Lafayette Regional

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 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.

Fly into KMSY and the National WWII Museum is downtown in the Warehouse District, six acres across three blocks. The reason it's in New Orleans and not Washington is Andrew Higgins, the local boatbuilder whose Higgins Industries built the flat-bottomed LCVP landing craft that put American troops onto the beaches from Normandy to Guadalcanal, more than 20,000 of them. Eisenhower called him the man who really won the war; historian Stephen Ambrose heard that and built the museum around it. The draw for a pilot is the aircraft hung through the pavilions: a B-17E named My Gal Sal, pulled off a Greenland ice cap 53 years after she went down, plus a B-25, an SBD Dauntless, a TBF Avenger, a P-51, an F4U Corsair, and a Bf 109. There's also a Higgins boat, a submarine experience built around the USS Tang's last mission, and the Road to Berlin and Road to Tokyo galleries. The Tom Hanks-produced film is worth the time.