THIS WEEK CHEAP Eats takes a little road trip. Ironically, its author, the Cheap Eats Guy, a.k.a. Lord Exister, a.k.a. me ... I'm going on a little road trip too, and yet they are not the same road trip. Cheap Eats is taking you out of town just an hour and a half or so to the tiny Delta town of Isleton, home of the annual Crawdad Festival. Whereas I'm going to Michigan. Get this: I got this great one-week gig teaching writing to 15- to 20-year-olds. Meaning 10 to 20 years from now, if all goes well, this country's free weekly food sections should be infested with restaurant reviewers who can't tell a bay leaf from a box of baking soda, blabbering about crawdad festivals and sports and shit instead of restaurants.

And won't those be the days?

They will be, but until then, last weekend will have to suffice – as the proverbial "days," I mean. That was the Crawdad Festival in Isleton I was telling you about. You'll have to wait until next summer, I'm afraid, if you missed it, but I was there this year, and – journalistic irrelevancy aside – I'll be damned if I'm not going to tell you about it.

Isleton, pronounced Isleton, is an old Sacramento River steamboat-style town of about 850 people. It has that real true old-west feel to it that a lot of these little Delta towns seem to have retained without trying too hard or talking about it or anything. The buildings all seem a little crooked. The facades need paint, and I hope no one paints them.

Once a year – I find out now (after 12 years of living in the Bay Area and six of craving crawfish) – the town throws a huge three-day crawfish boil for 200,000 guests, 199,996 of whom are bikers. The festival, according to the Isleton Chamber of Commerce, is the biggest "free" crawdad festival either in the country or outside of Louisiana – I forget which.

And by "free" they mean you don't need a ticket. The crawdads themselves are expensive as hell, compared with what you'd pay for the same critterage in Louisiana. But that's California for you. Love it or leave it, as Merle Haggard used to tell me. Twenty bucks for one of those standard foot-by-foot-by-couple-inch Styrofoam take-out containers full. That may sound like a lot of crawfishes, and it is (for a five-year-old girl on a diet), but it sure ain't enough for four hangovered hooligans to stake their midday recovery on – even if one of them didn't happen to be named Crawdad (de la Cooter, of course). Nor did it help that three-quarters of us had already started drinking again. Or maybe it did help. How should I know? I was the other one quarter.

At any rate, they were good crawfishes, and fun fun fun to eat, as always. Especially while sitting under trees on hay bales with live Cajun music all around you. Funny thing is that, although the Delta region comes up with its own crawdads, the ones for the festival are imported from Louisiana. At least that's what the guy at Bob's Bait Shop told me. But maybe he was wrong, or lying. Bob sells live, local crawdads, and he sells them live and local all year round, which may be the most useful piece of information I gathered all year this year so far. (By way of making myself useful, I'll publish the stats on Bob's Bait Shop at the end of this article, in lieu of any other sort of stats – like, say, for a restaurant.)

Meanwhile, I happen to have insider information that crawfish are out of season in Louisiana right now. Crawdad's dad told me. So if these 22,000 pounds of crawdads really did come up from Louisiana, maybe that's why they're all eating hamburgers down there these days.

Well sir, these 'uns certainly tasted fresh and in-season and seasoned just so – with bay leaf and baking soda, ha ha. We tried supplementing the crawstuff with jambalaya and curly fries, but between all that and beers and a couple of souvenir hats, we all ended up running out of money before we could ever go back and get more crawdads.

In fact, I loaned my last twenty to my ever-renomenclatable friend the Walleye to buy Tinzee a shirt with. And I publish that fact here as an official reminder to them, a TOM, if you will, for "they owe me." Walleye? You listening?

Renomenclatable ain't no word, you say? Look it up, says me. It'll be in the next chapter (minus the "re") after your goddamn "mundaneity."