Getting the flavor of ... Life on an Oregon farm

Life on an Oregon farm

Oregon’s Willow-Witt Ranch reintroduces harried Americans to the simple pleasures of farm life, said Jessica Garrison in the Los Angeles Times. Set in a meadow within the Cascade Mountain range, not far from the town of Ashland, the ranch is one of more than 25 farms in Oregon that offer overnight stays. Visits are accompanied by free tutorials in “how to milk a goat, approach a horse, and talk to a piglet.” I arrived with my husband and children and checked into a “charming studio” with a sleeping loft, a wood stove, a full kitchen, and “enough board games to occupy our family for months.” From our window, we saw “frolicking goats,” chickens, horses, and pigs roaming around a farmyard canopied by a “dense forest of white fir, ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir.” By the next morning, we’d already “found ourselves falling into the rhythm of farm life, waking as the sun began to rise over the trees.”

Contact: Willowwittranch.com

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Louisiana’s Cajun country

To know where to go in Louisiana’s Cajun country, you just need to know whom to ask, said Josh Noel in the Chicago Tribune. I spent a few days wandering near Houma, a bayou hub southwest of New Orleans, on the advice of Werlien Prosperie, the jovial 74-year-old owner of Jolly Inn, a Cajun dance hall in town. At his “wood-walled” establishment, you “put on your best jeans and let a fiddle-accordion-washboard band propel you” all night long. Prosperie told me to seek out the “old Cajun life” in the soupy waters west of Houma. There I met Norbert LaBlanc, a bushy-bearded tour guide who leads small groups into the “cypress-thick swamps” near Breaux Bridge. “For 40 years, LaBlanc trapped gators in these swamps”—a brutal process that involved bait meat, a hook, and a pistol. LaBlanc pointed out gators that we never could have spotted on our own, and even shared some of his family’s “peach-tinged moonshine.”

Contact: Houmatourism.com