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Louisiana

On the Road: Cuisine & Culture in Acadiana Louisiana

Program No. 24834RJ

Discover Acadiana, where the past meets the present, and culture, language and flavor come together in the heart of southern Louisiana.

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Food & Wine Regional Studies

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8 days

7 nights

18 meals

7B 6L 5D

Check-in, Orientation, Welcome Dinner, Jazz performance

New Orleans, LA

Lecture, F.P.C. Museum, City Tour

New Orleans, LA

Shrimp Industry, Bayou Exploration, Seafood Boil and Music

Houma, LA

Tabasco Factory, Rip Van Winkle Gardens, Chitimacha Museum

Lafayette, LA

Creole Class, Vermillionville, Acadian Culture Center

Lafayette, LA

Zydeco breakfast, Old State Capitol, Baton Rouge City Tour

Baton Rouge, LA

History Class, New State Capitol, Whitney Plantation

Baton Rouge, LA

Transfer to New Orleans, Program Concludes

New Orleans, LA

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At a Glance

Dive into the history, natural beauty and flavors of southern Louisiana's vibrant Cajun and Creole communities. This is Acadiana — a true melting pot brimming with heritage, distinctive cuisines and lively zydeco beats. Learn about the Cajun, Creole and indigenous Chitimacha peoples while delving into Acadian history and picking up some Creole French along the way. Explore Baton Rouge’s new and old State Capitol buildings, and enjoy exclusive access to the Acadian Cultural Center. In other words? Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Activity Level

Keep the Pace

Walking up to 1-2 miles per day; some uneven terrain including city streets and uneven surfaces such as cobblestones. Getting on/off busses and a boat.

Best of all, you’ll…

Enjoy a boat ride through the Louisiana bayou and learn about its wildlife, ecosystems and the impact climate change has had on this fragile environment.
Discover the flavors of Cajun and Creole cuisine, and dance to live Cajun music as you experience a Zydeco breakfast and take part in a seafood boil.
Visit the Whitney Plantation and hear the stories of the enslaved people who lived and worked there.

Featured Expert

All trip experts

Samantha Morgan

Samantha Morgan is a former journalist and community advocate from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After two decades in traditional news media, she launched the Downtown East Social Ride in 2019, a weekly bike exploration revealing Baton Rouge's hidden stories, landmarks, and diverse community narratives. Morgan also hosted a series for the Capitol Park Museum’s Green Book exhibition, exploring sites that once served Black travelers during the Jim Crow era. Her work includes restoring historic sites like the Lincoln Hotel and Lutheran Cemetery.

Please note: This expert may not be available for every date of this program.

Lyndel Brauninger View biography

Lyndel Brauninger, a native New Orleanian, is a retired educator who taught in the metropolitan New Orleans area for more than 30 years. Besides leading Road Scholar groups, she leads walking “foodie” groups in the French Quarter, where she has been a licensed exploration leader since 1996. Lyndel enjoys experiencing and learning everything the Crescent City has to offer, particularly the architecture, history, music, food, and amazing theater. She is thrilled to share her passion for New Orleans with people from all over the world.

Nathan Rabalais View biography

Nathan Rabalais is the Joseph P. Montiel Endowed Professor of Francophone Studies and Research Fellow of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he specializes in the folklore, literature, and popular culture of Louisiana and Acadia. Recent projects include feature-length documentary 'Finding Cajun' on the intersection of language and identity in Louisiana and his book, 'Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana' (LSU Press). Nathan is also a poet whose work has appeared in a number of literary journals.

Samantha Morgan View biography

Faye Phillips View biography

Faye Phillips has led VF Phillips Consulting in Baton Rouge since 2012, after retiring as associate dean of libraries at Louisiana State University. Her career includes roles at the U.S. Senate, the National Archives, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Phillips has authored eleven books, including 'Historic Magnolia Cemetery' (2019) and 'The Golden Band from Tigerland' (2016). A fellow of the Louisiana Historical Association and a member of several boards and commissions, she has also served as president of multiple archival societies.

Brian Altobello View biography

Brian Altobello is a native of New Orleans with a master’s degree in U.S. History and 29 years of teaching experience. He is an Army veteran and author of three books, including “Whiskey, Women, and War: How World War I Shaped Jim Crow New Orleans” (University Press of Mississippi, 2021). Married to a travel writing teacher, Brian currently works as a curriculum specialist in the New Orleans area.

Dave Roberts View biography

Dave Roberts was born in New Orleans and baptized in the same church as Louis Armstrong. He received his B.B.A. from Loyola University (New Orleans) and his M.B.A. from the University of New Orleans. For many years he worked at Loyola University as the director of student finance. Dave started working as a New Orleans group leader in 1997. His expeditions are a blend of history, architecture, food, music, writers, movies, and current events.

Robin Rocque View biography

Robin Rocque's favorite city to share with guests is her hometown of New Orleans. Its diversely unique culture and musical background provides a lovely backdrop during its introduction. Robin has happily led groups in many cities and several countries. Robin has been a licensed New Orleans tour guide since 2004, and a certified international tour manager since 2011. She is an alumna of Vassar College, and recently served as a board member of a nonprofit organization that provides community support in and around New Orleans.

Lyndel Brauninger View biography

Larry Schexnaydre View biography

Larry Schexnaydre is a performer, singer, and Huey Long impersonator who has been in character since 1976. Larry has owned a performing arts studio in Gonzales, LA for over two decades. He has also worked as a murder mystery writer, songwriter, sound technician, and prop/set designer. When he is not working, he loves fishing, traveling, singing, and writing.

Milton J. Carr View biography

Milton Carr was born in Tremé, a cultural center of New Orleans. After studying in San Diego, Milton returned home to New Orleans where he worked for Domino Sugars. During his 33 years at Domino, he became interested in sugar cane’s connections to slavery and the economic history of the city. Milton has been a licensed New Orleans guide since 2001, and is a one-of-a-kind expert on the city's unique music, history, culture and heritage.

Suggested Reading List (6 books)

Visit the Road Scholar Bookshop

You can find many of the books we recommend at the Road Scholar store on bookshop.org, a website that supports local bookstores.

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On the Road: Cuisine & Culture in Acadiana Louisiana

Program Number: 24834

Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans

by Dan Baum

Nine Lives is a biography voiced through the lives of nine characters spaning over forty years who tell their stories of living in this complex and facinating city. From outsider artists and Mardi Gras Kings to jazz-playing coroners and transsexual barkeeps, these characters are challenged to rise to acts of heroism or sink to the bottom as they face the devistation of two of Louisiana's most epic storms: Hurrican Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960's, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings the kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.

The Cajuns: Americanization of a People

by Shane K. Bernard

The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period, they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana.

Creole New Orleans Race and Americanization

by Arthur Hirsch and John Logsdon

This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community.

The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

by Ken Wells

With a long and colorful family history of defying storms, the seafaring Robin cousins of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care. In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them.

Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast

by Mike Tidwell

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico. Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

Africans In Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century

by Gewndolyn Midlo Hall

A comprehensive assessment of the development of the Afro-Creole culture in colonial Louisiana. Created by slaves before 1731, the Afro-Creole culture encompass its own folkloric, musical, religious, and historical traditions that still survives today as a cultural heritage of tens of thousands of people of all races in the southern part of Louisiana. In this book, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall studies the overall history of Louisiana's creole slave community during the eighteenth century utilizing a variety of archival sources from Louisiana, France, and Spain across the disciplines of history, anthropology, linguistics, and folklore. She touches upon topics such as French slave trade from Africa to Louisiana, the ethnic origins of the slaves, and relations between African slaves and Native Americans. She gives special consideration to race mixture between Africans, Indians, and whites; to the role of slaves in the Natchez Uprising of 1729; to slave unrest and conspiracies, including the Pointe Coupee conspiracies of 1791 and 1795; and to the development of communities of runaway slaves in the cypress swamps around New Orleans.

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On the Road: Cuisine & Culture in Acadiana Louisiana

Enroll with Confidence

Protecting the Environment

At a Glance

Best of all, you’ll…

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