Blogs from Vacherie, Louisiana, United States, North America

In our wisdom or stupidity, we had decided to book a tour to the bayou and plantations for the day after we arrived in New Orleans. When we were booking it, I think we were excited, so we were thinking let's do a tour and explore straight away, but in reality we were tired and would have loved to have had a lie-in. The tour picked us up early from the end of our street. We had booked a tour with a smaller company, Tours by Isabelle, as we didn't want to be herded about on a big bus and we had read good reviews of this one on tripadvisor. They offer a few different tours an we had booked the 'Grand Tour', as we wanted to experience the bayou as well as the plantations. The ... read more

Touring the low country along the rivers in Louisiana can be a lot of fun and stopping at some of the “plantations” can be enlightened. We stopped at several “plantations” and this is about our stop at the Oak Alley close to Vacherie, Louisiana. This plantation was built between 1837 and 1839. The mansion has a square floor design which surrounds the central hall. On the outside one can quickly see the roots of the name Oak Alley and large oak tress that run toward the river which one cannot see today since there is a flood levees in place. On the four sides of the house there are 28 Doric columns, which was a common feature of many of the mansions located on river roads such as this one. You will notice that prices to ... read more

Today was another day spent in plantation country. I got to see both ends of plantation tours here, with historical accuracy in one and fantasy in the other, along with both Anglo and Creole cultures. Nottoway The first plantation was Nottoway. Remember that I stayed here last night. The stay came with a free ticket to the tour, so I decided to take it. The guides wear modern clothes, but otherwise the tour is definitely slated toward the tourist end of the spectrum. The house is heavily restored. Almost none of the furniture is original to the plantation; some of it is reproductions. Even most of the artwork came from somewhere else. Keeping that in mind, however, the place does do a good job of recreating the general antebellum era. The tours focus on the standa ... read more