Summer Festing
Cool off in Natchitoches at the Folk Fest, plus shopping and more seasonal festivals
Grab your fiddle and head to the 43rd annual Natchitoches-NSU Folk Festival (July 22) held in air-conditioned Prather Coliseum (NSU campus) featuring the celebrated Louisiana State Fiddle Championship. Enjoy three stages of live music plus Cajun, zydeco and Native American dance lessons, a harmonica workshop, demonstrations on handmade banjos, quilting and blacksmithing plus a gumbo cook-off (nsula.edu).
Bossier City
A Shopping We Will Go
Browse through the Bossier City Farmer’s Market -— which opened in April and operating each Saturday through November -— enhanced with live music and flanked by several food trucks. Escape the heat at the new indoor customer seating area inside the Pierre Bossier Mall. Each weekend, over 75 venders are displaying their goods. Check out the summer produce and plants, ice-cold smoothies and handmade baked goods, local art, leather and woodworking (bossiercity-farmersmarket.com).
Delcambre, Morgan City
Fresh Off the Docks
Seafood lovers will show their support for Louisiana shrimpers while “passing a good time” with live music and dancing, seafood galore, parades and processions during the Delcambre Shrimp Festival (Aug. 16-20; shrimpfestival.net) and the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival (Aug. 31-Sept. 4; shrimpandpetroleum.org).
Lake Charles
Cajun French Celebration
Head to Lake Charles for the Cajun Music & Food Festival (July 15-16) in Burton Coliseum featuring Cajun cuisine and cold beer, arts and crafts, cake walks and auctions, Cajun bands and a Cajun French mass followed by a coffee and donut social. The Miss Cajun Music Pageant is held a week prior to the festival. Proceeds go to McNeese University scholarships (cfmalakecharles.com/index.php/festival).
Atchafalaya Basin
How It Knows?
A man recently caught a two-tone crawfish in the Atchafalaya Basin. The half blue, half red crawfish was pardoned and spared from the boiling pot. For those mumbling the old Cajun saying, “How it knows?” the exoskeleton of a crawfish can turn blue when they produce too much vitamin A. Another oddity recently occurred in North Carolina, where two new species of (very eerie-looking) gold crawfish were discovered. Not to worry, since they exist nowhere else on the planet.
