We got an early start this morning, leaving for Avery Island around 9:00 am. The island is 7 miles from where we are staying and is home to the Tabasco brand pepper sauce. The business is still family owned and operated by descendants of the McIlhenny Family that started the business in 1868. The family property sits on a salt dome that is Avery Island in southern Louisiana. They grow peppers on the island and use salt from the salt mines nearby. Due to the large volume of business, peppers and salt are also imported to meet the demand.
We have been here before but just recently they have expanded the factory tour and museum exhibits, opened a restaurant on-site, and expanded their gift shop which now has just about any kind of Tabasco trinket you can think of.
The factory tour and the museum were great and we an excellent lunch at the restaurant after touring the co-located Jungle Gardens and Bird City. The garden is essentially a drive-through tour with occasional stops to get out take pictures and look around. Visitors are encouraged to not feed or approach the alligators living in the water throughout the preserve. We saw several gators and stayed away from them. A gator can run 30 miles per hour if it wants to or if it is chasing down prey. They just looked at us however and actually they were not that big and apparently not hungry.
We then went back into town and visited America's oldest rice mill, the Conrad Mill, processing and selling rice under the Konriko brand. The mill was founded in 1912 and is still operating, processing the rice the way they always have and are even still using some of the original equipment. The mill has 15 employees and has a world wide market with distribution throughout the U.S., mostly to specialty grocery stores. It was a nice, low-key tour with a knowledgeable guide. We even had a French family with four children on the tour.
After the tour we went back to the RV and rested for awhile, then went out and got a few groceries for he trip home. We are mostly done with the fun portion of the trip and now will be just cranking out the miles as we head west. The stop tomorrow will be an RV park halfway between Houston and San Antonio.
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