The Holbrook Family of Greenwell Springs, LA

We got back from New Orleans in time for the family dinner my Uncle Tim was putting on. Devon had gotten everything started as we were a bit late getting back, go figure, it’s a miracle we got back at all! Devon cooked up a storm while everyone visited, and the meal was great! Ribeyes, Deer sausage (the night before he made an excellent seared tuna steak), Devon has got quite the culinary prowess.

Adam had not seen many of his relatives from LA in over quite a few years. So there was lots of visiting to take care of! The last time he saw his Aunt Sharlee or cousin Liz was when he was about 8 or 9 and he had never met Nicholas! So it was great to visit with them and catch up.

Aunt Sharlee and Adam

Kitchen Madness

Jodi, Tony, Kim and Samantha

Jodi, Tony, Nicholas, Sam, Adam and Tim

Sam and Jodi... and Tim

Tim

Before we knew it, the night was over, and we headed for bed (another squishy night on the inflatable mattress!)

Murphy and Brown

Our second day in Louisiana we hooked up with a professional colleague of Tony’s who had contacted us out of the blue several weeks before. Michael was his name, and he is one of the few others in this world that also enjoys combining botany with computer databases. Michael comes at it from a computer sciences background, but his brother was a botany student at Louisiana State University who got him interested in “biodiversity informatics”.

We met up for lunch at a local café with Michael and Tim Jones, a PhD Student who specializes in Carex/Cyperaceae and interactive identification keys. We talked shop and geek speak (and traveling and food too) for most of the rest of the afternoon. After lunch, we headed onto the adjacent LSU campus to the Herbarium for some introductions and a little show and tell. We were introduced to Lowell Urbatsen, the Herbarium Director & a LSU Professor; and Diane Ferguson, the LSU Herbarium Collections Manager.

After a bit, Michael showed us some of the things he’s been working on. He has done some amazing work with several institutions, most notably Herbarium. He has designed some really great interfaces for the herbarium data, worked with photographic images of plants, designed a high speed image and data capture process for herbarium specimens, some nifty mapping and distribution tools, and great user query interfaces and data displays.

It was really invigorating for Tony to see someone else’s work on similar problems, especially Michaels with such an excellent and professional background in computer programming. We really didn’t get a chance to show Michael what Tony’s worked on over the years, but most of it is so dated at this point (what you can do with computers has evolved so quickly) that it really wasn’t all that important. It was great to make new friends in LA and in biodiversity informatics, and we look forward to keeping in touch with them.

Devon and Adam

Tim, Tony and Devon at the Computer.

Murphy!

The next morning, Uncle Tim made us a huge and great breakfast before we packed the car and got ready for another day of driving. He made sure that we knew how to get to our next stop, which was just up the road! Adam’s parents have been bringing a special Louisiana tradition back to California, and we just had to pick some of this specialty up ourselves. It is a sausage called Boudain (“boo-dan”) and it can only really be found in a few areas of Louisiana. We were told by more than one source that the very best place to pick it up is a shop called Jerry Lee’s, which happened to be just a few miles from Uncle Tim’s house.

The sausage is made up primarily of cooked rice, pork meat, and pork liver, seasoned to perfection and just a hint of spiciness, all stuffed into a natural casing (yes, pig intestines). It is kinda like dirty rice, and kinda like a spicy pork sausage, and it is entirely good to eat!

We debated how much to get, since we didn’t know how well it would keep in our cooler all the way back to California. In the end we looked at the contents of our wallet, and told them to give us as much as our money would buy (reserving a few bucks for two freshly cooked boudain, of course!). And we just gambled that we could keep them cold/frozen till we can get home! (they made it!)