New Orleans! We spent Friday and Saturday in this interesting city. A great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live here. It is like Key West on steroids! We thought Friday that there was a lot of people, but the crowds were nothing compared to Saturday. Some of that is due to the NCAA Women’s Final Four is being played here. (see picture) Our first stop on Friday morning was Cafe du Monde for a beignet (pronounced bin-yea), which was recommended by every person we talked to that had ever been to N.O. Mike saw the line and said there was no way he was going to wait in a line that long for a “donut”. I said it is like going to Disney World on spring break – you know there will be long lines and you just do it. We got in the takeout line, which was shorter, but OH MY GOODNESS, they would have been worth the wait in the long line! Fried dough covered in powdered sugar. (see picture) We got them both mornings! We then took a narrated double decker bus tour of the city. It was the hop-on, hop-off kind, but we stayed on the whole 2 hours to get an overview of all the sights and learn the history of the area. I would like to share everything we learned, but I don’t think this blog is that long. OK – just a few facts: N.O. has more canals than Venice, Italy. The St. Louis Cathedral is the oldest Catholic church in the U. S. (see picture) I will have to research some things because actually they said a lot of things in N.O. were the “oldest in the U.S.” I would have thought those things would be in St. Augustine, FL. And my brother Tim would have love this one – Stephen Decatur, from N.O. said “My country. . . right or wrong”. On Saturday we got on and off the bus all over town. The French Quarter and Bourbon street are fascinating. Shopping, eating, music, beads and drinking in abundance. We were warned not to be on Bourbon street after dark and we willingly followed that advice after seeing it during the day! Most of the places had small, shabby fronts, but when you went inside there was usually an open air courtyard with tables and greenery and flowers and live music. The bus tour guy said, “In other parts of America, you eat to live. In New Orleans, we live to eat.” And eat we did – when in Rome. . . - we had gumbo, red beans and rice, crab cakes and po boys. I learned you don’t ask what kind of soup they have – it is all gumbo. You choose which kind (seafood, sausage, etc.). We even had it served with a scoop of potato salad in the middle! Mike really liked it. We walked through the oldest cemetery in N.O. – call the City of the Dead because all the tombs and vaults are above ground. The actor Nicholas Cage has a tomb already built waiting for him. The architecture was beautiful. More Spanish than French with the wrought iron balconies and railings. We did not see widespread destruction still from Katrina. We did see houses where they painted on the front numbers indicating the house had been searched and if people were found. We asked directions to drive to the Lower Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit, and was strongly urged not to drive through there alone, so we didn’t. Our bus driver had 9 ft. of water in his home and he lived in Texas for two years before he could come back. For those from Ionia, another example of “it’s a small world” – on Saturday we got off the bus and ran into Dan and Janet Balice, Kurt and Laurie Tjalsma and their families in town for a wedding on the Cook side!
Off to Texas in the morning!
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