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

After spending a week in Baton Rouge, Shae, Truffles and I headed an hour west to stay for a week in Lafayette. There was a lot of interesting stuff to learn while there, as well as some tasty food, so we had a great week there.

Here’s everything that we got up to in Lafayette.

Swamp Tour On Lake Martin

A couple of different people had recommended that we take a swamp tour of Lake Martin, so that was something we definitely wanted to do. There are all kinds of companies and individuals offering swamp tours; we ended up booking with Cajun Country Swamp Tours. Although their website looks like it was designed in the mid-90s, I was able to book online one night for a tour the very next day as it seemed like that was the only day we’d definitely have good weather.

Our tour guide was excellent and very knowledgeable about Lake Martin as he’d lived there and given tours for decades. Our tour cost $20 per adult which was great value as it was fun, interesting and lasted for more than two hours.

We saw all kinds of wildlife on the tour, with the best part of it being all the different alligators we saw along the way.

Billy’s Boudin

Our friends Robbie and Sandy recommended that we eat boudin (pronounced boo-dan) while in Lafayette. Eating different kinds of food has been one of the best parts of our road trip, so we certainly weren’t going to pass up on the opportunity to try boudin. In case you’re not familiar with boudin (I wasn’t before), it’s a type of sausage which, in Louisiana, often has rice mixed in and comes in several forms and flavors.

While driving into Lafayette we’d seen a billboard for Billy’s Boudin. It was fairly close to our hotel and had good reviews online, so I drove over there one evening to grab some for dinner. As mentioned above, boudin can come in several forms and flavors, so I got a bunch of different types of boudin. Billy’s Boudin had boudin balls, boudin rolls (a little like egg rolls) and hand pie/empanada style. They had a couple of different flavors as well – some were regular sausage and others were crawfish – so I got one of each flavor for the balls and rolls.

In addition to boudin, I bought some cracklins. Cracklins are like thick pieces of bacon/pork that have been deep-fried (the two small pieces on the plate below).

The cracklins were pretty good even though I’m not normally a huge fan of crispy pork like that. The boudin was very tasty, with the boudin balls being my favorite compared to the rolls and hand pie. I liked both flavors too, although the crawfish boudin was my favorite.

Lafayette Acadian Cultural Center

The Lafayette Acadian Cultural Center is a National Historical Park which provides information about the history and culture of the Acadian people.

Acadian is where we subsequently got the word Cajun, so it was very interesting (but sad) learning about their history of being exiled from their homes in Canada.

Vermilionville Historic Village

Shae visited Vermilionville Historic Village just before we checked out of our hotel; I’d stayed back to a) sleep a little later and b) finish packing. It’s a shame that I didn’t go too though as it apparently had even more fascinating information about the Acadian people, including original homes and artisans displaying Acadian crafts.

Shae wrote about both the Lafayette Acadian Cultural Center and Vermilionville Historic Village in a separate blog post, so you can check that out here.

Tabasco Factory Tour

As we left Lafayette to head to New Orleans, we took a quick detour down to Avery Island to go on a Tabasco Factory tour. Even though Shae and I aren’t big Tabasco sauce eaters, we had a great time learning about the company’s history and how it’s produced and, needless to say, especially enjoyed getting to try a couple of dozen types of Tabasco sauce.

The Tabasco Factory tour was definitely a worthwhile stop, so we’d recommend visiting there if you’ll be in the area. I wrote about the tour in more detail, so check out that post here.