Stop #2—New Orleans, LA. New state for all of us.
Along the way, we picked up a couple geocaches—including
this awesome stop at the Derailed Diner. We had some bad geocaching experiences
while traveling, but sometimes they take us places that we wouldn’t normally go
to, and are surprisingly fun little stops. (We’ve now found at least one cache
in each state we’ve been in the last couple months—NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, and LA.
And we’re planning to pick up a few more on the drive.)
We made a quick stop at our hotel to unload and get Molly
and Tumtum settled. We didn’t plan this trip out, and it turns out that
Halloween is a big weekend in New Orleans, so ended up having to go about an
hour outside of the French quarter to find a pet friendly hotel for less than
$250. Not the greatest set up, but in the end, we were satisfied with our taste
of the city.
First night, we fought the weekend evening traffic, walked a
few blocks down Royal Street, got dinner at Café Beignet, and then took the kids
up one block to Bourbon Street. It took about 5 seconds to realize that even
though it was only 8 p.m., there were no other kids out, and it really wasn’t a
family friendly place. It was really loud, lots of bright lights, and drunk,
scantily clad people. And it’s a little
disturbing to me when there are EMS vehicles just parked on the corners,
waiting for something to happen. We
stayed for a few minutes to watch some break dancers and our kids were done
with it all. They actually weren’t too excited to go back the next day.
This one with all the bone references was pretty
impressive.
Seriously beautiful homes.
(The home where Jefferson Davis died.)
Then, because the St. Charles streetcar wasn’t running
because of a half-marathon (of course—we have bad luck with these things), we
decided to drive over to the other side of the river where I’d read about a
free ferry that runs back and forth between Algiers and the French quarter.
Only after we crossed into Algiers, we started wondering just how safe it was
going to be to park our car anywhere over there—it did not look like the safest
part of town, and being white, and driving around with a luggage carrier on top
of our car made us really stand out as easy tourist targets. Then, we ran into
a closed street. From a few blocks down, we couldn’t tell what was going on,
except there were a bunch of people in the street and the car in front of us
just stopped in the middle of the road. Even though I was still the one pushing
for us to just get to the ferry terminal and see what the situation was, my
first thought was that there were possibly riots going on just a couple blocks
from us. It turned out to be a high school homecoming parade (for Landry-Walker
HS, which was in the news earlier this year for putting the principal and
several other admins on probation for suspected cheating on standardized
testing.)
We tried a couple other ways to get around, finally decided
this whole thing was a bad idea, and went back over the river to park in the
same lot we’d been in the night before.
The city was even more packed than it
had been the night before, but we were able to get beignets at Café du Monde,
wander around the street art at Jackson Square, venture back onto Bourbon
street long enough to realize it really was almost as crazy during the day as
it was at night, and then found a great little restaurant, Pierre Maspero’s, in
what was the old slave exchange building established in 1788. The history in
the south is still a little surreal for me. So many old buildings, such
complicated stories, and we can sit down and eat right in the middle of it.
Lunch was GOOD. We ate at Pierre Maspero's and had these incredible sandwiches called seafood pistolettes that I really hope I can figure out how to make so I don’t
have to wait until the next time we’re in New Orleans to eat one again. We also
all tried fried alligator which tasted a little like fishy chicken, but mostly
just like fried food, and had a smapler with Cajun Jambalaya, Crawfish Etouffée and Chicken & Andouille Gumbo. Had to have some good creole/Cajun food.
We did a little more wandering and then caught the Canal
Streetcar to get back to our car, satisfying Peanut’s only thing he wanted to
do in NOLA. (And he told us, all day long. I hope those half-marathoners had a
great day because mine would have been a bit better if we’d just been able to
ride the streetcar from the garden district.) Back at the car, we realized that
the cemetary we’d been planning to stop by was closed. But I found one just
north of the Garden District that didn’t say when it closed, so we thought we’d
drive by and see if we could go walk through an authentic NOLA cemetary (if you
are wondering what the big deal is, because of the water levels, they don’t
bury people below ground, so the cemeteries are full of crypts and mausoleums,
large above-ground tombs—it really is like the city of the dead). And once
again, me picking a random place to go meant we drove into one of the worst areas
of New Orleans (we looked it up later—Central City has the second highest crime
rates in the whole city). It really is crazy what a difference a few blocks can
make because once we found the cemetery (which was closed, but there is no way
we would have gotten out of the car anyway), we drove two blocks south and were
back in the beautiful historic area we’d been walking in that morning. We got
to see a good variety of New Orleans, for sure.
We didn’t have a really long time there, but it felt like we
got a good taste of the city. It’s such a weird mix of history and culture and
beauty, and then all of the saddest things in civilization. I went back to the
hotel that night and spent a couple hours reading about Hurricane Katrina and
some of the issues the city has faced since then. It really all becomes real
when you visit a place and really start to see it.
