4 Best Sights in Side Trips from New Orleans, Louisiana

This museum traces the African and African American experience in south Louisiana. Videos, artifacts, and text panels combine to create a vivid, disturbing, and inspiring portrait of a people. It is an ambitious and refreshing counterpoint to the sometimes sidelined references to slavery and its legacy.

A video introduction, a wall of names of Acadian Louisiana refugees, an audio tour, and a huge mural relate the odyssey of the Acadians. Behind the small heritage center containing these memorials, an eternal flame and the coats of arms of Acadian families pay tribute to their cultural and physical stamina.

Shaded by giant live oaks draped with Spanish moss, this 157-acre park has picnic tables and pavilions and early Acadian structures. The on-site museum traces the history of the Acadians and their settlement along the Bayou Teche in the early 1800s. The modest house was built in 1815 of handmade bricks, and it contains Louisiana antiques. An hour-long tour includes many interesting details about life on the plantation.

The mother church of the Acadians and one of the country's oldest Catholic churches, this 1840 building was erected on the site of an earlier church. Inside is a replica of the Lourdes grotto and a baptismal font said to have been a gift from Louis XVI. Emmeline Labiche, who may have inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Evangeline," is buried in the small cemetery behind the church.