frankfurt lately: city

To look at these pictures, you might think we'd been having a good bit of nice summer weather in Frankfurt lately. You'd think wrong. But about once or twice a week, over the three weeks since I've been back from the U.S., we've had a tiny moment -- sometimes only a few minutes, sometimes a whole hour or two -- where the sun came out and the air was warm and, even though tomorrow is August already, it felt like summer was just around the corner. Germany's doing its best to ruin my hopes of true summer weather, but I still haven't given up just yet. Happily, I'm off to the Côte d'Azur for a long weekend in less than two weeks, so even if Germany doesn't come through for me, I figure that Nice just might.

I was stuck in Frankfurt for the weekend (and spent part of Saturday working), but I put the rest of my time to good use: tried out Café Wacker on Oeder Weg, Launsch, and Moksha (the latter of which I intend to make into my local), as well as poking my head into Familienbetrieb (adorable, must return for breakfast); used a birthday gift certificate toward a hot stone massage at Palace Frankfurt, where I enjoyed myself but discovered that I'd completely forgotten how to say 'ticklish' in German (problematic, when you are in the middle of getting a back massage and the masseuse thinks she's doing something wrong -- 'kitzlig', by the way); and, last but certainly not least, finally giving Sunday Cycling a go. While the route wasn't terribly scenic (long stretches of the back side of the airport) and my knees didn't like me much by the end, it was good times regardless -- I'm planning on going again next week.

stone harbor III

Home front / bike ride to Wildwood Crest and back.

stone harbor II

Bay side.

stone harbor I

Beach side.

the open road

We all know that the creation of the U.S. Interstate highway system took all the glory out of American travel and reduced it to something easy, straightforward, and soulless. But you know what, I think the Louisiana state roads still have plenty of soul. Even I-10 (top) and the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (second from top) got some points for being (at least in part) bridges over water. And I think the American idea of "set out in your car and see what you can find" is still plenty alive.

baby gator petting pool

The homepage of Insta-Gator Ranch is perfectly clear from the start that the gators you can play with and hold for the requisite photo op are not all going to grow up and be released to the wild to become the scourge of Labradors. If the description of a visit to the ranch weren't clear enough ("Your guided tour gives you a first-hand account of the Louisiana Alligator Industry, from hatchling to handbag."), perhaps the fact that "Adopt A Gator" appears directly above "Gator Recipes" in their website's features might help. During the visit, they talk a whole lot about how farming gators protects the wild ones from being overharvested (and A+ to them for having some actual transparency, unlike the rest of the industrial meat industry) and it sounds like they're doing a lot of good in that way. It's still a little disturbing to stroke and photograph something that will ultimately be dinner . . . but I think that says more about how far we Americans have gone to free ourselves from knowledge of our food production than anything else. I'd much rather have the opportunity to be squeamish petting dinner than be kept from any knowledge about where dinner comes from at all.

world's best hushpuppies and perfectly adequate grits

I realize that 'world's best hushpuppies' is a big claim to make, and I'm willing to go right ahead and make it. They're served at Big Al's Seafood, which is located on a perfectly forgettable strip mall-laden boulevard in Houma (say HO-ma), LA, about halfway in between the trucker-haven Ramada Inn and Creole Lanes, the bowling alley (which gives you brand new socks if you need them, yours to keep!). We were mainly at Big Al's in an effort to go three-for-three on crawfish in our meals that day, and because we still, three days in, had not managed to eat a crawfish boil; the hushpuppies were an afterthought. But oh goodness, not for long. They were crispy with cornmeal on the surface and perfectly deep-fried so that the crispiness gave way to soft, spicy, artery-ruining glory the whole way through. The crawfish were amazing, too, not to mention all kinds of fun to play with. I tormented Katie with dangling talking crawfish the whole meal long.

Houma as a town was suburban standard and pretty forgettable, in spite of AAA's claim that it is "often likened to Venice, Italy" (by whom, AAA? by whom?), but its uproad neighbor, Bayou Cane, was pretty danged memorable. Don't mess with Bayou Cane, particularly not the gas station on Route 24 that advertises Confederate memorabilia, Bud Light, knives, and dolls with an absolute lack of irony (unpictured because when we tried to obtain photographic evidence of this, the very scary owner chased us off her property). Much as we'd wanted to get a view of (one side of) the real Deep South, we were pretty relieved to flee Houma and Bayou Cane for über-suburban Mandeville and the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain, which was a whole 'nother pile of weird, but a pile of weird in which we felt very much less like we were going to get shot for gas station trespassing.





Mandeville is home to a whole lot of rich people who seem to live a year-round take-it-easy vacation existence -- more South Florida than Louisiana, it seemed to us. The North Shore has lots of antiquing and a cute 28-mile bike path and adorable breakfast places like the original Broken Egg Café (which I hadn't quite realized was a chain!). If you go to the Broken Egg (or to Mandeville in general), go for the ambiance, not because you're expecting something exceptional. Katie's guidebook made the blackberry grits sound like they were going to be something to rave about, much like my AAA guidebook made Houma sound like Venice, and we were similarly disappointed. Not because they weren't delicious -- they were! -- but because they were nothing more than grits with a side of blackberries. Not quite that little special something we were looking for. But we should note that Mandeville does know how to throw a party (at the same four bars, visited in the same order, quite likely every night of the week) and that Katie was a real prodigy at the ubiquitous throw-the-metal-ring-on-the-bottle game. I'm sure she'd get a warm welcome back to Mandeville anytime. Me, eh -- maybe if I practice up.

plantationing

  

The top two pictures are from Shadows-on-the-Teche, New Iberia, LA. All others are from Oak Alley Plantation, Vacherie, LA. I like the landscape and the grounds of both the houses better than the houses themselves, and feel less historically troubled appreciating a beautiful landscape than a house built on slave labor . . . though of course the grounds would have been maintained by slave labor as well. More than Shadows, Oak Alley didn't shy away from discussing its slave history (Katie and I were glad that there was the rather unsettling plaque detailing the prices for each of the slaves who worked the plantation), though it should be noted that we learned a whole lot more about the standards of rich white girl courtship than we learned about the people who kept the household clean, clothed, and fed. In spite of this, I was glad to have seen these places -- and there's no denying that those 300-year-old oaks are incredible.

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.