Our Week In Baton Rouge, Louisiana – Here’s What We Did

Our first stop in Louisiana was Baton Rouge for a week. Our time in Louisiana’s state capital was fairly low key due to work and bad weather, but we did find some fun and great food in between.

Here’s a quick recap of what we got up to in Baton Rouge.

Otter Swim At Barn Hill Preserve

The week started off well as Shae got to enjoy a Christmas gift from her mom and stepdad – an otter swim at Barn Hill Preserve in nearby Ethel.

The experience turned out to be even better than she’d been expecting as tickets for the otter swim include a tour of the preserve where they have all kinds of other animals, including an opportunity to hold a baby sloth. You can read more about Shae’s experience here.

Shopping

While Shae was out at the otter swim, I took Truffles out to some stores as she had cabin fever after moving day on the Saturday and being stuck in the hotel on Sunday while we worked.

The great thing is that our hotel was within walking distance of several pet-friendly stores. We only visited a couple – PetSmart and Lowe’s – but Bed Bath & Beyond and Old Navy were along the same strip and both those stores are pet-friendly too. This is something we usually do when it’s rainy for a few days as it means Truffles gets to wander around without us all getting wet.

Gatti’s Pizza

Our Amex Gold credit cards have a $10 monthly dining credit that can be used at a handful of restaurant chains, along with Grubhub and Seamless. We tend to use them for Grubhub and while in Baton Rouge we ordered regular pizza and dessert pizza from Gatti’s Pizza.

I actually got dinner from somewhere else, but Shae really enjoyed her pizza. What was truly amazing though was the dessert. They no longer offered the dessert they had listed on Grubhub, so when they called to advise of that, we switched it for their S’more’s pizza. Oh man, it was incredible. I don’t know if it was the dough, all the chocolate or the marshmallows, but I would happily eat that for dessert every day if I could. I’m sure it’s not everyone’s cup of tea slice of pizza, but it certainly was ours.

Evergreen Plantation

When asking for suggestions of things to do in Louisiana, we received a lot of recommendations for tours of different plantation homes, many of which were less than an hour from Baton Rouge.

Money and time meant we wouldn’t have time to visit them all, so we picked one that we thought would offer the most unique experience – Evergreen Plantation.

The main house is beautiful, but is smaller than you might imagine as it’s only one room deep as the large wraparound porch was regarded as part of the living space. The plantation had numerous other buildings on site along with oak trees covered in Spanish moss.

One of the most notable features of Evergreen Plantation are its collection of 22 original slave cabins. As a result of this being on site, Evergreen Plantation has been used as a filming location for numerous TV shows and movies including Roots and Django Unchained.

B&C Seafood Riverside & Cajun Restaurant

Evergreen Plantation has a museum area in addition to the guided tour. After checking out the museum’s exhibits, we still had about an hour before our tour was due to start. We asked for a recommendation of somewhere to have lunch nearby and they recommended B&C Seafood Riverside & Cajun Restaurant. This is a restaurant someone had actually recommended to us already (thanks Sheila!), but I’d missed that it was so close to Evergreen Plantation as we hadn’t initially planned on eating out for lunch that day.

This was our first taste of proper Louisiana food and it was a fantastic introduction. Our server recommended the chicken and sausage gumbo and the crawfish stew, so we ordered both to share.

Our meal came with sides of potato salad, bread and corn and was very flavorful – definitely a great recommendation.

State Capitol

We arranged a late check-out from our hotel on our final day in Baton Rouge so that we could head downtown to visit the State Capitol building. Louisiana has the tallest Capitol building in the US which is one of the reasons we wanted to check it out before leaving.

We took a short self-guided tour of the building which included the House and Senate Chambers. There wasn’t any political activity that day though as we visited on a Saturday.

One of the best parts of visiting Louisiana’s State Capitol building is that you can take a couple of elevators up to the 27th floor where there’s an outdoor viewing platform. While Baton Rouge doesn’t have the greatest skyline, it was still fun getting to experience this at a State Capitol building.

Louisiana’s Old State Capitol

One of the reasons we like to visit each state’s Capitol building is because most of them have a gift shop where we can buy a pin in the shape of the state. We don’t tend to get souvenirs on our road trip seeing as pretty much everything we own is in our car which limits space for additional items. State pins have therefore been a great way to get something to remember the trip by without it taking up much space.

The thing is, Louisiana’s State Capitol doesn’t have a gift shop. When asking one of the employees there where we might be able to get a state pin, he suggested Louisiana’s Old State Capitol as it’s now a museum which has a gift shop.

There was some kind of event going on nearby that day, so we had a hard time finding somewhere to park. As a result, I dropped Shae off outside and she ran in to have a look while I drove around the block.

Their old State Capitol building was somewhat unconventional too compared to other State Capitols as it looked more like a castle from the outside. While most states have an ornate circular dome atop their Capitol buildings that look fairly similar, Louisiana’s old one has a stained glass dome supported by a column.

Cou-yon’s Cajun Bar-B-Q

Our final stop in Baton Rouge was Cou-yon’s Cajun Bar-B-Q for lunch and what a great final stop it was. Decently priced, amazing brisket, chicken and pulled pork and surprisingly tasty bread pudding with Jack Daniel’s whiskey sauce. You can read more in my review of it here to see why it’s now in my top three favorite BBQ places we’ve eaten at so far on our road trip.