimming there, no matter how inviting the water might look on a hot day. It's got a shockingly high number of gators per acre (something like 3,500 gators for 300ish acres?!) and while most of them probably aren't large enough to try to eat a human, I'm personally not taking any chances.