Avery Island South of Lafayette
Recently, I took a train trip with a route that stretched from California to Florida, and along the way I met an elderly man headed to Louisiana to see his mother, who had recently turned one hundred years old. It made me consider my own trip to that many-storied Southern state, and what I saw in a trip to New Orleans in 2004 — alligators and plantations and the French Quarter, the very place where Jazz arose — made me want to return, to stay on that Amtrak train for several more days and find myself once again in a spot where, in every restaurant, on every table, there was a bottle of Tabasco, sometimes small, sometimes super-sized. Immediately, I knew the next thing I’d like to do is go find one of the hotels Lafayette, Louisiana provides and then rent a car and then drive out twenty-eight miles to the South, and find Pepper Field Road on Avery Island, the home of Tabasco itself.
Lafayette, itself, is a beautiful place to stay — a city of a little over a half million, originally founded as Vermilionville in about 1821, closing in now on a hundred years ago. It was named after General Lafayette, a hero of the French military, who found alongside and aided the American Army during the Revolutionary War. The city, known for its Cajun cuisine and culture, has one of the highest number of restaurants of any city in the U.S., per capita. And I can’t help but think that much of that may well have something to do with the proximity of the Tabasco Plant.
The island is a salt dome island, one of five that rises out of the Louisiana Gulf Coast, where sediment from covers an ancient plain of salt. In addition to the Tabasco Plant, the island contains two hundred and fifty acres of a famous Jungle Gardens and Bird City, so it’s not all about seeing how the sauce is aged in white oak barrels. There’s also alligators and raccoons and deer on the island, as well as snowy egrets in the thousands. It costs a dollar to enter the island (for conservation fees) and around six dollars to see the Jungle Gardens, but to see the world where the sauce I sprinkle onto my eggs each morning is made, that seems more than reasonable!
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