So yesterday morning I roll away from the house at 0630, headed deep into Cajun country (Look up Kaplan, Louisiana. That’s pretty much dead center) to do a little training on my favorite safety topic, electricity and how to avoid killing yourself with it. At 0800 I’m there. Unfortunately, pressing operational requirements had my prospective audience spread over a good chunk of the region, so I wrote that class off, chatted with the manager for a little while, then got back in my car and back on the road.

I plan some of this stuff, and the plan here was to do this station on Wednesday morning, then slide two hours east and catch the bunch that tends our system just west of the mouth of the Mississippi. Look up “Houma, Louisiana.” That’s the bunch. They get a piece of the Chacahoula Swamp and a whole lot of the Gulf coastal marshes and the dozens of miles of offshore pipelines and several platforms standing out there in the Gulf, including one that’s manned.

Thursday is crew-change day, so visiting the site today got me everybody in one fell swoop. I did that training this morning.

Observations: Even in Houma, as Cajun as its roots might be, walking into a place named ‘Cajun’ and ordering a bowl of gumbo for lunch (yesterday) won’t guarantee that you get good gumbo. Never ceases to amaze me. They almost got the color right (brown) and it had shrimp and crab, but it just didn’t quite make the grade for flavor. Wasn’t bad. Just wasn’t GOOD. Maybe a ‘C’. I’ve paid for worse. I can cook much BETTER.

For dinner last night, on my journey through town, I saw a place offering ‘Mediterranean’ cuisine. Oddly (or maybe not) there’s a pretty significant contingent on Louisiana from the eastern end of the Mediterranean, since waaaay back, and you can find some pretty good things. This restaurant was one of them. A little pricy, I tossed forty buck on appetizers, main course, and dessert, but I left there full and happy. The Cajun loves him some kibby. And shawarma. And hummus, AKA ‘Purina Hippie Chow’ to my son.

I finished the class before ten this morning and headed back towards the other corner of the state, home. I did maybe a hundred miles while on the phone, discussing the intricacies of high voltage power systems. Nothing makes the miles fly like a conversation about ground detection systems on ungrounded three-phase electricity. The remainder of the trip was courtesy of Mister Beethoven.

And I’m home again.