Easter Crawfish

While some of you 'yankees' associate Easter with lambs, bunnies, and what have you ... there's only one true way to celebrate, and that's with crawfish! Because of the move and my lack of a teaching job this spring, Jillian and I were able to whisk away Megan to Louisiana's third oldest city, Opelousas, to visit our relatives.

Other claims to fame for Opelousas, according to wikipedia are, one of the two places where YooHoo! is made, THE place for zydeco music, and host of the annual Yambilee festival. It is also, according to me and not wikipedia or any other actual media outlet, the home of Willy Boyd, the former athletic powerhouse of the Opelousas Catholic Vikings. If you want to visit him and discuss his great boyhood baseball career, let me know. He'll wax poetic about it from the comfort of his barcalounger.
The biggest challenge of the entire trip was getting there. For some ungodly reason, here was our low-budget decision on how to get to our destination. We started at 11 am driving 3 hours from Grand Rapids to Chicago Midway, a 140-minute flight to Atlanta (thankfully Megan slept most of the way), a one-hour extremely squirrely flight to New Orleans, followed up with a 2+ hr drive to the Big 'O' as we call it. All told it was over 14 hours of travel time with a one-year-old. We are officially idiots.

And if you think that's bad, on the way back our flight to Atlanta was cancelled so we hung out in the New Orleans airport from 11 am until 530 pm, and then flew to Minneapolis, then to Chicago, followed by the drive home ... which we rolled into at 330 am. Oy vey.


But all of that was worth it for two reasons; food and family. Over the weekend I was fed like Paula Dean made every dish. There was shrimp etoufee, crawfish cornbread, mashed sweet potatoes, baked hams, brownies, po'boys, fried chicken, and that's without even mentioning the crawfish.

I (heart) Opelousas. It's a small town with great people. The last time we were in town was 6 years ago for a wedding, and as soon as we arrived I knew it had been too long. I blame the problem on the heat. The only time, as a teacher, I have to really travel is in the summer, and as bad as Michigan in the winter time is, Louisiana is just as unbearable in the summer. If you're outside for longer than five minutes there in the summer, you will sweat. So the heat has kept me away for too long. But my aunts, uncles, and cousins are so welcoming that we couldn't say no this time around. Plus I had Megan coming with me, so perhaps that's why I got such a great reception.

I told my Aunt Pat that it was crazy to see her as a grandma now. Even though I'm definitely aware that I'm getting older, I seem to romanticize the people in my life and just assume they don't age. So it's crazy that the cousins I was playing football/baseball with 22 years ago are now approaching the age my aunts and uncles were when I was little and that I somehow still imagine them to be. Perhaps it's a testament to their great anti-aging abilities that they still look the same as they always do, but it just affected me for some reason. Not sure if that happens to you too.


But while there we wanted to immerse Megan in the full experience, despite the fact I KNOW she won't remember one moment of this trip (save for pictures). We went on a swamp tour with my parents and sister's family. We were determined to have Megan meet a real, live gator. So, we boarded an antiquated pontoon boat that puttered along the Atchafalaya, we saw four real, live gators. And it was awesome.


But the highlight was the crawfish boil at my Uncle Jerry's house. Close to 80 family and friends gathered for hanging out, catching up, easter egg hunt, and just general chicanery. I wondered how Megan would react to so many people and to the food, and she was phenomenal. She loves to people watch and this was a smorgasboard for her. Her 8-year-old cousin Seth acted as a surrogate babysitter watching over her and giving her limitless forehead kisses to help soothe her throughout the day.


So in the course of Saturday afternoon, she touched/held a live crawfish. Which was so great. I think she was too ignorant to know she was supposed to be afraid of it, and went grabbing for it with both hands. Then, once boiled, she was popping 'em back faster than we could peel 'em. So much so, she cried when we couldn't shovel them in fast enough. I've never been more proud of her.
Later in the day, she took part in an Easter Egg hunt. Although for her it was more of an Easter Egg sit. We got her to her first egg and she just sat there, laughed, and shook her egg. Thankfully cousins Seth and Christian delivered eggs to her so she could celebrate at 'finding' some eggs for her basket.
And finally, even though she can't walk, she CAN drive! Her Opelousas cousins are 3, and they have these motorized cars that she was completely enamored with. So she 'drove' a John Deere truck and a convertible Jeep that has an actual working radio in it. The Jeep ended up in a fence while she was jamming to 'Just Dance' by Lady GaGa. That was not the proudest moment. All I could envision was 15 years into the future and watching my insurance premiums skyrocket.



But overall the extended weekend was so wonderful. I'm glad Megan got to 'meet' everybody, I was able to catch up with my sister's family, and enjoy some good Southern cooking. I promised it wouldn't be 6 more years before we came back, and I'm hopeful that will be a true statement. So thanks to all for for a great first trip to Louisiana for Megan.