Despite the number of hours that I spend daydreaming about international travel and planning hypothetical journeys around the world, I never let myself forget that there are delightful destinations I haven’t explored yet just a short drive from home. A place that I’ve been meaning to visit for years and somehow never have is Lafayette, Louisiana. And though train travel is vastly and devastatingly underutilized and inaccessible in most the southern United States, Lafayette happens to be a short Amtrak ride away from my home in New Orleans. It’s a ready-made weekend trip just waiting for people to take advantage of it. So a couple months ago, Michael and I hopped on the Amtrak on Saturday morning for the 3 and ½ hour ride to Lafayette.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Sunset Limited Amtrak line between New Orleans and Los Angeles only runs 3 days per week in each direction (three days heading east and three opposite days heading west). It works out conveniently for an overnight trip to Lafayette because there’s a morning train from New Orleans heading to Lafayette on Saturdays and an evening train heading from Lafayette to New Orleans on Sundays. The train schedules unfortunately wouldn’t allow for this to be a two-night trip—you’d need to stretch it to three.
The Amtrak train on this route takes a long time to get out of the New Orleans. It crosses the Huey P. Long railroad bridge, which is so high that it makes my teeth rattle and my toes tap uncontrollably. But once you’re out of the metro area, the train picks up speed. We arrived in Lafayette in time for a late lunch.
For the entirety of our stay, we stayed in the downtown historic district of Lafayette, and we walked everywhere we went. So I cannot speak to Lafayette as a whole, the outskirts of which are full of Cajun-country gems, sinful food, and the kind of absurd wonders you can’t find anywhere else in the country. I can only speak to the walkable downtown which was… I’ll admit it—not quite what I expected.
I think I built up my perception of the place in my mind before I arrived. I imagined a quirky and hidden haven that Louisiana visitors have somehow been overlooking, full of constant liveliness and streets full of eclectic shops. What I found was a place with suggestions of such a utopia but not quite there. And in a way this was nice because I was able to let go of my expectations quickly and take the city for what it is instead.
In a lot of ways, Lafayette is a traditional southern town. Nearly all restaurants were closed between the lunch and dinner hours, but we managed to grab a delicious and cheap lunch special at Dwyer’s Cafe, a classic blue-plate restaurant that my dad recommended, before they closed at 2:00pm, and then we wandered. We explored Lagniappe Records and spent a long time in the delightful Beausoleil Bookstore. We got a glass of wine in the very hip wine shop, Wild Child Wines, and we got a pastry at Carpe Diem Café and Wine Bar. These places were delights, but for every excellent shop or restaurant we passed, there were three shops unoccupied or permanently closed. It felt like a town full of enormous potential but lacking the traffic to keep it operating.
I think a lot about the ethics of travel, and even though I do NOT feel as though I am influencing more than like two people to visit any place I write about, I still think about the role I (and all travelers) play in exposing places to the public that might not want the attention. Last month, I published an article about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, for Travel and Leisure’s online magazine. I was delighted to have the opportunity, and most people were so kind and generous with their reception of it, but there was also a small group of people who responded to the article with disdain. Don’t let this secret out, they said. Don’t ruin this place by telling the world about it. We don’t want the masses swooping in.
Visiting a place like Lafayette makes me think about the opposite site of the argument. What if more people knew that a neat and lively town was a $25 train ride away from New Orleans? What if people knew that live, world-class music was waiting for them in Lafayette instead of on Bourbon Street? If people start spending their money here, can these empty storefronts turn into more boutiques, galleries, and restaurants? Can I tell you all that I didn’t fall in love with Lafayette but that I think you should definitely visit anyway?
That evening, we checked into our hostel—the famous Blue Moon Saloon and Guest House. It’s part hostel and part music venue with bands playing every night of the week. I’ve heard excellent things about the Blue Moon, and I was very excited for our stay. The only two-person room available when I booked the place was the Bois Sec Room which the hostel did an excellent job of warning guests before booking is DIRECTLY in front of the performance stage for every night’s musical act. You may as well be ON the stage, the website warned us. It will be LOUD. But the website said the bands stop playing around midnight, so I was undeterred. The warning was nice because it let me know we should get a quick nap in before sound-check started that evening. And when the mics started whistling, we left for dinner.
We got dinner at Spoonbill Watering Hole and Restaurant, which I loved so much that I took my mom there on a detour while we were driving to Austin a few weeks ago for the eclipse. It’s built into what used to be a gas station, and now it’s a quirky restaurant with an imaginative and international menu and surprisingly reasonable prices. I would have eaten every item on the menu. And the plethora of spoonbill bird décor made me love it even more.
Back at our hostel, the band had started playing. In our room, the walls were shaking from the bass. It sounded like the band was playing in the room with us. We couldn’t stop laughing. And truly, we had the best seats in the house! The temperature was in the low-40s that night, so we were the only people who got to listen from warmth of the indoors. We did go out to listen for a while though. The band plays on an outdoor stage, and we listened to a couple different acts, both of which were fantastic. We went back inside once my fingers went numb, and I somehow managed to fall asleep before the final act left the stage.
The next morning, we got breakfast at the absolutely delightful Reve Coffee Roasters. I LOVE this place. If I lived in Lafayette, I would be at this place every day. I wanted every pastry on display and every breakfast item on the menu. And then we wandered for a while. Most businesses were closed on Sunday, and the gorgeous and gigantic Cathedral of St. John was the busiest place in town that morning. We wandered around the nearly empty streets until the Lafayette Science Museum opened at 1:00pm. We worried the museum would be targeted mostly for kids on local field trips, but I was very impressed! I learned a lot about astronomy and our space missions and a lot about dinosaurs. While most (all?) of the fossils were replicas, it was extremely well-done and well-designed. We spent a couple of hours happily exploring like the enthusiastic nerds we are.
The only thing we could find that was open for lunch was the local chain Mexican restaurant La Carreta. And it was a great choice! We even had a lot of leftovers to bring with us on the train. (There were quite a few restaurants downtown that looked delicious, and you could spend an extra day in Lafayette just trying all the food. Except on Sundays. Assume 10% of things will be open on Sunday.) We headed back to our hostel to grab our luggage and make the trek to the train station.
My verdict is that if you’re confined to downtown, one night is plenty of time to spend in Lafayette. If you drive yourself and venture to the outskirts or neighboring towns, there’s plenty more to do in the area. The Blue Moon Saloon is worth a trip on its own, and I want to eat every meal at Spoonbill. This is a town with a lot of potential, and I hope very much that more people see that potential and start giving the city the attention it deserves.
