Bayou Country Children's Museum

Most children's museums teach abstractions — gravity, color, the food pyramid. The Bayou Country Children's Museum in Thibodaux teaches a specific place: this one. The exhibits are the working life of Lafourche Parish, scaled down to where a six-year-old can operate it. A child can climb into a full-size sugarcane harvester, the machine that actually runs through the fields outside town every fall. There is a shrimp boat to board, a duck blind to watch waterfowl from, a Mardi Gras float to throw beads off of, and a two-story oil platform — the four economies of South Louisiana rendered as playground equipment. The "Safety-ville" section runs a severe-weather simulation and a fire simulation, which on this stretch of coast is not abstract education either. It is a climate-controlled building at 211 Rue Betancourt, which matters in a region where the summer is its own weather event. Closed Mondays; open Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 5, Sunday noon to 5. It is the rare children's museum where the kids leave understanding the place their parents are driving them through.