Baton Rouge

After three very long and very awesome days in New Orleans (see previous posts: Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3), we started Saturday morning bright and early in Baton Rouge. One of my co-workers, Jeremy, went to LSU so he gave us a lot of great suggestions and recommendations, which we were very grateful for despite his subsequent corruption of my desk decorations. He gave us directions to free parking on campus, which was awesome.

The game was at 2:30 (central time) so we didn't have a lot of time before the game. Since Bo had never seen the campus, we walked around to check out the tailgating scene. We love a good tailgate, and we were really impressed with how intense everyone is at LSU. It seemed like everyone had the works - grills, TVs, large speakers, multiple massive coolers, chairs, games, etc etc etc.

We had a blast just walking around and checking out everything with our portable tailgate (aka styrofoam cooler, bottle of Jack Daniel's and two large re-fillable coke's).

it was a good day with Jack

On our way towards the stadium, we stopped by Mike's (the Tiger) cage but he never came out. I like to think he was afraid of the Gator Nation, even though his football team, clearly, was not.

The have a Tiger Walk about an hour before kickoff, so we watched that before heading into the stadium. We were hoping to see the team but apparently they went in a few hours before that.

We had great seats for the game - thank you Kristin and Mark!

Tiger Stadium

Mike the Tiger

Go Gators!

Best score of the game... 0 - 0

Albert & Alberta

heeeeere come the Gators!!

After the terrible loss the previous weekend, we weren't expecting much better against LSU. So that helped the pain...just a little. It's still sad to watch your beloved team lose so we tried to make the best of it. Once the inevitable loss was over, we headed out to grab dinner. First, we found a food cart selling jello shots and boudin - perfect.

We went to The Chimes for dinner (great suggestion from Jeremy) which was on the corner of campus. We ordered a bunch of appetizers and hung out for a few hours - it was very similar to The Swamp in Gainesville, except it was a lot bigger and the food was infinitely better.

Grilled Gator nuggets

crab claws

Not your typical spinach & artichoke dip...served with fried bow-tie pasta chips

cheers!

Sunday morning we packed up to head back home. We had lunch in downtown Baton Rouge at Capital City Grill (another great suggestion from Jeremy). Afterward, there was a music festival going on across the street from the old capitol building, so we hung out for a bit before we had to get back on the road.

So in summary, we had 14 different kinds of meats/animals: beef, veal, bacon, pork, chicken, shrimp, oyster, crawfish, turtle, duck, rabbit, alligator, crab, and mahi mahi. In our opinion, that is a successful trip!

When we got home we added the new pin to our world travel map, so the US portion (minus Hawaii/Alaska) now looks like this (clearly we still have quite a bit of work to do!):

We had such a terrific time in New Orleans and Baton Rouge - already looking forward to our next vacation!!