A Brief Fling with Louisiana

Have you heard that I'm a wedding photographer? No? That's because I'm not.

It all started a couple of months ago. My uncle sent out invitations to his upcoming wedding and my mom, sister, and I joked about going. No that the wedding was a joke to us, but because the wedding was on the other side of the country and, to be honest, my family isn't the fly-to-a-wedding sort of people. Anyway, somehow the joke spiraled until it became a reality. I found myself in my parent's living room, booking plane tickets, hotel room, and rental car for a weekend trip.

And then it spiraled even more. Upon RSVPing to the wedding, my uncle asked my mom to be his photographer. Let's make this very clear: my mom is not a photographer. She is an artist and takes a lot of very pretty facebook pictures, but she is not a photographer. She couldn't exactly say no to the request, so I tried to take some of the pressure off of her by volunteering to take pictures as well. The majority of my luggage for the three day trip was my camera equipment.

The one little bit of site-seeing we got to do was a swamp tour. If you have the chance to do one, I highly recommend it. We had the whole boat just for the three of us. Since it was winter, all the reptiles were out sunning themselves on logs, so we saw so much wildlife. My mom had done a swamp tour in the summer once and didn't see a thing!

Here's the lovely little swamp we motorboated about.

My mom, on the boat, enjoying a beauty day in a swamp.

Our tour guide/boat driver. I want to say his name was Gary? He was very dynamic and friendly.

Giant cyprus trees

The first little alligator we saw.

The deeper we went into the swamp, the bigger the gators got...

...until we came across this giant guy.

He had to be at least 12 feet long. I love the neck on him. He's a real life dinosaur!

After the tour, we had just enough time to grab some Hardee's and eat in the hotel room while getting ready for the wedding.

It was a nice wedding. Minus the two and half hour drive both way, I had a lot of fun. I took over 900 pictures, met some cousins I had never met before, and had a slumber party with my mom, my sister, and my aunt.

Makes me sad we don't do things like this more often.