Riding on the City of New Orleans

So, I’ve had some adventures with Blogger over the last couple of days, but I think it’s all straightened out now.  A new app, and there just happened to be a glitch with uploading that day.  Wouldn’t you know it.

Anyway, we’re not Riding on the City of New Orleans, but we’re Residing in the City of New Orleans, for about a day and a half.  Here we are on Wednesday, just heading in — across Lake Pontchartrain on the I-10 bridge.  It’s only 5 miles long.

So we set up the RV at Pontchartrain Landing.  It’s a nice spot near the lake, but only 15-20 minutes from the French Quarter, and they have a shuttle that takes us there a couple of times a day.  So it works nicely for us.  We drained the antifreeze, set up our dirt-caked RV, and got some groceries.  We had a lot of cleaning to do inside.  This is the first year we’ve had mice inside, so everything had to be removed and cleaned.  Forgot to do the mint oil thing in the fall.  We won’t forget that again!  When we were almost done, we went off to get some groceries.  It was getting late by the time all that was done, so we just went to the restaurant they have here on site.  A nice feature also.

Yesterday, we took the 10 am shuttle into New Orleans and booked a “Super City” tour for 12 pm, then went off and wandered around the French Quarter for a bit.

This is a nice spot on Bourbon Street called “Musical Legends Park”.  They have these bronze statues of famous characters (as you can see) and there was a band playing here at 10:30 this morning!

We wandered a bit more and saw some city works cleaning out a storm sewer.  Yuck!  Yep, that’s an ugly pile of beads and things.  Mardi Gras is only 2-1/2 weeks away, so they’re preparing.  The partying is starting now anyway, and just builds and builds until that night.  It’s crazy.  I was here one time about a week or so before Mardi Gras.  A study in human behaviour :(

Some things are tasteful, like the decorations on this hotel on Bourbon Street.

We thought this T-shirt was rather funny and says it all.

We went back to where the tour bus was picking us up, near the Mississippi River.  Andrea & Chris — we saw a cruise ship down at the terminal from where you sailed a couple of years ago!

Not sure about this bus driver.  Hmmmm.

It was a good tour - covered quite a bit of the city and the tour guide was humorous.  This X on some houses was done after Hurricane Katrina.  The top is the date the house was checked, the bottom indicates no people or animals were found...and I forget the other two.

On a good note — there are some areas of the city where people are not going to rebuild, but NO is the fastest growing city in the U.S.  The population was cut in half though after the hurricane.

On the Creole side of the city, there are colourful houses.

We visited one of the cemeteries.  All bodies are buried in tombs.  This one contains about 200 bodies.  There’s a real story to how they fit them all in.  You can read about that online, I’m sure.  Creepy.

We visited City Park.  Both Gerard and I have this feeling we’ve been here before.  I think we must have done a tour back in 2015 when we first stopped here.  I guess I could look back — haven’t done that yet.  This is the oldest Oak Tree in the country at something like 830 years old.  Massive.

New Orleans is celebrating 300 years in 2018.  It was founded by a French Canadian, actually.  I don’t know what celebrations they will be doing, but I bet they do it up right!

So today we’re heading off west into Texas.