Louisiana Swamp Thing & Crawfish Festival

Ok, so you drive all the way down to Buda and pay your $20 to then get your small purse inspected just to get into this rather small festival.  Then you find out for your $20 you get only one medium size tray of crawfish served by someone with bad customer service that tells you that you are getting 1 pound of crawfish.   This is not an all you can eat deal and if you are not aware of or experienced eating crawfish, there is not much meat in crawfish so for your $20 you get about 1/4 pound of actual meat if you are lucky which takes you a lot of effort to get.  The crawfish is spicy so you will probably want/need  something to drink with it so spend some more money for that and you can quickly see this festival is not worth what you pay for it.  Children 8 and under are free but I can't imagine a child trying to eat crawfish, they would not want to spend the time so I would not recommend this festival for families (way too expensive). This is not a festival I would recommend to anyone.  I did not feel welcomed but searched before I ever entered the festival but only after paying upfront to find out what I was told about the festival is no longer true.  Save your money and time and find somewhere else to go! Oh, and organizers, you need to let people know upfront before they pay what they get for their money and that you will search their belongings before you enter!!

I was under the impression $20 entry fee got you crawfish and potatoes/corn but only to find out it was a basket size crawfish and corn/potatoes was $4 extra dollars. Extra spices was across the field. The two red potatoes and one baby corn for $4 was served with no utensils and although I'm okay with it, my wife wasn't. Problem is there was no obvious wash stations so a water fountain sufficed until we stopped by a local Starbucks to clean up. Gator boys charged $10 for pictures with baby gator, $1 for jump zone, $3 for mouth wash size feed for live stolk...over all, your wallet was being raped every turn you made so I definitely left feeling I didn't get a good deal

The Jambalaya while leaving was awesome and only $2. Great job!

Live music, vendors (food, drinks, and shopping), petting zoo: typical Austin-area festival.
But wait, there's more- yummy, all-you-can-eat crawfish for $20! We got there at noon (the event started at 11am), and the lines for free crawfish weren't bad at all. Unfortunately, as the day went on, the crowds grew and the lines did the same. Our wait went from about 3 minutes to 15 minutes for each basket (see photo) which still wasn't terrible.

Do...
-get there early!
-make sure you have a drink to go with your crawfish (4...5...6 baskets later it can get spicy).
-ask the price of other food before purchasing (everything edible is pretty pricey).
-walk around and take a look at vendors' booths. There was a guy selling pretty affordable ($15-$20) Indian dresses and cool jewelry.
-try the beignet. It was a bit greasy like Shannon said, but I thought it was still pretty good.
-try the lemonade (same vendor as the crappy Shrimp PoBoy described below).

Don't....
-buy the Shrimp PoBoy that is right next to the free crawfish lines. The length of the sandwich was about the length of my hand, the bread was *stale*, there were about 6 or 7 small fried shrimp, and that was it!...meaning no sauce, no veggies, no nothing! Just shrimp and bread! OH. AND it was $9. BOOOOO.
-be afraid of the line. It moves by pretty quickly!
-wear anything nice. Both the Hubs and I made this mistake. You will most likely end up splattered in juicy, crawfishy, yumminess.