Yesterday, Grandpère and I headed for New Orleans with our two grandchildren from Thibodaux to meet my daughter and her three sons to visit the Audubon Insectarium in the downtown area. Our first stop was Mulate's for lunch. Well, it cost the earth for our tribe, but the food was good, and the restaurant was casual enough that our noisy, unruly bunch did not disturb the other diners unduly.
Then we were off to the Insectarium, which we incorrectly thought was nearer than it turned out to be. We had quite a walk in the hot, hot sun, six or seven blocks on brick and concrete, and while I was wearing comfortable sandals, my ancient feet call for walking shoes for this type of exercise.
Pictured above are the young 'uns of the group far ahead, with GP and I lagging well behind, out of the picture. In truth GP was lagging behind to stay with slow me, because he's a fast walker on his own, and he wore his walking shoes.
The Audubon Insectarium is quite well done. We learned that cockroaches could very likely survive a nuclear war (slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect a definite possibility) and all sorts of little known and fascinating facts about insects, along with seeing colonies and live specimens of the insects themselves, plus fossils. My favorites amongst the fossils were the perfect specimens preserved in amber.
From the review of the Insectarium in the New York Times:
What is it about these creatures? In the new $25 million Audubon Insectarium, which opened here in June, you can watch Formosan termites eat through a wooden skyline of New Orleans (as if this city didn’t have enough problems), stick your head into a transparent dome in a kitchen closet swarming with giant cockroaches and watch dung beetles plow their way through a mound of waste. And then you can engage in the museum’s most brilliant interactivity by joining in the line of eager visitors prepared to munch on a handful of crunchy Cajun-fried crickets or scoop up some wax-worm stir fry.
“Gross!” your inner adolescent is likely to shout with a smiling shudder. But visitors of all ages to the Bug Appétit buffet, situated just behind the museum’s Tiny Termite Café, keep lining up for seconds. And for every sight that inspires shocked amazement, there is another where sheer wonder wins out. O.K., it’s fascinating to learn that a cockroach can survive for weeks without its head, or that millipedes secrete a foul-smelling liquid that you can touch, or that one of every four species on this planet is a form of beetle. But you can also watch a colony of leaf-cutter ants at work. They carry their jaw-torn green bounty into their maze of tunnels where, in one chamber open for inspection, the workers cultivate a gray fungus found nowhere else in nature; that fungus feeds the entire colony.
A couple of us, including me, ate a cricket cookie, which tasted pretty much like a chocolate chip cookie and was fine so long as I didn't permit the thought of what I was eating linger too long in my mind. My daughter tasted the cricket dip, but she did not like it at all.
I was eager to get to the butterfly room, where you walk amongst the butterflies and, if you're lucky, one will land on you. I wore a pink shirt to attract them to me, but alas! - I was not one of the fortunate. My grandson and my daughter hit the jackpot as shown below.
Perched on GS's finger
This beauty liked my daughter's hair. She would have killed me if I had shown her face with every pore visible.
The butterfly room was lovely, the best saved for last, even if I didn't have a close encounter.
Then we were off on the looong walk back to the car - or rather the SUV that rode us all. Everyone else seemed to do well on the walk, except me. My feet hurt, and I felt a blister forming on my little toe, which, of course, grew larger and became more painful the more I walked. What with the heat, the sun, and my aching feet, I soon was lost in a generalized misery that had no real focus. The walk seemed to stretch for miles, but that was only in my head. It would have been an easy stroll under different circumstances. GP tried to cheer me on by telling stories and such. Finally, I told him, "You know, I really don't give a sh*t about anything you're telling me. I'm miserable, and I just want to get to the car."
The picture above shows a Hubig's Pies truck. I've loved Hubig Pies since I was a child, and the pie man came around the neighborhoods selling the fried pies from a bicycle cart. Peach pies were my favorites. I was in such a state, that I didn't even notice the truck until the picture loaded into my computer.
This sort of post is quite time-consuming, but I do it because I love you all and hope that you will enjoy it and, at the same time, appreciate just a little all the hard work that goes into it. In truth, I enjoy writing this kind of post.
So. Sometimes I'm nice, and sometimes I'm not so nice, as with poor Grandpère, who stuck with me and tried to cheer me up, only to have me snarl at him.
We reached home around 7 PM, and I was completely exhausted, but, all things considered, it was a good day of family bonding and family togetherness.
Mwah!
