Holiday Road

Judaculla Rock and an Airboat Swamp Tour

I’ve been threatening to drive to Louisiana for a long time. My first visit to New Orleans was a road trip after college graduation, driving a Mustang with the cruise set at 55, with a battered copy of Roadfood and a Rand McNally Road Atlas as my only guides. This time around, the speed limit was 70 MPH, and I had Google Maps and a Subaru which handled much better in the torrential rain.

We stopped for the night in Asheville, which is a gentrified hipster wonderland of farm to table gastropubs, anarchist bookstores, and hookah dessert bars. Nearby was Judaculla Rock, a petroglyph-encrusted artifact of the Cherokee. It was first used to harvest soapstone for making bowls, and then carved with letters and images, until the colonizers came. It’s a very interesting site, as you can’t see any carvings from the side you approach. You could walk right past it, if it wasn’t a protected site with a viewing platform.

The rock is on Eastern Band Cherokee land, who were forcibly removed in 1838 on the Trail of Tears genocide campaign. The Parker family gave the rock and its surroundings to Jackson County. I am glad it is protected in some way, and that there is access to it.

The trip to Baton Rouge from Asheville was less eventful. It was a ten hour stretch, so I didn’t find any side trips. That’s about my limit for a day’s worth of driving, now. On my first trip to New Orleans, we went via Orlando; we knew some budding young animators who were working as caricature artists at Disney World, and crashed at their place. The ride to Philly was 19 hours, and my lazy partner only took one five hour shift. We had a cooler full of soda and bagels. This time, I have a car freezer that will be packed with venison andouille and homemade turkey gumbo.

New Orleans is slowly becoming gentrified as well, but doesn’t seem quite so bad yet. We stayed at the Parisian Courtyard B&B in the Garden District, which I highly recommend; friends manage it, and do so very well. We met them and more friends for drinks and dinner at the Avenue Pub around the corner—their tater tots “poutine” with roux are great. As are the cocktails, which meant that I went on an swamp tour with Airboat Adventures with a hangover. It was a warm day, but still winter, so this was the biggest gator we saw.

Amusingly enough, I managed to take a better eagle photo here than I did at Conowingo Dam. You can see it in my highlight reel:

I found a hiking trail in Baton Rouge called Frenchtown Conservation Area and hiked in the rain, and saw a few birds. I also went looking for the sunken S.S. Brookline ferry in the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, but it is now completely submerged. By then, the cold snap had rolled in. It’s brutally frigid, and mercifully we’ve had zero precipitation to freeze the roads. I hope the drive home is as pleasant as the drive down has been.

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate.