New Orleans 

T-Day 2016

We planned to meet the kids and grandkids in Louisiana for Thanksgiving this year, and to avoid the crowds as best we could, we flew down a few days early, made reservations in the French Quarter at Olivier House (828 Toulouse, around the corner from Bourbon Street), built in 1839 as the personal home of a Madame Olivier.

 

With the original 20-foot ceilings still in the hallways and lobby, the hotel now offers 42 bedrooms, having installed sleeping lofts, and has two inner courtyards (one with a swimming pool that we did not use).

Our room was at the top of a curving stairway, with the bed and a half-bath in the loft.  We settled in, then walked a few blocks to Brennan’s for a scrumptious Creole dinner, including a sweetbread appetizer and Bananas Foster desert. 

 

After, we explored some more. The French Quarter is a walker’s delight: cast and wrought iron balconies,

plants and flowers, clear efforts to preserve the traditional look of the city.

We explored into the night, then wound our way back to the hotel.

The next morning we found Café Beignet to try that famous powdered sugar concoction.

Warning:  when eating beignets, do not breathe in.  I'm afraid we were not impressed:  grease soaked dough smothered in sweetness.

We shared one, gave the other two (they come three on a plate) to a couple of young men at a nearby table.  However, my crawdad omelet was good.

Then we started walking again, admiring the sights.

We walked by Jackson Square to the French Market, a pavilion with stalls

selling tees, hats, baby gator heads, and other doo-dads─the same "souvenirs" sold  at tourists traps the world over.  But there were a couple of interesting bronzes hiding in the back and the toilets were clean.

Here and there, buskers plied their trade.  A lady covered tourists with budgies for photos, a man did the same with a macaw.

In the most touristy parts of the Quarter, bands played street corners, and as evening approached, players showed up between corners, as well as in bars.

Even kids got in their licks.

The oldest bar in the Quarter got its start, according to flyers, as a blacksmith shop; now Lafitte’s Blacksmithy looks like a Disney concoction.

Despite the hokum, some authenticity slips in.  We took a break and discovered a Dale Chihuly creation.  The barman said a friend had purchased it 25 years before for $25,000 and it has hung over the bar unmolested ever since.

We liked best, however, near the French Market, the B.B.King Blues Club:  good food, good blues.

Antiques shops proliferate in the Quarter, with nice stuff at big city prices.

I was tempted by a Ferdinand Pautrot gilt chick, but I left it for next time.

The kids showed up Wednesday.  We checked out of the Olivier House, and bought a three-day pass on the Hop-On Hop-Off tour bus for a comprehensive view of touristy New Orleans.  Among our stops was the Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District, established in 1833, where each above ground tomb is built over a below ground vault to where remains are moved when the above ground tomb is needed for new tenants.  For the “lowest ranking tier of ‘society’” (according to the flyer for the self-guided walking tour) are wall vaults; when these are needed for a new interment, the remains of the previously buried body “would be pushed to the back of the slab using a ten-foot pole.”  Which may be the origin of the phrase “I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.” 

That evening, we drove across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (at 24 miles, the world’s longest continuous bridge over water)

 

to Abita Springs resort

where they had reserved a cabin for us and a site for their RV, where we planned to spend Thanksgiving relaxing and chomping on the turkey Dave had soaked in his special brine.

A pleasant day, long into the evening.

Friday, we headed south of New Orleans 28 miles to the fishing and tourist village of Lafitte for an airboat ride into tidewater cypress bayous of the 20,000-acre Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve.

In a boat with bench seats designed for up to eight passengers, we six started leisurely, then hit high decibels. 

I had chosen airboat over kayaks; we could perhaps have seen more animal life, but could not have covered the territory.  We pushed 50 mph over open

water, then slowed and headed into channels.  Bigger and smaller channels crisscross the bayous, dug and dredged for commercial purposes: oil, gas, logging; in the past for the collection of Spanish moss, used to stuff mattresses and car seats.  Synthetics have replaced the moss but it still grows beautifully in the trees that are left.

We saw a few birds and turtles but the tour goal is gators.

The big daddies had probably already gone into winter hibernation (the technical term is “brumation,” that is, as temperatures fall they slow their metabolism but not to the torpor of true hibernation). 

We slipped up on a few sunning mid-sized babies (10- to 12-foot).  When we over-stayed our welcome, they slipped into the water.

Our guide stopped the boat at a quiet side water and from a cooler pulled out a young gator. 

While he explained the odds against gator survival (even their mothers eat them), he passed his around for us to pet.

He catches them young, keeps them until about three—three years and three feet— when their survival chances are greatly improved, then releases them.  He said he had started a Face-Book page for Al Gator, but it was kicked off.  Surprisingly, Al’s skin is soft.

The next day we hopped on the Hop-On Hop-Off bus and hopped off at The National WWII Museum, ranked by TripAdvisor (according to the museum 

 website) as the number one attraction in New Orleans, the number three

(or four, sources differ) top museum in the United States, and the eleventh top museum in the world.

Opened only in 2000, it is housed in five buildings on six acres, a combination of artifact displays, videos, films, and Disney effects that would take several days to explore adequately (and there are plans to add two more buildings).  We made a quickie tour and emerged several hours later, impressed and, for me, at least, disturbed at the attempt to make entertaining so much distruction, suffering, and death.

We hopped back on the bus and hopped off at Mardi Gras World, a combination workshop, warehouse, and tourist attraction located in an old industrial part of town.

Every half hour, guides direct tours through the facilities and describe the process involved in character modelling and float making.

The originator, Blaine Kern, began in 1947, opened the workshops to tourists in 1984, and in the late 2000s expanded to 300,00 square feet.  Each year, the company builds or decorates some 500 floats for parades around the world at up to $80,000 per float.

We stopped by the Café du Monde at the French Market, a long-time destination of Maren’s, growing out of a failed attempt to get beignets there some three years before on a high school field trip.

 We had swung by the Café twice before but the lines to get in were longer than we wanted to wait.  This time we lucked out, no wait at all.  Maren finally succeeded in her quest, but the beignets were as awful as ever.

The next day, Maren headed back to Hendrix, Dave, Laurel, and Matthew to Huntsville, and we moved back into Olivier House.   The concierge got us a driver and we headed for the lower Ninth Ward to see what had happened in the eleven years since Katrina. 

We found a few derelict houses, but many vacant lots, some with mowed grass, some covered in head-high weeds, and, in many lots, on pillars, large new houses with solar panels.  Our driver told us that before, parts of the lower Ninth were so overrun with gangs and drugs that he would not drive there but Katrina washed them away; now it was safe.

We rode a stern wheeler, the Natchez─touted to be the last true steam boat on the Mississippi─around the harbor to get a view of the city from the river. 

The day was clear but windy. 

When we disembarked, we found our bicycle rickshaw driver, Polly, to take us to the Commander Palace for 25 cent martinis and lunch,

but she called and found it was closed so instead she took us just around the corner to Johnny’s Po’ Boys which had, she said, the best po-boys in the Quarter.

Then it was time for us to head home. A good time.