Another item I wanted to strike off my travel to do list is a visit to a slave plantation. There are quite a few to pick from but Laura Plantation kept receiving great reviews so we headed to it. It is located in a town called Vacherie between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It is not the type of house out of "Gone with the Wind" (Oak Alley next door has that type of house) which most expect from these plantations but very closely resembles an old Queenslander. The colours in the photos are the original colours from creole tradition. Slave labour was used to build the house and it was constructed in 11 days and it still stands strong today. All the timber is Cyprus that I mentioned in the swamp tour. The inside of the house tour was ok, very similar to old houses in Australia. Where Laura stands out is the granddaughter (Laura, who the plantation is named after ) wrote a book on 100 years of life on the plantation and she lived to 106 years old. This manuscript was only recently (probably in the last 30 years) discovered in New Orleans and fills in a lot of gaps in the history of the plantation. There are stories about the males fathering children to the slaves but never acknowledging them. It is suggested one male had over 20 offspring (children and grandchildren ) at any one time on the plantation. I suppose it is one way to build your stocks of slaves up. When a slaves child was 13 they were then deemed to be saleable property and sold separately to the mother whereas prior to 13, mother and child were sold as one item. There are stories of branding run away slaves faces with the initials of the plantation owner so they could not escape without being identified as belonging to this plantation. As the slaves did not have last names they normally adopted the names of the plantation owners. This is why a lot of African Americans have French sounding names like Duparte. The grounds are amazingly green, a lot like FNQ. We walked through the grounds to the last of the original slave quarters. The rest of the slave quarters were about 2 miles from the homestead next to their own sugar mill. This site is now right in the middle of Vacherie. From the front the slave quarters look like there is two rooms, it is actually a duplex housing a family of up to 5 on each side. These huts were built in the 1840s and had an extra room built on the back in the 1890s. The guide talked a lot about the civil war and the effect on the families. Laura plantation was not seriously affected by the war so the thought is the owner made a deal with the Union to retain the plantation. A lot of plantations were confiscated from confederates and taken over by Union supporters. Interestingly enough post civil war slavery was abolished and the slaves were free to go. But where would they go, most were born on the plantation and did not know anything else, they were uneducated (it was illegal to educate a slave) and they had no money. At least they would now get paid (although a pittance) for their work. This pay only lasted a few years when share cropping was introduced. Now the ex slaves got to work for, food, accommodation, clothing and healthcare. Nothing really had changed, the slaves were exactly where they were prior to the war. A comment was made to the guide about obvious improvements made in the 20th century to the slaves quarters. The guide informed us that as unbelievable as it sounds, descendants of the slaves lived in these huts and worked on the plantation until it was sold to local farmers in the late 1970s. Up until then the slave descendants still had little money or hope for anything else. It was not known what happened to these people after they moved out. The guide was great, she spoke in the twangy Louisiana drawl with the obligatory y'all thrown in. Her pronunciation of the French names was authentic and made it all the more realistic. I really enjoyed hearing the history and seeing some of it up close. We probably should have called in to Oaks Alley or Evergreen to look at the Gone with the Wind style mansions but wanted to get on the road to Nashville. Due to the preserved history parts of Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave were filmed in the Vacherie district. We headed north knowing we would not make Nashville by nightfall. The first significant town we got to about 4pm was Hattiesburg Mississippi, although a spread out town there is nothing there except a lot of boarded up businesses and houses. We continued on to Meridian Mississippi originally thinking it would end up being the same as Hattiesburg, we were wrong. Driving into Meridian there was a National Guard Base just off the highway. They had more Ch47 Chinooks parked on the helicopter apron than we have in the Australian Defence Force. Apparently Meridian was completely destroyed during the Civil War and was rebuilt between 1890 and 1930. Across the road from our hotel was an "Applebee's Diner", it was surprisingly good and quite packed, Americans seem to eat out at these diners a lot. Had a nice dinner, few beers and retired for the drive to Nashville tomorrow. Americans do their interstate highways very well, it is great to cruise down these highways going with the flow of the traffic at 80mph (about 130kph). Most drivers in the US are very polite and courteous, more so than I have seen in Australia. Fuel here is another cheap item, I am paying about $1.89 per gallon. That equates to about 50c per litre. I put 20 gallons (75 litres) in the jeep and it cost me about $42 or so. I also find most people very friendly, walking down the street in New Orleans, people walking past would say, good morning or hello. So far on the trip we have been to Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Off to Tennessee tomorrow.