Marriage, Cajuns and 2014-So. America

 

After Diane and I returned home in mid-September 2013, our first order of business was to complete the marriage license application that had come in the mail.  We sent it, along with a check for the fee, to Wapello County, Iowa.  We also picked up our wedding rings.  The weekend after my quiet birthday, Diane and I were in Denver for a four-day visit with our friends.  Then a little over a week later, we were in the car with Larry and Carl headed to Iowa.  At the Wapello County Courthouse, we picked up the marriage certificate form and the certificate before continuing to Iowa City and checking into a gay bed and breakfast. 

We relaxed until time for the judge to arrive.  She had clearly done this a time or two.  She asked us if we had some special vows, and neither couple did.  Diane and I agreed to go first.  As the judge read our vows, we were very pleased that they hit all the right notes for us, not too flowery and not at all religious, yet sincere and meaningful.  We exchanged rings and kissed.  Then it was Larry and Carl’s turn.  Not unexpectedly, Larry was very emotional.  I think we were all happy when it was over, the papers were all completed and it was time to go to our celebratory dinner.  We had a nice table with a curtain around it for our privacy.  The next day, we drove home, stopping by the Wapello County courthouse to drop off the forms with the judge’s signature.

We didn’t have a photographer at the wedding.  Later in the month, the four of us met at our house.  We all dressed as we were for the wedding, and a friend took our pictures.

Carl and Larry

 

 

Me and Diane

 

 

About ten days later, we were off on another trip with Road Scholar: The Cajun Experience in Music, Food, and Dance, Louisiana-History & Culture.  We flew to Lafayette, LA through Dallas/Ft. Worth, arriving mid-day.  Leaving our luggage at the hotel, we walked up the street to the Blue Dog Cafe for Sunday brunch.  We settled in with a Bloody Mary at the bar, and then were seated at a table right in front of the band stand where a local group of musicians entertained us for the next hour or so.    We had the seafood buffet with all the champagne you wanted.  It was a nice start to our "honeymoon."

The next morning, our tour guide picked us up at the hotel by for The Atchafalaya Experience, a Swamp Tour.  He drove to his parent’s home to pick up his boat, and we continued to the visitor’s center on the Interstate where he picked up three young people.  The boat access was nearby, and we were all soon on the water.  He told us that most of the canals and channels we were going through were not natural, but made by Texaco when they were developing a big oil field.  Texaco had agreed to donate the area to the state of Louisiana when their work was completed.  They were in the process of  taking their equipment apart and removing it.  We saw a couple of floating cranes digging out contaminated soil and loading it on a barge for removal. We drove through many areas, seeing birds (great blue herons, great egrets, anhinga, cormorants, red-shouldered hawks, kingfishers and several varieties of ducks among others) and alligators of various sizes from REAL big to youngsters.  In one large area, the boat driver demonstrated the presence of Asian Carp by driving fast around in circles.  At the sound of the engines, they became excited and started leaping out of the water.  We had heard stories about these fish in the Missouri River jumping into fishermen’s boats and knocking them over.  It was a beautiful day and we really enjoyed the three-and-a-half-hour ride.

Me, boat captain and other passengers

 

 

Equipment used for dredging

 

 

Swamp

 

 

Bird on nest

 

 

Alligators

 

 

On our way back to town our guide recommended a place for lunch, the Olde Tyme Grocery.  It had also been recommended in a New York Times article about Lafayette.  He dropped us off and we ordered shrimp poor boys and a bottle of beer.  The hotel shuttle picked us up and we freshened up for the Road Scholar meeting at 4:30. As expected, the average age of the almost 40 people was about 75.  We had a horrible group dinner of hotel-prepared sparse salad, dull jambalaya, dead broccoli, and tasteless pecan pie.  I am going to talk a lot about what we ate because it was a focus of the trip.

Olde Tyme Grocery

 

 

The following morning, our group boarded the University of Louisiana-Lafayette red bus and drove through the city to the Jean Lafitte National Park.  This location focused on Acadian Culture, featuring stories of the origins, migration, settlement and contemporary culture of the Acadians (Cajuns).  We saw two films and then viewed the exhibits in the museum.  The families of many Cajuns were expelled from the Acadian area of Nova Scotia in the late 1700s.  They were Catholic, spoke French and were farmers or fishermen.  They brought their culture to Southern Louisiana.

Red bus

 

 

It was a short distance to Vermilionville, a living history museum and folklife park that preserved and represented the cultural resources of the Acadian, Native American and Creole cultures from 1765 to 1890.  Our tour guide, an Indian chief, showed us the attractions, including seven restored original homes with more than 13 local artisans providing demonstrations on a variety of essential crafts performed by the early settlers, like spinning, wood carving and brick making.  We ate lunch in their Performing Arts Center.  It was a tasty gumbo, with a rich broth made with roux and chicken and sausage pieces over rice, potato salad and a piece of bread (the requisite three starches in Lafayette).  The dessert was a very good bread pudding, and I had two pieces.

Our guide with the group including me

 

 

Spinning

 

 

Playing a historic accordion

 

 

We went back to the hotel for a break.  We then had a two-hour class on the history of Louisiana taught by a local community college instructor.  You might think it would be boring, but she was very good and kept most of us awake, most of the time.  Louisiana probably has one of the more interesting histories of any state in the country.

We opted out of the included dinner at the hotel and went to another of the restaurants recommended in the New York Times article, Steve and Pat’s Bon Temps Grill.  The hotel shuttle took us there and back.  We started off with a bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and an appetizer of garlic panneed frog legs laced in an herb, butter, garlic cream sauce (French influence).  Then Diane had a grilled, speckled trout with a satsuma creole meuniere sauce accompanied by sage sweet potato mash and grilled asparagus.  Satsuma is a local variety of oranges seldom seen in Columbia.  I had grilled mahi mahi with an herb cream sauce, accompanied by a side salad and braised brussels sprouts.  We split an apple in our hotel room for dessert.

The next day was full of music starting with a local fiddler, David Greely.  He began by telling us the story of his ancestors leaving for Acadia in the early 1600s from an area in France that held the roots of Cajun music.  He demonstrated how the music changed over the years by playing songs from different places and times.  He spoke about the folklore of the Acadians, including tall tales and other stories.

Next we boarded the red bus for a tour of the downtown and university areas, viewing murals designed and painted by a well-known local muralist, Robert Dafford.  We stopped for lunch at Dwyer’s Café.  It was a ‘plate lunche’.  We went through a line where we could order one meat, three side dishes, bread and a drink.  Generous portions of all these items are piled high on a plate.  Lunch was traditionally the largest meal of the day in Cajun country.  On our way back to the hotel, we stopped by St. John’s Cathedral to view the huge 500-year-old live oak tree, the 2nd largest in the country.  The architecture of the church was unusual, Dutch-Romanesque style.  We then paused at the swamp in the middle of the University campus, viewing an alligator, turtles and great egret.

Back at the hotel, we could relax until our lessons in the Cajun Waltz and Cajun Two-Step.  The waltz was easy compared to the two-step.  We even accomplished both a single and a double twirl as well as a single and a half that ended up with us side-by-side.  The two-step was so fast we pooped out.  They played good Cajun music preparing us for our Friday night test on a restaurant/bar dance floor. 

Our group leader was in the continuing education department at the University.  She grew up in the area and gave an hour-long discussion of local food traditions, ingredients and recipes. She showed us a movie about local eateries, including the place where we had lunch. Dinner was at the Hub City Diner.  We had chosen our dishes from a list earlier in the day.  Dinner salads were on the tables along with a glass of water.  Diane had a plate with blackened catfish and shrimp etouffee.  I had a cobb salad with fried shrimp.  We each ordered a local beer and were served bread pudding for dessert.

We started the next day with a talk by a man who gave up being a professor at the local university to go live in the Atchafalaya Basin.  He worked with a group that was trying to save the swamp and the life-style it supports by enforcing laws against more logging of cypress trees and laws requiring oil companies to return the land to its original state when they stopped using it.  He shared many stories and pictures dating back decades that described what life was like in the past and how it had changed.

We boarded the red bus and drove to Poche’s, a market and plate lunch restaurant in rural Breaux Bridge.  I had crawfish etouffee (crawfish sauce over rice), crunchy mashed sweet potatoes and coleslaw while Diane substituted corn maque choux for coleslaw.  The sweet potatoes tasted like they were sweetened with cane syrup.  We got a small sweet dough pie with a coconut filling just to see what it was like.  It was mainly crust, not really sweet, cakelike with the crust having a ton of nutmeg.  After sampling some of it, we gave the rest to our student bus driver.  Diane picked up a couple of bottles of hot sauces.

Poster for Poche’s

 

 

We proceeded to McGee’s Landing for another swamp tour.  The group boarded a covered boat, which was good because it was a sunny day but still chilly.  We were surprised that with the noise of the big boat and the number of people on it, the alligators were letting us approach them so closely and the Asian carp were still jumping.  We were glad we had taken the earlier swamp tour on a smaller boat.

We were back at the hotel for a short time before leaving for the Martin Accordion Factory where a family band taught us about accordions and played music for us.  We received a full explanation about the reeds in an accordion.  The family band consisted of the grandfather, the daughter (who may have been a lesbian) and a young nephew.  They played different types of music, answered all of our questions and thoroughly entertained us for two hours.

For dinner, we stopped at Deano’s Pizza.  We had never eaten pizza prepared this way.  The crust was thin and topped with olive oil rather than a tomato sauce.  We had a choice of three pizza options:  Cajun Executioner, with pepperoni, hot sausage, spicy shrimp, onions, bell peppers and jalapenos; Jacques Boudreaux, with shrimp, crawfish and crabmeat; and Muffaletta Pie, with ham, salami, olives and mozzarella cheese.  Diane and I enjoyed a bottle of wine and all the pizza we could eat.

The next day began with a drive to New Iberia, so called because it was settled by several families from the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe.  However, they were quickly absorbed into the Cajun culture and all that remained of the Spanish influence were the last names.  We toured the Shadows on the Teche, a white columned brick plantation house.

 We then drove to Avery Island (which is not really an island) to tour the Tabasco factory and company store.  Diane loved it, even sampling the Raspberry Chipotle and Jalapeno ice creams.  Then we went to Landry’s Seafood and Steak for a lunch buffet, mostly fried foods, like catfish and shrimp.  But they did have a salad/soup bar and more bread pudding with rum sauce.

After a rest at the hotel, we had our second dance lesson on the Cajun waltz and two-step.  I couldn’t really say we improved much, but we were still hoping for a certificate.  To receive it, we had to eat a bite of boudin, a soft sausage of beef and/or pork and rice.  You don’t eat the casing; just pull the sausage out with your teeth.  We both received our certificates which declared us Honorary Cajuns.

Diane and I had a cocktail at the hotel bar, knowing that Diane at least might try to dance after swigging alcoholic lubricant.  Our guide then took us to the Pont Breaux Cajun Restaurant.  It was like a cowboy bar, very local.  There was a band with a couple of guitars, drums and accordion.  The dance floor was pretty small, but had a lot of action.  Most of us just enjoyed watching the locals.  Diane and I started on a bottle of Woodbridge wine (the only option) and half way through it, Diane was ready to try the Cajun waltz.  WE MADE IT.  She even volunteered to try it again later.  This was the kind of place we would never go in on our own, but with a group it was a great experience.  We had the house special which was grilled catfish with a small-shrimp sauce, rice, bread and baked potato, the requisite three starches.  Then we had a choice of cheese cake or bread pudding for dessert.

Dance floor

 

 

Well, the next day did not turn out as expected, or we would have made it home to Columbia.  At the airport we found out that the flight to Columbia from Dallas/Ft. Worth was cancelled so we opted to spend the night in Lafayette, rather than the Texas airport.  We got vouchers for the same flights the next day.  They gave us a lodging voucher at the Hilton where we had been staying, but they would not give us food vouchers.  There were two more restaurants that had been on our list of good places to eat Cajun food in the New York Times.  We took the hotel shuttle to Jolie’s for lunch, very French.  Diane had an Oyster Po’Boy with a dark beer and I had Louisiana shrimp and crab meat, tasso (a smoked seasoning meat) gravy, two fried yard eggs (from free range chickens), buttermilk biscuit (which was more like a bread pudding than a biscuit) and a glass of white wine.  The gravy was wonderful and I found some bits of crab meat in the gravy sauce.

We walked back to the hotel.  It made us really appreciate Columbia’s push to have walkable sidewalks.  Craig was able to get us good seat assignments for our new flights home, and we printed out the boarding passes.  In the afternoon, we went to a movie.

At dinner time, we called for the hotel shuttle and it delivered us to the next (and last) restaurant, the Café Vermilionville.  It was housed in an old historic building, and we had the full white tablecloth treatment.  You might guess that we were not really hungry, so we each got a cup of the crab/corn bisque and split the entrée of the Gulf Coast Acadian.  The fish of the day was grilled grouper.  This was served with shrimp, crabmeat, corn and peppers in a beurre blanc sauce and parmesan risotto.  To accompany our food, we had a bottle of Sonoma-Cutrer (Russian River) Chardonnay.  The next day everything went perfectly and we were home to spend the night in our own bed.

The rest of November and December we were busy meeting friends at restaurants and at each other’s homes, as well as all our other activities.  On November 14, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon announced an executive order to allow same-sex couples married in other jurisdictions to file joint state income taxes if they filed joint federal returns.  Craig spent Christmas and New Year’s at our home.  Harry and Nancy had their annual New Year’s dinner at their country house.  It was another good year for us. On the negative side, Diane was not able to figure out much on her Apple Mac beyond the basics, and her cooking was not as good as it once was.  To me, the flavors were missing, but she didn’t seem to notice.  On the positive side, it was good that she was still an excellent traveling companion, because 2014 was going to be busier than 2013 had been.

Yes, another year of big travel was coming up.  It was good for us that not much was happening with national or state politics.  There was no Presidential election and no U.S. Senate contest in Missouri.  The only state executive branch office on the ballot was for state auditor, and the Democrats did not even have a candidate.  The U.S. Representative for the district in which Diane and I lived was a Republican incumbent, and the Democratic opponent had no chance of winning given the way our district lines were drawn.  It seemed like Democrats were in for a difficult time.  There would be nonpartisan elections for our city council and the school board.  Not an exciting political year. 

We were looking forward to our first trip of 2014 even though we mainly signed up for it because of the pre-trip and the ending visit to Rio de Janeiro.  In mid-January we left Columbia for Buenos Aires and the next morning continued on the pre-trip to Puerto Iguazu Airport for the tour of Iguazu National Park in Argentina.  Iguazu means ‘great waters’ in the language of the indigenous Guarani people. Iguazu Falls has over 275 individual cascades or cataracts.  The combined flow of these individual falls is the largest of any waterfall in the world.  It is much taller than Niagara Falls and is twice as wide. 

From the park entrance, our first activity was a visit Devil’s Throat.  We rode a mini train (the Rainforest Ecological Train) to a trail that led to a variegated iron walkway.  It was a good thing it was a sturdy walkway as at each cataract, people lined the railing for a view.  For almost a mile, the walkway spanned a river and, ending at a lookout station that provided views down through the mist into the Devil’s Throat.  While walking along, I saw a lot of wildlife. In the water I saw the outline of a huge catfish and many turtles.  On land I saw a coati with its ringed tail, a blue plush-crested jay bird with a beautiful light blue dot above its eye and a scissor-tailed flycatcher.  On my way back, I fell on the moist walkway, but was able to pull myself up by the railings.  Then we did land trails of what were called the Superior Circuit and the Inferior Circuit, viewing even more waterfalls.

Me and Diane are ready to see the falls

 

 

Iguazu train

 

 

Walkway

 

 

Devil’s Throat

 

 

Catfish

 

 

Turtle

 

 

Jay bird

 

 

Flycatcher

 

 

More waterfalls with rainbow

 

 

The Falls form the border between Argentina and Brazil.  Our group boarded a bus on the Argentine side that took us through border control to our Brazilian side lodging.  We had to pay for visas from both countries.  The next morning, we saw the Falls from the Brazilian side.  There was only one trail of almost a mile which had steps and many viewpoints along the way.  At one of them, two of our fellow Olivia travelers donned Seattle Seahawk hats, green hair and football jerseys. They held up a sign for the Seahawk’s ‘Legion of Boom’ secondary (football).  They hoped that the photos their friends took of them would be used by a TV show when they got home.  We took a leisurely walk along the circuit and spent the afternoon around the swimming pool at our lodging talking with the other guests.

Walkway

 

 

Seahawk fans

 

 

Me and Diane in front of falls

 

 

Brazilian falls

 

 

Me relaxing poolside with other Olivia travelers

 

 

After the flight back to Buenos Aires for our second visit to the city, we had a half day city tour starting at San Telmo’s kapok tree, the colorful neighborhood of La Boca, the city square or Plaza de Mayo where again there were demonstrations, the new port or Puerto Madero and the stop at the burial spot for Eva Peron in the Recoleta Cemetery.  After a stop at our lodging, we left for dinner and a tango show at Rojo Tango.  The food was unremarkable and the show was very touristy.

Kapok tree

 

 

Still demonstrating

 

 

The next morning started with a tour of Teatro Colon, the main opera house in Buenos Aires.  It was very beautiful with stained glass and costumes on display.  We were seated in the auditorium where lyric singers gave us a demonstration of the acoustics.  Then we went to a bar, were given a glass of champagne and two male singers each sang solos for us and then a duet.  We then went to an Italian restaurant where we had more wine and a three-course lunch before boarding the ship.  It was a chartered Seven Seas luxury vessel, the Silver Cloud. 

Diane and me in the auditorium

 

 

Singing a duet

 

 

          Seven Seas ship

           

          It was a short distance to our first stop in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital.  We only had to sail across the Rio de la Plata, the muddy estuary of the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers which form part of the border between Argentina and Uruguay.  I knew very little about Uruguay and learned that it has a relatively high standard of living, is peaceful and same-sex sexual activity has been legal with an equal age of consent since 1934.  Anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT people have been in place there since 2004. We then left on a shore excursion starting with the Plaza Independencia, the most important square in Montevideo, featuring the Artigas Mausoleum housing the remains of José Artigas, the man who declared Uruguay’s independence from Spain at the beginning of the 19th century.  We saw the government buildings, sculptures in Prado Park, the Plaza de la Armada Nacional and the gorgeous sandy beach on The Rambla.  We stepped inside the Castillo Pittamiglio, a culture center of unusual design inside and out, where we had a tango demonstration.  Some of our Olivia guests who had competed in the Gay Olympics in ballroom dancing joined in the tango.

Artigas Statue

 

 

Horse Cart Sculpture in Prado Park

 

 

Plaza de la Armada Nacional

 

 

Castillo Pittamiglio

 

 

Tango dancers

 

 

Our next port of call, Punta del Este, was only a short distance up the coast of Uruguay.  Our first visit on our shore excursion was to the El Faro Punta Del Este lighthouse.  Diane always loved to see a lighthouse.  We walked along the street paralleling the beach and saw the realistic sculpture of the Fingers of Punta del Este sticking up out of the sand and the handmade scrap iron statue of a horse, among other sculptures.

El Faro Punta Del Este lighthouse.

 

 

Diane in front of the Fingers of Punta del Este

 

 

Our bus then took us to The Fundacion Pablo Atchugarry, a nonprofit institution created by the internationally known Uruguayan artist Pablo Atchugarry, best known for his abstract sculptures and marble works which resemble the monoliths of early civilizations.  After seeing some of his work, I realized we had driven by one of his large outdoor pieces on the way to his studios.  A staff member demonstrated the process of creating a sculpture from a piece of marble, and then we were free to walk around the spacious working studios and the outdoor sculpture garden. 

Workplace for creating marble sculptures

 

 

Outdoor sculpture garden

 

 

Our final visit was to the Ralli Museum of Contemporary Art, the first before others opened in Chili, Israel and Spain.  The large building boasted one of the most important collections of Latin American art in the world, as well as works by renowned European artists.  I particularly enjoyed the contemporary paintings by Marc Chagall and Latin American artists, and the surrealistic art by Salvador Dali.

Salvador Dali sculpture

 

Sculpture garden

 

 

Our day at sea was uneventful.  Our friends from the China trip, Fran and Leslie, asked us to dine with them and their other friends in the ship’s special restaurant.  We were at sea because of the much longer distance to our next destination, Santos, Brazil which is near Sao Paulo, a busy seaport.  Our shore excursion there was not very interesting, consisting of a visit to a coffee museum, the Vila Belmiro Stadium football (soccer) stadium and the Orchidarium.  We had seen better orchid displays at the annual orchid event at the St. Louis Botanical Gardens.  The next day was also not very exciting.  A walking tour was scheduled for our visit to Paraty, Brazil, named after a local swamp fish.  Its Portuguese colonial center had cobbled streets and 17th- and 18th-century buildings dating to its time as a port, during the Brazilian Gold Rush.  Still, it was a charming place to visit with colorful houses and verdant gardens.

Me waiting with our tour group in the shade in Paraty, Brazi

 

 

Our ship arrived late for our final port of call at the bustling port of Rio de Janeiro.  As it was our last night aboard the ship, our waiters entertained us at dinner.  The evening’s concert was wonderful, featuring a great lineup of Olivia stars: Vickie Shaw, Teresa Trull, Barbara Higbie, and Karen Williams.

 On our way into the very busy and crowded city, our first stop was at the statue of Pedro I, nicknamed “the Liberator.”  He was the founder and first ruler of the Empire of Brazil having led the revolution against Portugal.  Next, we stopped at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian which is very tall, but has a modern design based on the Mayan architectural style of pyramids.  The inside of the cathedral was even more amazing with the stained-glass windows also in the modern style.  Our tour took us by the public square in the old city center and the Theatro Municipal, an opera house.

Outside of the Metropolitan Cathedral

 

 

Inside the Metropolitan Cathedral

 

 

The Theatro Municipal

 

 

Finally, we reached the cable car ride to the top of the mountain called Sugarloaf.  It stands at the mouth of the bay on a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean.  Its name came from the shape into which sugar was molded for transport on ships.  A good reason for going up the mountain are the spectacular views in all directions.

Cable cars going to or leaving Sugarloaf

 

 

Top of Sugar Loaf

 

 

Back down the mountain, we arrived at our last night’s lodging that was across from the famous Copacabana beach. That night we had dinner at a local Churrascaria, where roving waiters served the barbecued meats from large skewers directly onto our plates.  Dinner was followed by a show at Plataforma.  It seemed like the performance attempted to show the entire history and complexity of the country with a variety of scenes each having a large number of dancers in a variety of very elaborate costumes, even including acrobatics.  It was over the top!

Copacabana beach

 

 

Dancers

 

 

The last morning of our trip, we looked out our hotel windows admiring the beach at Copacabana.  It was so large and lovely that it got me thinking of another beach a short walk away spoken of in the song The Girl from Ipanema.  The smooth beach was well maintained and well populated.  I was very glad we had seen Iguacu Falls at the beginning of our trip, as that for me had been the best part.  I also enjoyed the visits to both cities in Uruguay, but not so much the visits in Brazil.  I was disappointed to find that I did not develop the same positive feelings for Rio de Janeiro as I had for Buenos Aires and would not care to return.