Today we went to lunch at Billy’s Boudin and Cracklins, a place Jim found that was highly rated for it’s Boudin balls, a mix of ground pork, rice and spices fried into a batter. Gotta keep trying local stuff! We had that and the Cracklins, I can’t even describe what they were except it seemed to me it was just some fried batter and spices. And also Boudin roll ups, same as Boudin balls but shaped like an egg roll. Now I’m sure to some people this stuff is wonderful but we both got about 2 bites of each before it was on its way to the trash. Apparently Jamie’s grandmother in law from Louisiana used to make some of these things but she remembered it being much better.

From there we hit the road for Shreveport and Barksdale AFB but on the way we hit a little snag. The nice new tires we had camping world put on that we’ve had nothing but trouble with and they promised was fixed, wasn’t. One of the tires was a little low so we pulled over to put a little air in it and just like before, soon as I took the cap off air started pouring out. So after putting the cap back on now the tire pressure was even lower. We were fortunate enough to find a place to look at the tires and it turns out they had the wrong valve stems in all the tires. They only had two in stock so they replaced the ones that were giving us the most trouble but now at some point we need to have the rest of them replaced. Thanks camping world.

Finally made it to Shreveport around 7 and set up camp and ate dinner and called it a day.

Jim’s history lesson for the day: Cajun are people who were kicked out of Acadien Canada and migrated to Louisiana. Creole are a mix of people from the Caribbean, France, Spain, Africa, etc that settled into Louisiana.

The next day Jim played golf at Olde Oaks GC, a Hal Sutten course that was part of Louisiana’s Golf Audubon trail. I’m sure at one point this was a beautiful course but it’s been let go and was in terrible shape. If I was part of Louisiana’s Golf association I’d kick them off this Audubon trail. But the weather was beautiful and I had a great day. Jamie spent the day as she calls “nesting” lol. She did some cleaning and organizing. I wanted her to come with me to the golf course but that’s what she wanted to do and apparently she enjoyed herself so who am I to question. That was about it for Friday. Saturday to Tuesday we both went to work.

We made it back from work around 11 am on Tuesday without a hitch. We were both jet lagged so of course what do we do? Nap? Naahhh. Not on jmonzz’s bus. We decide we hadn’t seen enough of Shreveport and were leaving the next day so we hit the road. Jamie wanted to do a bit of wedding dress shopping for Brian and Winnie’s wedding (a bit may be a slight understatement) so I dropped her off and went for a haircut and by the time I got back she was barely into her shopping. About 2 hours later we left with 2 dresses (apparently she fell in love with 2 of them) and by then we were starving.

Shreveport has quite a few casinos so we decided we couldn’t leave without checking at least one of them out. So we went to the one owned by Caesar’s and had a great steak dinner at their steakhouse and went to check out the casino. She played some slots and I played blackjack. We lost a little and decided to call it quits.

Wednesday we took a tour of the plane display at Barksdale AFB. It was a pretty impressive display. Enjoy the pics. After that we hit the road for Dallas.