The Big Easy

The Big Easy

We left Natchez on June 3 and made our way to New Orleans, stopping along the way in Gibson Point on Church Street to take this photo. What were these people thinking? There were easily 10 churches on the well-named street.

Our campgrounds in New Orleans is in St. Bernard parish, one of the heavily hit places during Katrina and as we came in, we saw many boarded up houses and empty lots.

We had a long encounter with the post mistress in a local post office we told us many hurricane tales: a house that was speared on top of a telephone pole; a house that was taken from its foundation and floated a mile down river, then cut in half by an oak tree and then the two halves floated away; her son who JUST moved back into his home; her neighbor, a contractor who ripped her off $3000 and all the folks who used this time to make much needed improvements.  But, everyone we spoke to emphasized that the physical scars, while they will eventually go away, will take a lot less time to erase than the emotional ones.  But, this woman did say that they won't be right for about 10 years.  And where she is, the parrish built the levees and they are totally inadequate and the feds won't help rebuild.

It seems that the campgrounds, while not very shady, does have wi-fi!  However, we found that for some reason, we cannot upload photos to this site, so we went into town (about 30 minutes away) and spent a full two hours at a coffee house with wi-fi writing and sending the previous two blogs.  Our first great taste of New Orleans.

Then the fun began.  We went to a great and very popular oyster house for dinner and I had my first taste of crawfish.  Messy and good.  Then on to Bourbon Street and a WALL of sound!  Mostly loud rock and roll and electric stuff, but we found two places with real old time jazz that we plan to go back to.

We had a great GPS experience on the way back.  "My lady" (the name for the GPS) has been invaluable, ad even David, while still looking at maps, has learned to trust her.  But tonght we had our doubts as she took us, at 10:30 pm down a main highway and through a sharp left and right where she then said "Now board ferry".  My God.  It was pitch black, we didn't see a soul, no boat and she seemed to have left us stranded.  However, she really does know her stuff and about 10 minutes and $1.00 later we, and about 4 other cars trundled on a little ferry for the trip acorss the Miss.

We did meet a great guy who recommended a wonderful restaurant that we plan to go to tomorrow.

We are so thrilled with the people we have met.  All are so open and willing to share information and seem genuinely glad to see us.