The Big Not So Easy

We were last in New Orleans twenty years ago on a rather fabulous wild weekend. It hasn’t changed much despite the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and several others since then.  The French Quarter remains charming and vibrant, ridiculously talented musicians busk in the pretty squares, the queue for beignets seems not to have moved an inch, and drunken tourists are still staggering along Bourbon Street, even on a cold January afternoon.

Preservation Hall

The Pepper Palace - over 200 hot sauces.  

Why yes, I think I would.

What has changed is me I guess.  Last time we revelled in everything the city has to offer.  This time not so much.  

We stayed at an RV park located on the outskirts of the French Quarter, underneath the elevated highway. Amazing location but noisy and not a place to be walking at night.  There were sirens and gunshots.  And Covid of course - the city was rife with it. 

Then there’s Daisy, our nervous dog, who doesn’t care for noise and lots of people - and cars and birds and clouds and, well, most things, so wandering the narrow streets of the French Quarter wasn’t an option for long.

Felt lucky to be there as maybe Rev. Zombie himself was leaving.

Driving back to our RV park one night after picking up dinner, our GPS got us well and truly lost in a decidedly dodgy part of town.  It kept telling us to turn down streets that were dead ends, or up streets that were one way - the wrong way.  It should have been funny but it just made us feel old.

Still, the food is amazing and the French Quarter early on a Sunday morning is lovely, with the streets freshly sluiced after the night’s revels, and the smell of coffee and beignets in the air.

  

And yes, we ate it all.

Resisted the turtle meat but did buy some smoked crawfish boudin.

On the way to pick up shrimp and crawfish at Lake Pontchartrain we stopped at the Metairie Cemetery.  Even Daisy had trouble finding anything to object to unless it was perhaps the ostentatious display of wealth.  Quite a contrast to the city cemetery next to the RV park.

I think this must be the Park Avenue of the cemetery.

And this is just one family’s resting place.

The city cemetery next to the RV park.

So, farewell to a city I hope to come back to again one day - sans dogs, trailer and pandemic.  We’ll do what we did twenty years ago on that glorious wild weekend - well, maybe not everything we did back then.