Avery Island, New Iberia & Breaux Bridge: Tabasco, Bayou Teche & Lazy Mornings

Edmund McIlhenny began making Tabasco pepper sauce on Avery Island in 1868, using Capsicum frutescens peppers grown on the island's unusual salt dome soil, Avery Island rock salt, and aged red wine vinegar — a formula that has not substantially changed in 155 years. Avery Island is one of five salt domes in Iberia Parish, rising 163 feet above the surrounding marsh on a massive underground pillar of rock salt that was first mined during the Civil War. The free factory tour covers the three-year barrel aging process, the pepper mash room, and the bottling line; the gift shop has the world's largest selection of Tabasco products and the museum displays original 19th-century correspondence and bottles.

Edward Avery McIlhenny created the Jungle Gardens on Avery Island beginning in 1895 — 250 acres of subtropical botanical garden with camellias, bamboo forest, ancient live oaks, and the extraordinary Bird City: an egret nesting colony he established in 1895 to protect great and snowy egrets from the plume hunters who were wiping them out across Louisiana. McIlhenny captured eight snowy egrets, raised them in captivity, and released them on a small island in the garden pond; their descendants now number in the tens of thousands each spring and summer, the colony visible from a viewing platform as a white mass of nesting birds in the cypress trees. The garden also contains a 1,000-year-old Chinese Buddha statue purchased in Beijing in 1936 — one of the more unexpected objects in the Louisiana landscape.

A New Iberia Cajun lunch institution near the Shadows-on-the-Teche — crawfish étouffée, fried shrimp po-boys, and the daily plate lunch specials that represent the Teche country's home cooking tradition at its most straightforward and satisfying.

The 1834 National Trust antebellum plantation house on Bayou Teche in New Iberia — Greek Revival columns reflected in the bayou, giant live oaks with Spanish moss, and one of the most complete antebellum family archives in the South. The house was occupied by four generations of the Weeks-Conrad family until 1958, remaining continuously in use and largely intact. The Union army's General N.P. Banks used it as his headquarters during the 1863 Red River Campaign; the tour covers both the antebellum grandeur and the Civil War occupation with equal candor.

Bayou Teche flows past Breaux Bridge toward Henderson Swamp — a 20,000-acre natural swamp area in the Atchafalaya Basin that is the largest river swamp in North America. From the Breaux Bridge waterfront, kayak outfitters offer gentle paddle trips down the tree-lined bayou toward the swamp, passing Creole cottages on stilts, cypress trees draped with Spanish moss, and the occasional alligator on the muddy bank. The Teche is a slow, quiet river — one of the most relaxed paddling experiences in Louisiana — with the main channel about 50 yards wide and shaded by enormous live oaks on both banks.

Downtown Breaux Bridge's main street contains a series of outdoor murals depicting the town's Cajun heritage, crawfish industry, and bayou life — a relaxed walking loop that covers the historic 1829 downtown, the Bayou Teche waterfront, and the modest but genuine Cajun cottage architecture of Rees Street and Bridge Street. The town was named for Agricole Breaux, who built a cypress bridge across the bayou in 1799 and gave the settlement its identity as a bayou crossing town.

Downtown Lafayette's Jefferson Street corridor has undergone significant revitalization — galleries, boutique shops, and independent coffeehouses fill the historic Creole storefronts around Jefferson and Vermilion streets. A leisurely afternoon walk through the downtown and the adjacent Freetown-Port Rico neighborhood (the city's historic African American cultural district) provides a good introduction to Lafayette's contemporary creative energy before the drive east.