April 1, 2018
Day 40
Deridder, LA to Manu, LA
Deridder, LA to Mamou, LA
miles: 65.5 elevation Flats: 0
April 1st , Happy Easter Everyone.
We left Deridder in the thick fog but by 9:30 it had cleared. By 10 we had nice sunshine. The first 28 miles were riddled with hills but nothing difficult. Miles 28-65 was flat, with some broken roads. We’ve decided that so far Louisana is losing when it comes to road repair, and today Evangeline Parish took the trophy for the worse roads we’ve ridden on thus far.
Derek and Abby are riding with us as mentioned yesterday. Derek didn’t start the day with us but did catch up by first break. He seemed a little worse for wear and explained that last night on his way back to his hotel after dinner he was turning into the motel parking lot and his bike skidded out and threw him off one way while it went a different direction. He was pretty scraped up and felt pretty sore this morning and had a late start. He rode well and finished the days ride with us.
Deep into Evageline Parish, a parish is what we would call a County at home, we started seeing lots of fields that were flooded, and not from the recent storms, but actual farm fields, and they had baskets floating in them .
so now we are all spectulating what kind of farming it could be. At break we asked the Louisanian, Tim to clarify, seems they are rice fields combined with crawfish cages. Now we didn’t guess crawfish, although Jeff did mention lobster, they are just really big crawfish, right. Mystery solved, and now we will just have to participate in a crawfish boil although after listening to George describe how one eats crawfish, I will decline.
We arrived in our destination of Mamou, LA after a long hot afternoon, the last 12 miles seemed to take forever, and the Kazan, Hotel. The Kazan Hotel is a lovely historical hotel which is said to be haunted. Ghost Hunters has been here to film their show. The owner Ms.Valerie explained the hotel and its ghostly inhabitants to us. Don’t expect I’ll sit up waiting for the gentleman or lady to appear but wonder if they will be wandering the halls of the hotel. Manou was founded in 1907 and proclaims to be the Cajun Music Capital of the World, and Fred’s Lounge on 6th street plays cajun music every Saturday morning and has been for the last 40 years. So very sorry that we are a day late for this. Its Easter Sunday and no restaurants are open, we did find an Cheveron station that had some fried chicken left, the owner rather then throwing it out sold us what he had left for $20, 3 big boxes of tasty chicken, Maggie and I made some pasta, peeled some tangerines & we took it to the pub next door to the hotel and feasted on fried chicken, pasta and beer. It was quite the party. No internet connection here so I will post this report tomorrow along with some photos I took today.
Today's ride: 66 miles (106 km)
Total: 1,811 miles (2,915 km)
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6 years ago