Crackling Festival near Abbeville, Louisiana…

We left Fontainebleau State Park north of New Orleans and hit the road for our 165 mile drive westward. I am certainly happy to be heading west again and looking forward to our adventures this coming year. We drove about halfway over to Abbeville Louisiana and stopped at a truck stop just west of Baton Rouge. We stopped there so we could stock up on the makings for a month of happy hour snacks and beverages. As you know we will be at Betty’s RV Park where there is happy hour every day at 4:30 pm so we needed to stock up.

Our quick run to Costco and Trader Joes yielded plenty of goodies for us to share at happy hour with the rest of Betty’s RV Park. The remaining drive went off without a hitch but the road south on 90 out of Lafayette Louisiana may be the roughest road we have been on to date and that includes a lot a bad roads throughout the USA!!!

We have been at Betty’s since Friday afternoon and have settled into our our site. February is usually the coldest month in this part of Louisiana but it has been unseasonably mild here according to Betty. We are glad especially since we will be here a month this year. It may be mild but it sure was stormy yesterday with tornadoes hitting much of the area west of us. We were fortunate to have had nothing more than one severe thunderstorm warning about 20 miles north of us. We really feel for those who lost their lives and RV’s in eastern Louisiana to a tornado yesterday.

Our first few days of weather were perfect here. One day we headed down to Palmetto Island State Park to attend the Crackling Festival there. For those that don’t know what a crackling or cracklin’ is let me tell you.

Cracklins are made from pork skin including not only the skin but also some of the attached fat and meat. The pork skin is cut up into cube sized pieces and dropped into a large kettle of hot hog lard. There it will cooked for several hours as the frying renders most of the fat out that is attached. So although they may start with a large chunk of pork skin by the time it is done rendering it reduces considerably in size. It changes from a soft piece of meat, fat and skin to a most delicious treat. A crackly, crunchy chunk of pure deliciousness with a wonderful “bacony” flavor. Since this was a contest we visited with many of the competitors and enjoyed watching how they were preparing their cracklings.

There were all kinds of cracklings to try and since this is Cajun country where they want to make sure everybody is full and happy, they also put out trays of homemade beignets (powdery deep fried Cajun pastries), sausages, boudin ( a rice/meat sausage), as well as fried apples and bananas. This event was entirely free as long as you paid the $2.00 per head to enter the state park. Now that is a heck of deal and ton’s of fun too!!!