Change of plans

Mandeville LA Trailhead

Back in Louisiana our original plan was to go to New Orleans for a day. But, since we've been there and done that a couple of times (Before and After Katrina) we decided to check out the Northshore area of Lake Pontchartrain, instead.


We found out that Cafe de Monde has a shop in Mandeville, so we set out to find it in our touring.  Along with a few geocache's!

Mandeville Trailhead-Tammany Trace

Our first stop was at the Mandeville Trailhead, It has a Cultural Interpretive Center. It  is along side of the Tammany Parish's Trace, which is a 31 mile Rails to Trails conversion. You can run, walk,cycle,blade or even bring your horse! The Trailhead is also where the community has a Farmers market every Saturday.

Lake Pontchartrain

 We had a couple of geocaches to find along the Lake Pontchartrain north shoreline. They have a beautiful park along it and across the street are alot of nice homes.

Home over looking  the Lake

The Cafe de Monde coffee and beignets!

It was lunch time but we had to find our beignets first!  Cafe de Monde is the original French Market Coffee Stand in New Orleans and now they have a few outside the city in the surrounding towns! Hooray for us!!  Well as you can see we found it! We had to have their Chicory coffee to go along with our beignets! It was all wonderful!  The French Acadians (Cajuns) brought these two wonderful things to the area, if you want to read about it
http://www.cafedumonde.com/main.html ,here it is.

Covington LA-downtown

We drove over to Covington  and then over to Abita Springs. They are both neat little towns.

Abita Springs LA-Pavilion

Trail at Foutainebleau State Park

We headed back home, as we had a few of geocaches in the park to find. We headed out on our bikes and found the nature trail. Very heavy with folage, I love the spanish moss hanging!  The trail connected up to the Marsh boardwalk. We were there just in time to see a beautiful sunset!  We saw signs that warned against feeding the aligators, but we didn't see any, only a few birds.

Marshy area at Foutainebleau State Park

Sunset at the boardwalk

We are glad that we didn't go with our original plan- as we love to explore new places!  One thing we are finding out is, we may need better bikes. What we have are collapsable bikes, and they are basically for just tootling around. Since Vel's knees are brand new, we may be able to do more than just tootle, the nature trail was a little to rough for what we have, so we'll have to see what we can figure out.
We want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!! -Later-M