Best Christmas Gifts - Adventure One

A pair of my volunteer friends, Steve and Chari, suggested we get together while we were only an hour away from each other - they in the New Orleans area, and me just across the pond, aka Lake Pontchartrain. Plans morphed into an invite to spend two days with them and do touristy things together.

Our plans finalized with a decision to spend day one visiting some of the units of Lafitte National Park. I met them in the Chalmette Battlefield Section of Jean Lafitte National Park. This section is on the site of the Battle of New Orleans. Jean Lafitte and his pirate crew, along with a motley assortment of militia fighters, frontiersmen, slaves, and Indians joined Andrew Jackson to win a decisive battle against the British.   The British lost 2036 men: Jackson lost 71 men. This visitor center celebrates that battle and gives us its historical details.

The visitor center

The entrance to the exhibits and videos on the Battle of New Orleans

Inside the exhibit

We got a sense of how the English soldiers dressed

Signage showing the geography of the battle

We got to listen to a song we all remembered, the Battle of New Orleans. You can enjoy it again too, by clicking the link.

Malus-Beauregard House - built 18 years after the battle

Steve and Chari reading the signage in front of the house

We drove out of the driveway leading to the visitor center to the next driveway to visit the Chalmette National Cemetery. We listened to a few stories about the dead buried here on the audio tour.

 We finished this tour late in the morning and decided to drive to another visitor center - this for the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center in Thibodaux, a mere eighty or so miles away.  There we had our favorite adventure of the day.  Stay tuned.

But I am grateful for all my friends, the old, new, the fixed and the moving.  Another friend gave me the gift of a 15 mile canoe trip to help with a Christmas bird count - and he did all the paddling as I still can't use my arm.

I'm going to post this blog VERY late as I am juggling traveling, PT, getting organized to live in Louisiana, and partying. Oh yes, I did a few Christmas bird counts.  I'll try to be more timely with at least one blog a week.  A friend just gave me a wonderful gift.  He paddled me the 15 miles we did to find birds along waterways within the  San Jacinto Wilderness Count Circle, just north of the city of Houston. More on that in a future blog.