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SFA Field Trips

If our symposium is considered the classroom event, then an SFA field trip—held each summer in a different location—is meant as experiential learning. Lasting three days, SFA field trips teach and feed you, but also put you to work. We’ve grunted for worms and tonged for oysters, but we’ve also sipped Madeira from the porch of the Thomas Rose House in Charleston. Field trips offer experiences for all types.

Field trips usually span a weekend, sometimes including morning events on Sunday. We always send you off with a meal. Expect a few presentations to orient you to our place and topic, but mostly be ready to hit the streets and experience the place first hand with your SFA friends, guided by locals who know the area best.

Registration fees are less than the symposium, but more than a day camp. Transportation and lodging are your own expenses, but we’ll wrangle buses if we need to get you to far away locations that you might not easily find on a map. A field trip schedule will detail exactly what the registration fee covers by way of food, but guests should generally expect at least two belly-filling experiences each day.

Register for SFA Field Trip online!SFA Field Trip
June 23-25, 2011
New Orleans to Eunice, Louisiana
SOLD OUT

Click here for the field trip bibliography.

Join the SFA as we drive the prairies of Cajun Country with SFA app-loaded smart phones in hand. Down blacktop back roads. Through dog-in-the-road towns. To meat markets that sell liver-flecked boudin. And crawfish boiling points where the tables are draped in newspaper.

We begin at 5:00 on Thursday afternoon in New Orleans, above Cochon, at Calcasieu. That night, Stephen Stryjewski will dish catfish courtbouillion and rice. And Paul Prudhomme and Donald Link will hold forth. We end on Sunday morning, when, bellies full of boudin and crawfish, arteries pumping Tabasco, we drive home.

Along the way, you’ll hear from experts and raconteurs, including:

  • Marcelle Bienvenu, author of the classic Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?, who will dish gumbo gossip
  • Jim Gossen, founder of Louisiana Foods, who will share how crawfish came to be farmed rather than fished
  • Pableaux Johnson, a writer and photographer who grew up in New Iberia, is, in the words of SFA board vice-president Sara Roahen, a “master smotherer” of all God’s creations
  • Gerald Patout, director of the Arnold LeDoux Library at Louisiana State University, Eunice, who will talk of rice dressings and other delights

With SFA Oral Historians Amy Evans Streeter, Sara Roahen, Rien Fertel, and Mary Beth Lasseter leading, you’ll experience:

  • Mowata Store where Bubba Frey stuffs boudin links and crawfish rice-larded chickens
  • Okra Supper at Ruby’s Cafe, open since 1959, in Eunice, where Dot Vidrine presides
  • Falcon Rice Mill, doing business in Crowley since 1942, and one of the last family-owned rice mills in the state
  • Boudin Biscuits, Glazed with Steen’s Cane Syrup, from Justin Girouard of The French Press in Lafayette
  • Beer, Boudin, and Fiddle at Savoy Music Center in Eunice and Fred’s Lounge in Mamou
  • Debut of the SFA Boudin Trail Traveling Exhibit
  • Joe York’s new film, on the cochon du lait tradition
  • Smothered Lunch featuring cooks from the SFA’s Plate Lunch Oral History Project
  • A Cracklin’ Buffet, preceding the live Rendezvous des Cajuns radio show at the Liberty Theater in Eunice
  • Morning Romp through the Crawfish Fields with Craig West and Troy West, who run one of the oldest commercial crawfish operations in the state
  • Crawfish at Hawk’s, which “you could easily drive past while mistaking it for a tractor garage or chicken coop.” That would be a shame, wrote SFA board member Brett Anderson, “because in actuality it's among the best boiling pots on the planet.”
  • Zydeco at Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki, a dance hall, in business since 1947, famous for staging some of the best live music in the state

SPONSOR
Anson Mills of Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, produces artisan mill goods from organic heirloom grains. Since 2007, they have served as sponsor of our annual summer Field Trip.

HOTELS
Thursday Night lodging reservations may be booked at the Wyndham Riverfront New Orleans. Set in a converted rice mill, the hotel is walking distance from our opening night dinner: Rates, beginning at $145, include complimentary airport shuttle.
Friday and Saturday Night reservations may be booked at the Holiday Inn Express, 1800 Hwy 190 West, in Eunice. Rates begin at $89.00.

For both hotels, availability and rates are guaranteed through May 31. Mention that you’re with the SFA Field Trip when you book your rooms.

TRANSPORTATION
You’ll need a car for this trip. Or, at the very least, a friend with a car. We open in New Orleans. Then we drive 2-plus hours west and north to Eunice. We have booked buses for group transport while in Cajun Country, but you’ll be on your own for a couple or three detours.

REGISTRATION
Cost for the weekend is $325 for members and $355 for non-members. Registration is now closed.