Baton Rouge, LA
Opened 1940 as Ryan Field, named for a Baton Rouge aviator killed in WWII. Louisiana state capital. LSU and the Mississippi River. The airfield sits along the river upstream of New Orleans.
The Atchafalaya is the largest river-swamp wilderness in the United States — nearly a million acres of bottomland hardwood, cypress-tupelo swamp, and bayou where a major distributary of the Mississippi spreads out on its way to the Gulf. It's the heart of Cajun country: the water world of houseboats, crawfish, pirogues, and the Acadian culture that grew up fishing and trapping it. The Basin is a vast flood-control safety valve — when the Mississippi runs dangerously high, the Morganza Spillway can divert water into the Atchafalaya to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Spanish moss drapes the drowned cypress; alligators, herons, and roseate spoonbills work the still water. The I-10 bridge crosses 18 miles of it on pilings.
Along the "River Road" that follows the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge stands the most famous of Louisiana's antebellum estates: Oak Alley, named for the breathtaking quarter-mile double row of 28 live oaks — planted in the early 1700s, decades before the 1839 Greek Revival mansion — that frame the path from the river to the house. Riverboat passengers gave it the name, marveling at the tunnel of oaks. Like the other River Road plantations (Whitney, Laura, Evergreen), the modern site now tells the fuller story honestly, including the enslaved people whose labor on the sugar plantation built the wealth the columns represent. The setting on the Mississippi levee, the oaks, and the sugarcane country around it are the draw.
From the air, Avery Island is a 163-foot dome of solid rock salt pushing up out of flat delta swamp; in country this flat, it's hard to miss. The McIlhenny family has owned it since the 1840s, and Edmund McIlhenny started making Tabasco there in 1868: peppers grown on the island, mashed with Avery Island salt, fermented three years in oak barrels, then cut with vinegar. More than 150 years on, almost nothing about that has changed; the company is still family-owned, the barrels still oak, the ferment still three years. The factory tour runs through the original 1868 buildings and the mash room, and the gift shop carries every Tabasco product made (TABASCO Chocolate, if you must). The bigger surprise is the Jungle Gardens: 170 acres of azaleas, live oaks, and Spanish moss, and Bird City, an egret rookery McIlhenny started in 1895 to save the snowy egret after plume hunters nearly wiped it out for ladies' hats.
The French Quarter — the Vieux Carré, "Old Square" — is the original city the French laid out in 1718 on a bend of the Mississippi, and three centuries of French, Spanish, Creole, African, and Caribbean culture pressure-cooked into something found nowhere else in America. The Spanish rebuilt it in masonry with wrought-iron galleries after fires in the 1790s, which is why a "French" Quarter looks Spanish. It's the birthplace of jazz, the home of Mardi Gras, Creole and Cajun cooking, above-ground "cities of the dead" cemeteries, and a street grid that floods because the whole bowl of the city sits below sea level behind levees. Jackson Square, St. Louis Cathedral, and the river levee anchor it; the streetcars still run up St. Charles.