New Orleans - A Different Perspective

Oh, there are tons more pics of houses and food...TONS! But these will be the last pics, then I have to go back to the real world, there is work at the shop and our open house is less than a month away. I have to WORK!
John had two damsel in distress moments on the trip. One was this woman on the ferry who could not get her parking break off to move off the ferry. He finally got the problem solved, however he could not understand the woman's Spanglish and she put John on the phone with her husband and he was worse. The other incident was in a little gallery on Royal Street where the owner/artist was flying around in a tizzy having lost her cell phone. She felt sure that someone had stolen it. John calmly tells her to call her phone and offers his to her to use. She declines, realizing that she has a land line in the shop, calls it and finds her cell phone ringing in the bathroom under the toilet paper. We leave after she thanks him over and over again. About a half a block later he just laughs and says,"Why wouldn't that be the most natural problem for me to solve? An artist type woman running around, hair flying, head turning fast, that has lost something...I do it every day of my life" Hmmm.... Before you start thinking that he is the normal one of this couple....I had to strongly dissuade him from the pricing of used ferry boats. He kept daydreaming aloud about how it would only take us two weeks to pilot it up the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Allegheny, we could park it at Travis' Dad's house on the river and paint it all black and gold and it could be a party boat for Steeler games, we could rent it out for weddings and parties...Whoa! for awhile I think that the man who can't sit in the backseat of a car without getting sick was really serious about this.

I saw a little flyer about this festival and just thought we should attend. We walked...about another two miles to get to it. It was interesting people watching, had a nice conversation with a couple there, good music and about the best bread pudding I ever ate. As a side note on that subject, all the walking, and I mean a lot of walking did nothing to burn off all the food we ate. I gained six pounds on this trip!

Of course some flower pics. Wouldn't it be great to live where you could have flowers all year long?

I loved these little alleys and the courtyards at the end of them, when you could get into them. They were at the back of a lot of the shops.

And this vehicle was quite the tourist attraction. It really was a work of art.

And of course, a junk shop. My daughters want to make a picture book called "The Places Our Mother Has Taken Us" The junk shops, yard sales, treasure hunt places that I have taken them that they have actually learned to appreciate now that they are older. When they were young, I feel sure that they just thought every mother dragged their kids to junk stores. As they got to be older they realized that was not true and would roll their eyes at the places we went to, now I think that they actually enjoy some of the places and they seek them out and go to them on their own! My step-daughters have not been raised with this appreciation of treasure hunts. I am still working on them.

This shop was fun and the talking to the quirky owner made it more memorable. I even bought part of Shawnee's birthday present there.

Final thoughts: I loved New Orleans. I would go back anytime. It has a Caribbean feel that I have not experienced in any other southern town in the US. The food, the smells, the architecture and the music so many times reminded me of places I have visited in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The people that we met and talked to were so helpful and friendly and everyone seems to want to tell you the BEST place to eat...refer back to the six pounds.....it was a great trip!

I bought the book called Nine Lives by Dan Baum at a little bookstore in the French Quarter. The woman who was running the store, who I think had read every book in there, told me that it was the best book for portraying the human interest side of Katrina and she was right. I am over halfway through it, devouring it on airport waits and flights. It follows the lives of nine people, some of them from Hurricane Betsy in 1963 through Hurricane Katrina and beyond. They are all true stories and provide an insight into nine perspectives of life in New Orleans. It is a great read and a great Sociology lesson on the area.