By Pam LeBlanc

Imagine a bike ride where speed doesn’t matter and every pedal stroke carries you closer to another helping of Louisiana music, food or drink.
I lived that dream at Cycle Zydeco, a 200-mile rolling Cajun culture festival in the USA. Po’boys, etouffee and jambalaya fuelled four days of bicycling, punctuated by the sounds of rubboards, fiddles and accordions.
This was no endurance event to be feared. Mileage hovered between 40 and 65 absolutely flat miles per day, and no one hurried as we spun past crawfish ponds and cow pastures in the heart of Cajun Country.
At times I pedalled behind two women on a tandem bike, dressed in multicoloured tutus and fishnets, blasting zydeco music and waving at farmers as they sped down the road. I watched someone named T-Boy make boudin, looked for alligators lurking in a swamp, tapped my toes to the finest zydeco music in the land and shared it all with cyclists who came from all over the country for the same experience.
“The priorities are dancing and eating, and [the participants] just happen to ride a bike,” says Scott Schilling, 43, president of Transportation Recreation Alternatives in Louisiana, which took over the event, now in its 14th year, in 2012.
This year’s ride drew 316 party-loving cyclists, mostly in their 50s and 60s, many from the Midwest; organisers hope to grow it to 1,000. About half camped along the way; the rest booked hotels and used a shuttle service provided by ride organisers to get to the start each morning.
Here’s how my experience went down.

Wednesday: “Into Cajun Country”
My friend Gretchen Sanders and I pass a dead alligator on the highway during the seven-hour drive from Austin, Texas, to Lafayette, Louisiana, where we unload our bicycles and queue up for pit-roasted meat at a kick-off party. As we eat, Grammy-winning zydeco musician Chubby Carrier (he weighed a whopping 10 pounds at birth) and the Bayou Swamp Band fill Blackham Coliseum with the steamy sounds of Louisiana music.
“It’s our music, the music I grew up on,” says Todd Ortego, a 56-year-old disc jockey at radio station KBON in nearby Eunice, who has come to watch the fun. “I love the passion and I love the stories.”
As Chubby belts out a rendition of Who Stole the Hot Sauce? Ortego explains a little about the Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop sounds we’ll hear this week. Sometimes it’s still sung in French. Usually it features the whirling sounds of fiddles and accordions, and often you can hear traces of Irish jigs, rhythm and blues, and even rock ‘n’ roll in it.
As the show winds down, some folks roll out sleeping bags inside the coliseum, and others pop tents outside. We’ve seen the forecast, though, and it calls for plenty of rain, so we head to a nearby hotel.
Thursday: “Hey, Tom Sawyer, want to boil some crawfish?”
Distance: 38 miles
Chubby’s here bright and early, this time astride a shiny red beach cruiser. A police escort fires up its sirens, the musician climbs astride his bike and the whole parade rolls away with a cheer at 9am.
In less than an hour we reach our first stop, Parish Brewing Company, where cyclists sample some drinks and I stuff a few Zydeco Bars, a Louisiana-made energy bar with an accordion on the wrapper, into my pocket. I’m trying to pace myself.
We ride another hour or so, then pull off at Belle Ecorce Farms, where someone uncorks bottle after bottle of juice and we dip crackers into crocks of goat cheese. That’s when Gretch lets out a squeal. She’s found a days-old dairy goat with tiny rosebud ears, and I swear it smiles and bleats as we cradle it in our arms.
A few more miles and we roll into St Martinville, the heart of French Louisiana. There we feast on crawfish etouffee, listen to more music and rest in the shade of Evangeline Oak, the subject of a romantic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Then it’s back on our bikes. We roll pass an old sugar refinery, then into Breaux Bridge, self-proclaimed Crawfish Capital of the World. Cyclists are putting up tents and making their way to the shower truck, but Gretch and I are distracted by Mark Thibodeaux, 54, and Greg Latiolais, 66, of B&L Boilers, who are preparing to cook up 300 pounds of crawfish for the group.
We’re innocent bystanders until suddenly we’re enlisted to help. Soon we’re slitting open sacks of crawfish and pouring them into boiling water, dumping in jars of okra and stirring the vat with giant paddles.
“They’re so sweet and tasty,” Thibodeaux says, swooning a little as he explains that these crawfish were harvested within 40 miles of where we’re toiling. He shows us how to hold the head in one hand and twist the tail off to get at the meat. “If you’re born and raised here, you suck the heads to get the juice and the fat. It tastes like heaven.”
We eat a pile of our handiwork, then grab our bikes again.
We wrap up the night with a visit to Pont Breaux’s (formerly known as Mulate’s), a famous Cajun restaurant where we meet a busload of tourists all the way from France and nibble hush puppies and grilled shrimp while couples swirl around the wooden dance floor.

Friday: “Swamp thing”
Distance: 42 miles
The forecast calls for rain, but we head out on our bikes by 8:30am anyway. Soon we’re streaking toward the Atchafalaya Basin, America’s largest wetland. Our agenda calls for a swamp tour, and we’re hoping to see some alligators.
At McGee’s Landing, we pedal up the levee and join the crowd of cyclists piling onto boats for a 30-minute tour. Themn-acre swamp looks like it’s filled with tea. We see lots of cypress trees and draping Spanish moss (once used as pillow stuffing and wall insulation) as we putter through the mist, and the guide spews Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes nearly nonstop, but not a single ‘gator shows its head.
Back at the landing, we sample beignets, pass on the bloody marys and hop back on our bikes. We whiz past a Piggly Wiggly and a bunch more crawfish ponds, and pull into Bayou Teche Brewery.
Down the road in Arnaudville, where 40% of the population speaks French and an etouffee festival takes place every May, we park our bikes in front of the Little Big Cup cafe. We eat gumbo on the back porch as rain pounds like bullets on the metal roof. When the rain eases we strike out again, heading for the small town of Sunset, the newly declared Rubboard Capital of the World. There I’m mesmerised by the accordion played by one of the members of the Back O’ Town Playboys. Squeezed shut it shows a crawfish, expanded it’s a crab.
The skies darken again and it starts spitting as we ride over a highway overpass and merge onto a frontage road. We’re soaked by the time we arrive in Opelousas, Zydeco Capital of the World and birthplace of Clifton Chenier. The town’s Yambilee Building, where the now-defunct Yam Festival once took place, will serve as our headquarters for the night.
Pooped and chilled, we stash our bikes and settle in with plates of grilled catfish topped with crawfish etouffee, then mingle with our fellow riders as Corey Ledet and his Zydeco Band take the stage. Some folks dance; we slide over a table, where a fellow rider has drawn a crowd painting fingernails in purple, green and gold.

Saturday: “Hot Damn, we made it to Fred’s”
Distance: 50 miles
Even before we get to Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, I’m pretty sure this is going to rank as my finest day on a bicycle. Ever.
An hour in, we stop at T-Boy’s Slaughter House, where we sample boudin and cracklings and watch T-Boy himself whip up some sausage. I’m incredulous, watching as ground meat and onions shoot out of a tube, inflating yard after yard of casing like circus balloons.
We don’t dally, because we’re on our way to Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, which is only open from 9am until 2pm Saturdays. A couple hundred bicycles are parked outside the unassuming little bar when we arrive. We swing open the door and are immediately hit with a sort of liquid Louisiana — it’s hot and dark, and people are swilling drinks, most notably little bottles of a cinnamon-flavoured Schnapps called Hot Damn. And the music — some guy is bending over an accordion, squeezing it to within an inch of its life.
The crowd, including a bunch of folks wearing clattery bike shoes, surges around him. A tiny little white-haired woman named Tante Sue (the wife of the bar’s namesake Fred, who died in 1992) walks around smiling, waving a little homemade no-kissing sign and warning patrons not to dance on the cigarette machine.
When we finally break back out into the sunshine, our ears are still ringing. Across the street, we sit down with bowls of homemade jambalaya served up by the Mamou Athletic Booster Club.
“You’ve taken over the whole town!” someone hollers out the window of a passing car.
It’s 13 more miles to Eunice, home to the Cajun Music Hall of Fame. Along the way we pass an array of road kill — nutria and armadillos, snakes, turtles and frogs. Per Cycle Zydeco tradition, many of the carcasses are adorned with Mardi Gras beads tossed there by passing bikers.
In Eunice, we clean up and grab platefuls of chicken and sausage sauce piquant and sweet potatoes before heading to the Liberty Theatre. Zydeco legend DL Menard, who wrote the widely covered zydeco hit “The Back Door,” is celebrating his 83rd birthday tonight, and he’s the featured guest on the “Rendez-vous de Cajuns” radio show that’s being broadcast. The Cajun French accents are so thick it’s hard to understand everything that’s said, but the music draws couples young and old to the floor in front of the stage.
When the show ends we’re still humming, so we move down to Ruby’s, where we practically wear the soles off our shoes spinning around the dance floor.

Sunday: Rain or Boudin?
Distance: 0 miles
It’s pouring when we wake up. A few hardy souls hop on their bikes, but we’re worried about slick streets and the forecast, which shows a 90% to 100% chance of rain, so instead we pile onto a shuttle bus headed back to our truck in Lafayette. I find myself sitting next to Johnny Hauck, a 61-year-old stevedore from New Orleans who has done Cycle Zydeco 11 times.
“I love zydeco dancing,” he says. “I love cycling. I love the hospitality of the people in Southwestern Louisiana and I love the out-of-towners enjoying it all, trying to learn how to dance and experiencing the new and different foods.” Other highlights? Listening to the birds as he pedals down deserted roadways, and looking at the trees.
“It’s the attitude of having fun, not just riding from point A to point B,” he says. “I feel like I’m breathing the air when I’m on a bike. I like the wind in my face and looking at wildflowers on the side of the road. It gives me time to ponder.”
That’s the thing about bike trips. Everything slows down. You can chat with other folks on the road. You smell things. You feel the place as much as see it.
When we get back to Lafayette, we get in our car and take a much speedier ride to Scott, to catch the Boudin Festival, where we’d originally planned to ride. As it turns out, the rain isn’t so bad, and we feel a little sad that we didn’t pedal this last leg of our journey.
We take a few hours to salute the local sausage, traditionally made here with a mixture of meat and rice. There’s more music, too, of course. Horace Trahan and the Ossun Express are pounding away on the stage when the power blows, so they do what they have to do — they hop off the stage and into the crowd, where they play, enthusiastically and fantastically unamplified.
It’s a rousing finale to our leg-powered, two-wheel trip through Cajun country. And we’re already plotting a way to do it again. — Austin American-Statesman/TNS