Customer Reviews

Cajun Country Guide

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We used several guidebooks to plan a long weekend in southern Louisiana in connection with a family wedding in Lafayette. This was the most useful of the books.

The author gives a star to especially noteworthy attractions, hotels, and restaurants. We went by these stars to plan our trip and had a great time. Even our new Cajun cousins-in-law were impressed with the selections we made.

A close second as a guidebook was "Louisiana Dayride - 52 Short Trips from New Orleans" by Shelley Holl.

Two final notes: Neither guidebook covers the city of New Orleans itself; and every guidebook we read had the wrong area codes for many telephone numbers (Louisiana has 2 brand-new area codes -- 225 and 337)

I bought this book while in New Orleans for Jazz Fest. Having never really ventured out of the crescent city, this book was a god send. The next year, after reading the book from cover to cover, I travelled thru-out South West LA, before heading to Jazz Fest. I got to see and experience things I think I would have definitely missed with out this book (i.e. great restaurants, where to get the best boudin, great places for live zydeco, swamp tours, cheap cabin lodgings---just to name a few things). We even ventured down to Grand Isle. The book is great for its thorough research on the entire area. You can plan a great trip for cheap or travel in style. If you love the area as much as I do, it is necessary to own a copy of Cajun Country Guide. My '92 edition is so dog eared I am in need of the 2nd edition SOON!

This well-written book was invaluable for our family's week in Bayou country. It has a dry humor ("on the Bayou, land is a recent occurrence..."). It covers geography, history, culture, and then gets into where to stay, where to eat, where to dance, what to see, and what to do. It's pretty up front (about one town -- "don't get hungry here...").

Everything we tried that was recommended in the book was great fun. One of the eateries was not so much wonderful as wonderfully different, but we were glad we went just as well.

Some of the details are a little out of date, but I think that's due to their specificity. If you say that a tiny bakery makes sweet potato pies between 11-3 on Thursdays, but the one owner-baker decides to change to Wednesdays, there's not much to be done about that. Even so, that only happened once in the entire week.

We had this book and the Delorme LA map, and that was a perfect set of resources for us. We had a great time, and I'm confident it was due to this book in particular.

Highly recommended.

Spent several weeks in Cajun Country last winter with this book as our guide. Found a LOT of wonderful, out of the way places and experiences that we never would have known about otherwise. My New Orleans "born and raised" friends didn't even know about many of them. This is a wonderful area to visit -- we camped, but ate most of our meals out to really get the "local flavor" (I'm getting hungry just remembering). This book does a good job of describing all the local foods, too.

Good directions to all the "little places" and good descriptions of what you'll find there. If you go to any of the dances (and you should!), be sure to call ahead and find out what the current start time is. In the Christmas season, try to catch one of the many "boat parades" on the bayous -- they're not listed in the book, but just ask around and people will tell you when and where.

We recently spent a week visiting Lafayette and the surrounding area in search of music and dancing, both Cajun and Zydeco. This book is the most helpful resource we could find anywhere. But we were disappointed to discover the hard way that some of the directions are impossible to follow. For instance, we drove out to Loreauville to search for Clifton Chenier's unmarked grave, and the book was just plain wrong. It told us to turn west on a road that only went east, giving us an impossible set of directions. We got lost, and spent an hour wandering rural backroads that had nothing at all to do with the highway numbers given in this book. On other trips, we learned the distances they give are sometimes way, way off, causing much confusion. The authors seem to be obsessed with food and eating, and know very little about the music and dance venues. Still, we couldn't have gotten along without it.

This book is a great guide to a significant number of the thriving hot spots for cajun and zydeco music and dance. Though that was my main interest, I also found myself visiting sugar plantions and found an excellent bayou tour and great places to stay and eat that are still very local in cultural feel as opposed to the more tourist oriented culture of New Orleans. I skimmed through 3 other guides tossed them aside and then kept this book at hand constantly while driving around the bayou country. I've been two years in a row to lafayette area and am going back again, and I still will have this guide close at hand as I plan and travel in cajun country.

I wanted to tour Cajun country, so this seemed like the perfect guide. And it was really great, but it's very out of date, which made things a little hard. None of the phone numbers seemed to be right, and even the route or highway numbers had often changed. Still, most of the places and tours guides were still around- you just had to do a little digging with the local tourist office or on the web to get the right phone numbers. I'd also recommend getting a road atlas of Louisiana.

We used several guidebooks to plan a long weekend in southern Louisiana in connection with a family wedding in Lafayette. This was the most useful of the books.

The author gives a star to especially noteworthy attractions, hotels, and restaurants. We went by these stars to plan our trip and had a great time. Even our new Cajun cousins-in-law were impressed with the selections we made.

A close second as a guidebook was "Louisiana Dayride - 52 Short Trips from New Orleans" by Shelley Holl.

Two final notes: Neither guidebook covers the city of New Orleans itself; and every guidebook we read had the wrong area codes for many telephone numbers (Louisiana has 2 brand-new area codes -- 225 and 337)

A buddy and I just finished touring Acadiana using this book, and were very pleased with the book. It is very thorough and reflects that the authors know the area extremely well. A tip - their statement that the raw oysters in Abbeville are the best in the world is absolutely correct.

I used this book everyday when travelling and it is the most comprehensive and interesting of all the guide books. Too bad for the updated phone numbers.