What is so cool about New Orleans?  The people?  The culture?  The city?  It’s all those things…. the wildlife…  in and outside of the city is something to behold.  😉  We took a little swamp tour and it was amazing…..

Though there are lots of tours to choose from we decided on the Honey Island Swamp Tour through Cajun Encounters… Captain Greg was our trusty tour guide…

It was a very fun tour, we chose to do the small boat tour which is up to the maximum of 10 people and there were actually only 6 of us…. it made for a very nice trip….. Captain Greg seemed to know exactly where all interesting wildlife was…. we came upon a very cool hand-sized spider that I don’t have a picture of since it seemed to be a little camera shy… but we did catch this cool dude…. little grasshopper…

The grasshoppers were huge by my humble Canadian standards and the racoons were small but seriously cute. You’ll notice him having a little treat….. we’ll talk about that later…

The surroundings were stunning!

And of course then there were the crocodiles….

A little closer???

Awe… we can get a better look than that….

These crocs are very cool…. and there were quiet a few of them in a certain section of the swamp…. they swarmed to our boat as our captain gave them a little treat….. and gave us an opportunity for some fabulous pictures…but that wasn’t all…

There were still the wild pigs to visit…. as they grunted and snorted and ate up the treats our trusty captain had for them….we also stopped by one of the local neighbourhoods…

Certainly an cool way to live….

 All in all it was a very cool adventure.  I have to say that I really appreciated the tour provided by Captain Greg, he was great at stopping, shutting the motor off and letting us listen to the peacefulness of the swamp. He also provided us with a numerous facts about the swamp and many opportunities to photograph the beauty.

I must admit though that I was torn walking away from this day trip.  As much as I loved the opportunity to get up close and personal to many of the animals on this day, knowing that they were hopped up on marshmallows because of people like me was not lost on me.

You see, the animals come up to the boat and hang around for all those wonderful picture opportunities because they want the treats that are provided by the drivers of the boats… and their drug of choice is the marshmallow.  All the Captain had to do it throw one of those pillowy blobs of sugar into the water and the crocs would turn and come in our direction….yes folks… we were hanging out with the ‘pusher’ and I have to admit that I’m not sure how I feel about that… they are essentially addicted to sugar…. something they can ONLY get by hanging out by the boats….I suppose we can all think a little about our addictions….

We ended our day by going back to The Joint…. just had to get a meal and it was worth the walk from our hotel following the trip…

A half rack of ribs… with a side salad with smoked tomato and onion dressing and the drink… which I couldn’t remember the name of here…. is actually ‘Mr. Whiskers’ and it was just as good the second time around….

The whole meal was fantastic and the ribs are really quite amazing…. and their chairs … were even cooler the second time around.