Breaux Bridge & Lafayette, LA

We’ve had an enjoyable stay at Breaux Bridge which is called the Crawfish Capital of the World. It is a great location to work out of as it is located between Lafayette and St. Martinville. Like so many of the towns, Breaux Bridge has preserved the old buildings. We were here four years ago and visited the Longfellow Evangeline State Historical Site, took an Atchafalaya swamp tour, toured a rice mill, and visited Mcilhenny’s the maker of Tabasco sauce.

Our campground surrounds a huge stocked fishing pond.


The Cajun cuisine is fabulous here. We’ve been on the Cajun See Food Diet. If you see it – eat it. We had Pork Boudin and Crawfish Boudin (a Cajun breakfast sausage that is sold everywhere). It’s a mixture of either cooked pork or crawfish mixed with rice, onions, and secret special seasonings. We’ve also tried alligator, catfish, crawfish etouffeé, crawfish pie, shrimp, Andouille sausage, jambalaya, and cracklins. The only place you can get this cuisine in Bakersfield is at Merv’s Primecut at Brimhall and Calloway. Almost all of the restaurants have a Cajun band playing in the evening.


We visited Vermilion Ville in Lafayette, LA. It is a Cajun/Creole Heritage & Folklore Park, which is a living history museum with the purpose to preserve and interpret authentic elements of folklife and cultures of the time between 1765 and 1890.

We met a Black Creole gentleman in the French Creole style home built in the 1840s. He majored in music and played a fiddle for us after explaining the differences between Cajun and Creole music.


Spinning, weaving, quilting and textile crafts were demonstrated.

We were entertained by a gentleman playing a squeeze box inside the schoolhouse. His had only one row of buttons, which is the original way they were made. The student desks were original and they learned English, since French was spoken at home. In the classroom and the playground, speaking French was forbidden.

We then visited The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, one of the prominent churches in Lafayette. It is a Dutch-Romanesque Cathedral completed in 1916. It is huge and very attractive.


Since the water table is so shallow, coffins are placed inside above ground crypts. It is not an unusual sight to see a cemetery in the middle of a downtown area or a residential area.