USA 2019 - Week 4, Austin, Lafayette and New Orleans

We arrived at Franklin's BBQ at around 11am on Tuesday (opening time) and the line was already to the parking lot; especially impressive since Tuesday is meant to be their quietest day. We were worried that we might miss out on the world famous brisket, but one of the Franklin guys settled our mind by taking orders along the line, and said there would be plenty of brisket left but we may miss out on the ribs and some of the other meats.





2.5h later, after passing the time chatting to people and drinking some beers in the line, we made it into the small dining room where we took in the amazing smells and got unbearably hungry. We ordered a mixture of the brisket (lean, fatty, and bark), 1 rib each (but got 3 since it was by minimum weight), 2 links of sausage each (but they threw in a 3rd since it was not a full link), and some sides (I was so hungry I overruled Andrew at the last moment and upsized the potato salad to a pint).







The food was absolutely incredible, I've never had anything like it. We of course ordered too much, so we wrapped up the leftovers which made for an awesome lunch today! The banana bourbon pie was a perfect way to top off the meal.

We waddled home, then got ready to head out to watch the bats at Congress Ave bridge. From my research it seemed like they come out 20minutes before sunset, but they started coming out pretty much bang on sunset, and took about 10minutes to reach maximum bat throughput. It was very impressive watching the continuous stream of bats filter out from underneath the bridge and wind its way in a spiral through the sky, so pretty and cute!







We then went bar hopping at Rainey street, stopping at a couple of cool bars set in old Austin houses. We got a couple of margaritas from two different bars, some beers from Craft Pride (I got the King of the Hill / Austin Lake themed Ladybird, Andrew got the Jellyfish), then took a really dodgy walk to the White Horse for a honkey tonk experience recommended by the Franklin BBQ guys. All the places were really cool, Austin is a great city to bar hop in, but you'd really need to get to know which are the well lit streets to avoid the slight (not major) scariness we experienced.













The next morning we were planning to get on the road early, but had an issue with the communal washing machine at the airbnb we were staying at not spinning, so we called it, packed the wet washing in some thick bags, and got on the road towards Lafayette, stopping at Molina's in Houston for an unexpectedly huge lunch at George Bush's unofficial tex-mex place.





We arrived at the Blue Moon in Lafayette, checked in quickly, then made our way straight to Prejeans for our first taste of gumbo, and catfish. The gumbo was so rich, and the catfish was absolutely delicious. We both thought it tasted similar herring, with none of the "muddy" taste that you get warned about with catfish. The restaurant was swamp themed and had a live band playing music very similar to what Annie plays in Treme; a violin (aka fiddle), accordion, and a guitar, with twangy singing went perfectly with our meal. We loved it, and Andrew was getting quite indignant when people weren't clapping after each song!







Back to the Blue Moon, we made our way straight down to enjoy the live music, which was descried to us as Japanese Comic Book Psychadelic Rock - we couldn't wait to find out what the hell that means. The Blue Moon is a giant old house with each of the rooms turned into a bookable place to stay. It had an awesome communal area and kitchen, and the garage was the live music venue. We had the Balcony room, with super cool wallpaper and more importantly, our own unshared bathroom.









The first act was this amazingly dexterous guitarist playing theme songs to various things like Sailor Moon, The Simpsons, and Westworld. The main act, Peelander-Z was... I don't know how to describe it, like The Wiggles, but a rock band and for adults. They started up by hyping up the crowd, but then they weren't ready so they went away for a bit, came back, and craziness ensued.



Their hits included songs like Mad Tiger (claw hands!), Bike, Mike (I am Mike, you are Mike, everyone is Mike, there are so many Mikes!), and Steak (Medium Rare). Yellow (the main dude) crowd surfed a couple of times, we all played limbo, skipped rope, and generally just had fun together with some music sometimes. It was very unique, and the diverse crowd embraced it.







We woke up this morning quite early, went to a 24h laundromat to sort out the wet laundry situation, then rushed to our Cajun Encounter Bayou gator tour. We saw gators, wild boar, a crawfish, a wolf spider, and I can confirm that swamps look exactly like every cartoon picture of a swamp and every Monkey Island game.













We took the scenic route to the Roosavelt hotel so that we could cross the super long Pontchartrain Lake Bridge (38.4km) and stop to pick up a catfish poboy from Liuzza's by the Track, and are now getting ready to head out for a sazerac!