North Shore Escape: Covington, Mandeville & the Global Wildlife Center

Begin the day at Coffee Science on Lee Lane in Covington — the North Shore's best specialty coffee shop in a Victorian storefront, with single-origin pour-overs, house-baked pastries, and a relaxed neighborhood atmosphere that captures the Covington character: smart, unhurried, locally rooted. Lee Lane itself is the most pleasant pedestrian street in St. Tammany Parish, lined with boutiques, galleries, and garden shops under live oak canopy.

Bogue Falaya Park occupies a bend in the river of the same name — a blackwater river draining the longleaf pine uplands of St. Tammany Parish into Lake Pontchartrain. The park's shaded picnic tables, boat launch, and easy riverside walking trail make it one of the most relaxing outdoor stops in Covington. The water is clear and dark (stained by tannins from the pines), and in summer the park functions as a swimming hole for North Shore families.

Old Mandeville's lakefront seawall runs for half a mile along Lake Pontchartrain, lined with Victorian cottages and live oaks that shade the sidewalk cafés and the small boat launch. The view south across the lake toward New Orleans — 24 miles of open water with the city skyline faint on the horizon — is one of Louisiana's great understated panoramas. The Tammany Trace rail-trail begins at the western end of the waterfront; the Mandeville Trailhead Park has a beach, a kayak launch, and picnic tables under the oaks.

Pontchartrain Vineyards is a working Louisiana winery producing wines from muscadine grapes and hybrid varietals suited to the hot, humid Gulf Coast climate. The tasting room on the North Shore offers afternoon tastings of their fruit wines, muscadine reds, and seasonal special releases — a relaxed stop that highlights Louisiana's small but growing winemaking tradition.

A North Shore dinner institution on the Mandeville waterfront — Gulf seafood in a comfortable setting with lake views, including the chargrilled oysters, crab-stuffed flounder, and the North Shore's beloved barbecue shrimp over grits. The lakeside tables are the most sought-after in the house.

The Global Wildlife Center in Folsom, Louisiana occupies 3,600 acres of rolling St. Tammany Parish hills that support the largest free-roaming wildlife preserve in the United States — herds of giraffe, zebra, elk, fallow deer, llama, camel, and over 900 other animals roam freely across the property without fences or barriers. Visitors tour the preserve in covered wagons, armed with feed pellets, as the animals approach voluntarily — a giraffe lowering its long neck to take food directly from your outstretched hand is a genuinely memorable experience. The 90-minute tour covers the full 3,600 acres; morning tours are generally cooler and more active.

Bogue Chitto NWR preserves 37,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and swamp along the Bogue Chitto River — a blackwater tributary of the Pearl River in Washington and St. Tammany parishes. The refuge's quiet river access points make excellent picnic and canoe launch sites; the Bogue Chitto is calm and clear, shaded by cypress and tupelo, and one of the cleanest rivers in Louisiana for a midday riverside lunch.

The Bogue Chitto River offers some of the best flatwater canoeing in Louisiana — a clear blackwater river with a sandy bottom, cypress shade, and the sound of wood ducks and pileated woodpeckers in the surrounding bottomland forest. Local outfitters in Franklinton and Washington Parish rent canoes and kayaks for half-day floats; the river's gentle current makes this accessible to all skill levels and is one of the most relaxing afternoon activities in the North Shore region.