Cajun Country Guide

There's just nowhere else but South Louisiana to find real knee-slapping, crowd-hooting Zydeco music. Even the big-city chefs can't cook up a Cajun meal the way they do at the roadside restaurants deep in the bayous of Acadiana. Likewise, no other guide matches the amount of in-depth information presented in Cajun Country Guide. It's a study of Cajuns that tells visitors how to find the sights, sounds, and flavors of one of America's most culturally unique regions.

Take a vacation to a part of our own country that, in some places, didn't even speak English until nearly fifty years ago. While modern technology is weeding out some of the one-of-a-kind qualities of this subculture, not all of them are gone, or even hard to find, if you know how to hunt for them. And there are no better hunters than authors Macon Fry and Julie Posner.

With the handy maps, reviews, and recommendations packed into the Cajun Country Guide, a trip to the bayous won't leave one feeling like a visitor, but more like a native who has come back home.

Macon Fryís love for Cajun Country actually began years before he ever moved to Louisiana. A fan of rhythm and blues recordings, he began studying and collecting Cajun and Zydeco records while in school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He made several trips to Louisiana over the years before finally making the decision to call it home in 1980. Less than forty-eight hours after arriving in New Orleans, I found myself a bleary-eyed passenger in a packed car speeding across the Atchafalaya Throughway at 8 A.M. As the sun smoldered along the tops of the black willow and cypress, I looked down from the interstate at the blackness of the nationís largest freshwater swamp and pondered how different and beautiful South Louisiana was. Fry stayed in New Orleans teaching in public schools in Jefferson and Orleans parishes and began submitting articles to local magazines about his excursions into the bayous. He quickly found that even people in New Orleans, just outside of Cajun Country, were not as familiar with the lay of the land in Acadiana. Thatís when he decided to start compiling information for what would become Cajun Country Guide , an outsiderís guide to the sounds, tastes, and sights of South Louisiana. In 1990, Fry, with his coauthor and fellow travel writer Julie Posner, drove 20,000 miles through the Cajun prairie covering most of the highways and byways. They took every swamp tour, visited every dance hall, and ate at over half of the homestyle restaurants they passed. Fry continues to write a weekly column for Wavelength , a New Orleans entertainment magazine, and contributes articles to New Orleans magazine as well. His trips to Cajun Country have not stopped with the publication of his travel guide. Thereís still a chance that on a Saturday morning you might run across him in a small Acadian tavern, tapping his feet to the beat of a squeeze-box with a boudin sausage sandwich in one hand, and his camera in the other.