Louisiana Coast pt. 1

The world has been a wet place - by mid December the Louisiana coast received over 22 inches of rain for the month of December. My route options became more limited in a place with already few roads and camping became out of the question in many places.
I continued out 90 west until getting onto Louisiana scenic byway 182 passing countless plantation homes, oil field services, and sugar cane fields in the Bayou Teche. The home pictured below is aptly called the steamboat house. The federal and greek revival architecture is well
preserved throughout the region. The area was one of the wealthiest agricultural regions in the first half of the 1800's. The main street of Franklin, LA still has turn of century cast iron streetlights underneath an arcade of live oaks and over 420 homes on the National Historic Register (in a town of 8000 people). The smell of carmelized sugar blankets the region and the endless flow of trucks from the cane fields littered the road with stalks. Hard to see the sugar
cane factory for all the smoke. But sugar is not so profitable today, reflected in my motel choice on a 40 degree rainy day but the chickens are friendly, and eventually the heat works.