A Week in New Orleans with Two Lunatics.
Some years back, Sarah and Shannon spent a week in New Orleans, and loved it, and were eager to return. Amid much planning, I joined up, but Chris (our traditional fourth) had classes to attend and no money after paying tuition, so it was just the three of us. Halloween is the third biggest event in the city – number one is, of course, Mardi Gras, followed by the Jazz Fest every May or so – but Halloween is Shannon’s favorite holiday. We asked around and got advice, went online and arranged the whole thing: six days, five nights at a 3-star hotel in the French Quarter plus airfare roundtrip for three. Prices dropped from an initial estimate of $2200 down to $1500. It does pay to shop around.
New Orleans is, of course, Sin City. Maybe that’s why the girls like it. On Bourbon Street the peep shows apparently are set up so that sex demonstrations
are visible to passers-by in the street. In 1994, New Orleans had the
nation’s worst murder rate, and though it has since fallen out of first
place, a serial killer had been stalking women in the area for the last
five months or so – three women were killed (stabbed, strangled, throat
cut), and a fourth would turn up in December (bludgeoned). We were warned
that pickpockets are everywhere, and our room had a private safe (which
we didn’t actually ask for and were charged extra for.) Tropical Storm Isidore had
thoroughly moistened the area in September, and Hurricane Lily flooded
the place immediately afterward, less than a month before our arrival. At
the time, most every case of West Nile Virus was confined to Louisiana. Even the food would kill – New
Orleans was, until recently, the Fattest City in
Undaunted, on Monday Oct 28th at two-thirty in the morning, I got up, having dozed lightly, and prepared for the flight. I usually get a week of vacation time in September, so I was already in a vacation mood. Already prepared were my luggage & clothes (I’m the type that packs everything early), so I had little to do until my ride arrived at four a.m. I was too excited to rest, and I had packed most of my reading material and portable music (the downside to being prepared.) I brewed a cup of tea and drank it leisurely, wandered uselessly about, then finally moved outside to wait in the driveway in the dark.
Albuquerque, of course, shuts down at night. There is no night life to speak of. Three a.m. is a very quiet time. And in late October, it gets a little chilly. So I walked back and forth in the driveway, hands in pockets for awhile. Then I figured, why not do something constructive, and I began practicing my karate katas. I expected to be sitting in airports and on planes for the next eight hours or so, and it might do me good to loosen up, get the kinks out to avoid the usual stiffness. And it must have worked, for I was fairly comfortable all day. But, as katas, they sucked. It was a good thing I had no audience, as I screwed-up most every move – more practice was needed desperately. But mercifully, Shannon drove up before I got too discouraged.
Shannon is the motivational force, almost an elemental force that drags us off our butts. Mostly this is a good thing. She’s twenty-five, with kinky dark-blonde hair, and she attracts. Everything. She’s one of those people that the fates will not leave alone. Merely to stand in her presence may lead to being caught up in events that surround her. In the dictionary, her picture is used to illustrate the word ‘exhaustion.’
The plan was to congregate at her apartment, then have Chris drive us to the airport. We played with cats and video games and kept her house-sitter awake until Chris arrived. Chris is a professional driver, and there was hardly any traffic, so we reached the airport with time to spare. They tell you, be two hours early to go through security, but it never took us anywhere near that.
Continental’s check-in booth was terribly efficient. They point you to a machine and tell you to stick a card in it. I shrugged, picked an ATM card at random out of my wallet, and popped it in the machine. Now, I hadn’t paid for the tickets myself; Sarah took care of that some weeks before, through Expedia.com, and put them on her credit card. But now the machine popped up all three of the tickets merely because the name on my card matched one ready to be picked up. Technology astounds. We pressed a few buttons and we were all set, made sure our luggage was tagged and then we were off to the gate.
Sarah is the dangerous one. She is the mastermind, the quiet one, the one most likely to bring up torture in a conversation. She is the only person in the world that has ever sent me an email that mentions ‘spilling bowels’.
Now, the security people obviously sensed that Sarah was the one to watch; she was searched much more thoroughly every time we reached a checkpoint. Time after time. She never made it through one the entire trip without having to take off her shoes at the very least, and she was waved repeatedly with detector-wands in more than one city. She’s the most attractive of us, but she usually likes to keep a lower profile than that. Anyway, we made it through security in Albuquerque in a very few minutes (it was still pre-dawn) and wandered off to find coffee.
Even given the six a.m. hour, or perhaps because of it, coffee was abundant. Now, I’ve not been in large numbers of airports, but Albuquerque seems to have one of the better ones. You can get a breakfast burrito with green chile almost the moment you hit the gates. It’s clean and new, but with a kind of local atmosphere – a distinctive place. Denver is more high-tech and spotless, Seattle-Tacoma is a dump, Houston is unexceptional, and New Orleans is old and run-down. But Albuquerque is a great place to start your journey from, and to return home to after a long flight.
A word about coffee: To me, it is the very stuff of life. Nearly every day on this journey would start with some, and we were the poorer when we missed it. At home, I usually drink a local blend roasted with piñon nuts, but in a pinch almost anything will do. In Seattle, the first thing that greats you after you step off the plane is a ‘Seattle’s Best’ coffee booth. A native Seattle friend commented that he could drive from home all the way to work downtown and never be more than 100 feet from a coffee shop the whole trip. In their University area, there are two Starbuck’s coffee shops right across the street from one another.
But New Orleans has a coffee style all its own. In New Orleans they have chicoried coffee, and their famous café au lait. Chicory is the root of the Endive plant, roasted and added to coffee beans. They say this practice was first begun during the Civil War, to stretch the dwindling supply of coffee beans – but chicory has no caffeine. It does add an interesting flavor as well as a touch of bitterness. It was in New Orleans that I first heard the Turkish recipe for how coffee should be made – “black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.” Add half scalded milk and you get café au lait, which is much more drinkable. Apparently, true café au lait does not have froth, no matter what Starbuck’s may say. But I’m not that much a coffee snob. I regret missing café brûlot, a mixture of coffee (dark French roast with chicory), spices (brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, orange & lemon peel, and a bit of butter), and liqueurs (brandy, Grand Mariner, triple sec) – served flaming, which I heard about, but never witnessed.
So, fortified with caffeine, eager and nervous to be off, we made small talk and munched a breakfast Danish or two. We have a friend or two that used to work there at the airport at night cleaning, sanitizing and restocking the planes – kept us well supplied with little packets of peanuts and complementary mints, as long as she had the job. Eventually, the plane was rolled out of wherever they keep ‘em at night, and we marched aboard. We were in Coach class, of course, but it wasn’t too bad. I once took a bus trip out of Albuquerque, and before we’d even left the terminal, a couple INS agents wandered through and hauled two people off -- nothing like that happened here. At the scheduled seven o’clock time, we departed. Shannon got the window seat.
I have a fear of heights. Well, actually, it’s more of a fear of falling. Even being on a second-floor balcony will cause my stomach to start to clench, and I get a touch of vertigo that gets worse with every inch closer to the edge. Shannon is just tickled by this fact. She and Sarah dragged me onto a Ferris Wheel at the State Fair a month before, but I didn’t disgrace myself too badly. Up & down wasn’t a problem, much, but when we stopped near the top, and the entire structure began to sway in the wind, I admit I had a death grip on the armrest.
But I love to fly. The best I can explain it is that you just can’t fall out of a plane. I love the motion, the turns, the feeling of the power of the engines, even the turbulence, if it’s just playful. And the sight of clouds below you is one that I just never tire of.
The snack was soda and pretzels. In the two hours to Houston, I made a dent in Theodore Rex, a recent biography of Teddy Roosevelt. He was such an amazing character. If you get a chance, I recommend a movie called the Wind and the Lion, with Sean Connery. Brian Keith plays President Theodore Roosevelt, and with just the kind of over-the-top presence that I would expect came naturally to the real Roosevelt.
Houston was unexceptional, and busy. It’s a hub for a number of different airlines, as well as being roughly in the center of the country, so there are quite a few planes going in and out. It was grey and overcast, so the city was not at its best, but the layover was a mere forty minutes, and then we were on another plane headed to New Orleans.
New Orleans too was humid and overcast. For the first five minutes, the humidity was actually startling – we came from New Mexico, remember, where bone-dry is the standard condition. 10-20% humidity is usual, and makes for a much more pleasant summer than, say, Houston, as I’ve heard it. Here it was 70-80%. But it was nearly November, and though the humidity was high, we adjusted very quickly. New Orleans gets about seventy inches of rain per year (Albuquerque gets about eight), and occasionally sees sleet but never snow.
The first thing I noticed, when we approached the taxis, was that the Yellow Cabs were all orange. Back home, Yellow Cabs are actually yellow. So immediately, a sense of foreignness descended on us – perfect for the start of a vacation. With a stroke of good luck, we managed to direct our driver to the correct hotel, the Chateau Dupre and not the Maison Dupuy – a very easy mistake, as the driver had a heavy accent and pronounced ‘em very much alike. Along the way we caught our first glimpse of some of the local landmarks – including one we missed, but I wish I’d visited: the Dueling Oaks in City Park, where countless young men fought to the death. If I’d thought about it, I’m sure I could have dragged the girls there. Sarah is fond of blood and death, and Shannon is fascinated by ghosts. But it was not to be, this trip.
Our goal was the French Quarter, the heart of the original
city, where many of the buildings date back to the late 1700s. It is a
very European-style place, and it is the heart of the city in many ways.
Bourbon Street for example, has a world-famous reputation for naughty fun. The Chateau Dupre is just inside the French Quarter, on Decatur near Canal Street – pretty close to the southwest corner of the French Quarter.
The Chateau was an entirely ordinary hotel, with a bit of age to it, but well kept. It did have some odd angles in the hallways, and I never did manage to locate the stairs, but we ended up just down the hall from the elevator, in a corner room that was perfectly adequate.
Now, when I say I was bed-hopping with the girls every night that week, I am forced to admit that the sleeping arrangements were depressingly chaste. There were two beds and three of us, so we rotated every night with one of us on the floor. I took advantage by not volunteering for the floor the first night, or the second, so that I only had to spend Wednesday night on the floor, while the girls had to spend two nights there each. I was just waiting for a chance to offer half the bed, if either of ‘em got fed up with it, but they never complained.
About that, anyway. And that’s surprising, because at any given time, during the entire week, it may be assumed that there was a 50/50 chance of them being in an argument. They were having one of their periodic phases where literally anything could touch off a heated debate – food, zen, music, crowds, the difference between gumbo and goulash, etc. They launched into a fairly vicious argument over a walkman at 2 a.m. one night. It was just bad luck that they were in that mood this week, but we tried to make the best of it. So if you can imagine a soundtrack of – mostly friendly – arguments as background noise for this trip, you’re right on track.
So anyway, here we are, in New Orleans, we’ve checked into our Hotel and dumped the baggage in our room. It’s noonish, and we head out to eat our first meal. We lunch at the House of Blues, which is actually mere feet down from the Chateau Dupre. We admire the décor and absorb the atmosphere – there wasn’t any live music yet, though there would be every evening during our stay. We found this out our very first evening, because our corner hotel room was very well placed to listen to the bands, throughout the night. It was very fortunate that we exhausted ourselves so much, or we would never have gotten to sleep much before three or four a.m., with all that music blaring. On Halloween night, I swear they were still playing at eight a.m. the next morning.
They do have good food at the House of Blues. I had a turkey sandwich with Swiss cheese and something that they called green chile, but wasn’t. Hey, I come from New Mexico, and New Mexico green chile has a wonderful spicy afterburn. This stuff was about as spicy as a bell pepper – no burn at all. But it was a tasty sandwich nonetheless. I had some bread pudding for dessert, as I like cinnamon, and it was quite acceptable – it’s something of a specialty in the city, I understand. And I found out that neither of the girls even wanted to try it.
But then, they both have odd food issues. Sarah dislikes barbecue, uncooked onions, milk, frosting, peas, and abalone – I guess you find that at sushi bars. Shannon avoids pork, sausage, watermelon, cantaloupe, melons of almost all kinds, and avocados. And she’s not captivated by chocolate the way Sarah and I are, which we find almost blasphemous. As you can imagine, we rarely cook for each other. Our meals together almost always occur in restaurants.
But there are so many good places to eat that we rarely find this a problem. I can’t recall what the girls had at House of Blues, though it was probably a burger for Shannon and a chicken sandwich for Sarah. Anyway, thus fortified, we headed out into the French Quarter, to wander around and get a feel for the place on our first afternoon. The girls played tour guide, since they had been here before. We saw cafes and plazas, shops and art galleries, landmarks and tourists. We bought a New Orleans baseball cap for Chris from a fairly nice lady on the street, and were forced to have coffee at the Royal Blend, because we’d all been up since about three that morning. Even so, we retired early back to the hotel. Dinner was regular old Subway sandwiches we took back to our room. Sarah had the floor that night, and we gave her the extra blankets to lie on.
Tue Oct 29
The day began with a crisis – we couldn’t figure out how to activate the shower in the bathtub. No longer intriguingly exotic, this was actually annoying. Sarah and I would have had to call the front desk and be embarrassed as hell to admit we couldn’t even turn on the shower, but luckily Shannon saved the day. Apparently the plunger had to be pushed up from below, rather than pulled up from the top. Thank ghod we had her with us.
Water continued to be an issue that day, as the overcast had become a light drizzle of rain that continued throughout most of the morning. Now, again, we come from New Mexico. There are people there that don’t even know how to drive in the rain, it happens so rarely. So we took it in stride, and enjoyed getting damp. But we witnessed an extraordinary sight. There were many tourists here besides us, of course. And some of them had purchased cheap, disposable raincoats as emergency protection from the drizzle. They were printed with some New Orleans logo. But here’s the thing: They were plastic garbage bags. We saw whole families dressed in garbage bags – mom, dad, both kids. People wandering around in garbage bags. All three of us agreed that no matter how wet our socks got, none of us would be caught dead like that. And interestingly enough, though it continued to rain off and on for the next few days, I never saw any more garbage bag people after that day. Some street vendor with a fantastic line must have decided not to press his luck any further. Garbage bags!
Breakfast was at the Café Du Monde
for café au lait & beignets. Pronounced,
by the way, “kah-FAY oh-LAY” and 
“ben-YAYS”. I was looking at one particular New
Orleans guidebook, and was struck
by one particular note about French/Cajun pronunciation in the city: “The
letters s, e, t, x, z, and n, when found at the end of a word, are almost
always silent.” Still, it was delicious. The Café Du Monde
(“kah-FAY doo-MON”) is basically a huge kitchen with a covered outdoor
patio eating area. You seat yourself after searching for an open table
– not an easy task during the busy morning hours – and within moments a
waitress comes to take your order, which is delivered very shortly after. The
only decision you make is if you want a regular order or a double order
with extra pastries. Very efficient, serving only one beverage and one
food, and it’s always packed. It doesn’t take long to finish, either,
which helps rotate the customers through and keeps everybody happy. The
beignets are kind of a light French donut sprinkled with powdered sugar. We
came back here nearly every morning during our stay.
Last time, the girls stayed across the Mississippi River in Algiers, and took a ferry over to the French Quarter. This time, the only water we encountered was the rain. It kept up pretty much all day on Tuesday, which as I said, was nice for the first few hours.
First stop was Virgin Records, the location featured in a vampire movie Shannon and I saw last year. I picked up a Deep Purple cd that I’d meant to track down, and Shannon bought a little portable cd player, as hers had died recently. It was a fine music store, but the only local touches were some displays of jazz and blues music. Otherwise, it could have been in any city anywhere.
But just a bit further on we passed Jackson Square and found Pirate Alley, which is quite a New Orleans landmark. It’s the west side of the St. Louis Cathedral,
and is home to Faulkner House Books, on account of this is where the Nobel Prize-winning
author William Faulkner lived when he wrote his first novel. The bookstore
is a wonderful, tightly packed building with books all the way to the ceiling,
and Sarah was in high heaven. She had worked in a bookstore for years,
and continues to be fascinated by rare and antiquarian books. Faulkner
would sometimes make up a word or a phase when he wanted to convey a particular
image – he wasn’t as concerned with the actual details of grammar as with
conveying ideas better. One example might be, from a review of a Debbie
Gibson song, “Deb seems to display a certain lack of ignorance in areas
normally reserved for Madonna.” Involving leather, apparently. Well,
I’m all for precise communication, even if the words themselves are unusual. I
spend my share of time in bookstores, as well, as does Shannon. Now, Shannon is fond of vampire stories, and thus Anne Rice, who’s house
we’d admire on Thursday. They had advance copies of her newest book on
sale here. But this year, unlike in previous years, Rice would not be
holding a Halloween ‘New Release’ party, which was something of a disappointment
to Shannon.
Afterwards, we sat down for an espresso at a sidewalk coffee house just a few doors down. The rain had let up for the moment, and Sarah actually allowed a picture to be taken of her. Let me take a moment to explain – neither of the girls want to appear in pictures. I mean, they seriously avoid ‘em. They’ve tried to explain it to me, but essentially, they’re just nuts. So you might notice that of all the pictures we took, roll after roll of ‘em, the girls appear in only three. That’s Sarah and me, both of us in black T-shirts and jeans – mine has the “Sopranos” logo, Sarah’s has “Samurai Lapin”, a pink bunny with a sword.
We wandered out to Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, which the infamous pirate Jean Lafitte and his men would use as a cover to sell goods and slaves plundered on the high seas. The place dates back to 1772. It’s a bar now, and has been for many years. Just down the street is Lafitte’s In Exile, which is the oldest gay bar in the country, but that was started by a former owner of the original bar and has no connection to the actual pirate.
Lafitte and his men plundered ships all over the Gulf of Mexico in the early 1800s, and became very wealthy. The U.S.
government finally got fed up with Lafitte and the navy shelled his headquarters
south of the city ‘into oblivion’ in 1814, but the pirate escaped and even
received a full pardon soon after, with information on British invasion
plans that helped Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. These
days he is considered a patriot, a revolutionary, an adventurer, and a
great leader. The Buccaneer with Yul Brenner
is not a bad story of his adventures. The bar is a small, dark, smoky
place that is very evocative of its old history.
Not far away is Marie Laveau’s Voodoo Shop, which evokes the history of another famous resident of the city, the Voodoo Queen herself. I am not sure how much of the oils, incense and trinkets they sell are actually voodoo paraphernalia, but it’s a fun place to visit.
Marie Laveau was the greatest Voodoo Queen Louisiana ever had, and her spirit and reputation were such that she’s essentially been elevated to sainthood, and is frequently contacted by modern houngans for advice even today. While she ruled, she was held in awe by the black community and was feared and respected by the whites as well, influencing the well-to-do of all communities as well as various dignitaries and visiting royalty.
Rain continuted to drizzle
down, and right before lunchtime we were beset by one of the clowns on Decatur. He was a balloon man, and he did make us laugh with
his outrageous observations and suggestions (mostly having to do with threesomes). We
were sold some funny balloons and an extensive line of snappy patter, and
got a couple of pictures of the three of us, which in retrospect were worth
the embarrassment. For me, anyway. Lunch was
at Café Maspero, a place with a rustic feel,
and consisted of some decent burgers and lunch-type side-items. I don’t
remember much about the actual meal because the girls got into a fairly
heated argument here. Seems Sarah was truly mortified by the clown encounter,
and tried to explain to us how she grew up, believing that all attention
directed towards her was bad. That is, she’s not just shy, but painfully
shy. She seemed to believe that walking around with funny balloons was
tantamount to, well, wearing garbage bags. Pointing
out to everyone that we’re stupid hicks that seem proud of being conned
out of money. And in a perfectly-timed demonstration, one of the
balloons, which we had plopped on the next table, shifted and popped when
it fell against the rough brick wall – drawing every eye in the place toward
us for a moment. Sarah shrunk down low into her chair, then turned
on us with anger renewed. Shannon and I tried to get her to see things
logically, but being shy is an emotion that’s not really subject to reason,
and the event left a bad taste in our mouths that had nothing to do with
the food.
We finally got fed up with the rain, and bought little
umbrellas. The rain ended for good soon after, and the umbrellas will
likely be stuck in the back of the closet in Albuquerque twenty years from now. We went back to the hotel for
a short break, during which I snuck over to the Royal Blend coffee house
and internet café, just to let Chris know we were okay and to check my
email. And get more caffeine, of course.
We wandered back towards the St. Louis Cathedral and took the tour. Now, they were in the middle of a construction event, and scaffolding covered the front of the building, but it was very impressive, nonetheless. Built in 1794, dedicated to Saint Louis IX, I think, as it’s patron saint; it’s got towers and stained glass and paintings and pipe organs and just about everything you’d expect, including it’s own gift shop. Sarah was raised catholic, but I had to be reminded to remove my hat inside.
Wandering along in the evening afterwards, I was taken by a painting in the window of the Blue Dog Gallery, a painting of sax player, just his silhouette in black, on a red firey background. If I’d had a spare $900, I’d have bought it right there, but alas. So many plans seem to begin ‘When I win the lottery …’
New Orleans is
The other type, the performers, draw larger crowds and have better brochures. They dress in costume and boom out their stories in loud theatrical voices. And they don’t have to tell the truth. But we were interested in more authentic stories than that, and were quite happy to belong to the smaller group led by our grey-haired old gent. For one thing, he was happy to answer questions. And for a ghost tour, it just made sense that we lean in close while he told us the about the haunted places around us. We were interrupted by the theatrics of the performers more than once, as it was almost Halloween and there were a number of such tours going on. And our guide reminded us of the silliness of his competitors frequently.
He began his tour by explaining that in the French Quarter the city works department fixes holes in the pavement and sidewalk by diligently painting a circle around ‘em. So we watched our step. Now, there were too many haunted houses to remember, and we only got the stories that were on his route, as it were, but I’ll relate a few.
There was the old Ursuline convent:
Back when the city was first being settled by French convicts, there was
a conspicuous lack of women in the area. The French king made a deal with
the church to send over a bunch of young orphan girls to the convent, ostensibly
to teach them to become proper young ladies. The girls, oddly enough,
were shipped over from Europe with a coffin-like basket that held their luggage. For
the first few months at least, they stayed upstairs in the attic while
rooms were prepared and beds were built for them … but to make sure they
didn’t sneak out, the windows were sealed shut. Rumors of vampires persist,
especially after two girls were found dead on the grounds in 1978 ‘drained
of blood’, and some say that the third floor attic is sealed off, and the
shutters are secured with thousands of blessed screws.
Nearby is the Beauregard-Keyes house, where the ghost of Confederate General P.T. Beauregard -- whose attack at Fort Sumter started the Civil War -- relives a battle with the ghosts of slain Civil War soldiers. In the 1900s there was a bloody Mafia shootout at the place, as well.
One
of 
the most famous of the city’s haunted mansions is the LaLaurie House. In the early 1800s it belonged to a well-to-do
doctor and his socialite wife. Rumors abounded that they mistreated their slaves, the wife in particular once chased a young slave girl
across a balcony with a whip and caused the child to fall to her death
in the courtyard below. But the couple had connections, and she was merely
fined. Some time later, a fire broke out in the house, and as authorities
rushed in to help extinguish the blaze, they were horrified to find a torture
chamber in an attic room. Starving slaves were chained with leg and neck
restraints, some with broken bones and untended wounds. A cook had started
the fire to finally expose the doctor and his wife. Charged with torture,
the doctor claimed these were merely ‘experiments’, but they quickly fled
the enraged mob and left the country and moved back to
One story our guide had researched himself was that of a young husband and wife that had to take in his mother-in-law as she got older. The old lady was a classic, and made his life hell whenever she could. His wife could not speak a word in his defense while her mother was in the room. Months after month this went on, and the husband began to sneak home small bundles of salt from his workplace, and store them in his old sea chest. One hot summer afternoon, as the old mother-in-law rounded on his again, he snapped. His butcher knife, for he was of course a butcher, stilled her voice. But not quickly enough, for his wife had heard and came in to see him standing over her mother. It was the tenants in the downstairs apartment that called the police, when they noticed a bloody red stain start to leak through from the floorboards above. The authorities arrived and knocked on the door, inquiring if all was well. The butcher at first spoke to them through the door, but as they became more and more suspicious, he finally threw open the door, covered in blood, and led the police to the dining room, where blood had run off the table and pooled and splattered everywhere. He pointed to the chest, which was opened to reveal his wife and her mother, neatly sliced and carefully packed in salt, with the heads posed on top.
After the tour, we wandered for awhile looking
for someplace to eat, and ended up at O’Flaherty’s bar, and my own big 
blow-up of the trip. Honestly, I have no excuse. Just
a bunch of little irritations, along with too little rest and a sudden,
very loud bar kind of made me snap. Fortunately, I’m no butcher,
but I think they might have thought me a little mad, as I vehemently informed
the girls that I would never eat a bite in a place that served pot pies,
because the entire establishment would be contaminated by those insidious
little pastries. I just needed to blow steam, of course, but as we sat
and drank and fumed at eat other (the girls ate, and I relented and finished
some fries) – the evening turned around. Beth Patterson was playing, and
she put on a wonderful show. By the end of her last song at one
a.m., we were cheering and crowding
up to purchase CDs. She’s Cajun herself, but frequently plays Celtic music,
has a great voice, and is a master of the bouzouki, among other instruments.
We retired back to the hotel, where we had a long discussion about the problems of the day, about the effect of crowds on both the girls, and ended up with one more argument when Shannon blew off some steam by stabbing the plastic carton that her new CD walkman came in. Sarah seemed to think it a sign of mental problems. Well, by then we were all a bit unstable, and finally turned out the light not far from 3 a.m.
Weds Oct 30th
The day dawned clear & hot, the rain finally gone. And with it, the clouds that made the city pleasantly cool for our first few days. We decided to try out the continental breakfast at the Chateau Dupre, and we noticed on the way down that the elevator, the only one for the building we knew of, had an inspection sticker that said that the elevator permit would expire on October 31st – tomorrow. We resolved to ignore it, hoping that permit expirations were not of the same class of paperwork as warranties. Downstairs there were the usual pastries in crinkle wrap, but some fresh fruit and muffins too, along with cold cereal and something that may have been an attempt at an omelet, but which we didn’t like the looks of. The coffee was palatable.
Today we decided to see what there was to see outside the city, and got a ride to the Gray Line Bus Tour port; today we’d be off on the River Road Plantation tour. Sarah got a faraway look in her eyes as we prepared to board the bus. The terminal was right on the Mississippi – they do steamboat tours from the same place – and it stirred up memories of growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia. Apparently there’s a big island in the middle of the Ohio River there, and her brother and sister used to take her out there when she was little.
Incidentally, since New Orleans does not follow any conventional compass points, you may hear directions given as “lakeside”, “riverside”, “uptown” and “downtown”. The Mississippi river is on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other. The French Quarter is downtown, and past that on the other side of Canal St. is uptown.
But our destination was Nottoway and Oak Alley, two of the more famous plantations in Louisiana. We found out soon enough that these lay around a hundred miles west of New Orleans, most of the way to Baton Rouge in fact, and the entire trip would be about eight hours. As we had little sleep, a long air-conditioned bus ride seemed just the thing. I learned the difference between a swamp, a marsh, and a bayou as the tour guide pointed these out along the trip. A swamp has trees and water, a marsh has no trees, just small plants, and a bayou is a backwater where water is left after a flood or the river changing course, and is usually stagnant. We crossed a portion of Lake Pontchartrain on the way, and it was the first time I had ever been on a highway built over a lake. It’s a big lake.
The plantations were primarily for sugar, and we saw
a few sugar mills along the way. Nottoway was built in 1849 and is essentially an American castle, complete with
65-foot grand ballroom. The rooms are designed to be the very grandest
example of conspicuous consumption; its 64 rooms are spread among 53,000
square feet. The plantation itself was 7000 acres – almost 11 square miles. It
was almost destroyed during the Civil War, but saved due to the efforts
of a northern gunboat officer, who had been a guest there in happier times.
We sat down to a fancy meal in the restaurant, complete with white linen napkins and wine. Personally, the food was not worth the price, but the atmosphere of the place was fantastic. It was, of course, hard to imagine the life of the people there while being herded from room to room along velvet ropes, but we were given a few minutes every now and then to let our imagination roam free.
Did you know that tea was so precious, the entire supply was kept locked up in a special casket to which only the lady of the house had the key? We saw one such chest, and it contained within it a tiny compartment, barely big enough for a box of tea bags today. It was a highly decorated item of furniture. And little silver sugar spoons, with the scoop no larger than the nail on your little pinky. Guests were an event, and treated like royalty, as the huge, elaborate banquet halls attested.
One item I wondered about but never heard answered – the Randolph’s had nine children, so it was a large family, but even though we got a distant view of the slave quarters, I never found out how many slaves, or even paid workers, lived here.
Oak
Alley was built in 1839, and was a bit more modest, but the spectacular
feature here is a quarter-mile long
avenue of live oak trees that lead up to the mansion. Their canopy offers
a unique walk and was actually here before the plantation – the 
walkway was planted around 1715 by one of the original
Spanish settlers of the area. We declined to try the mint juleps, which
I now regret – sipping a mint julep on the veranda of a southern plantation
would be quite a memory, though I’m given to understand that the drink
itself may not be to my taste – but we did stop in the gift shop for sodas
and an ice cream.
By the time we got back, my tentative plan to visit the French Market was out – they open early and close early. We got chicken-burgers at Popeye’s for dinner. We don’t have any of those in Albuquerque either, and Sarah speculated about a plan to taste chicken dinners in every city in every state; she likes chicken. This time, Popeye’s was pretty average.
For reasons I don’t recall, we went out that evening in search of a chess set. The girls wanted to play chess. So we checked every gift shop and toy shop that was open, but had no luck. We did manage to upset a schitzo lady near the plaza, who seemed to feel that Shannon was trying to steal her soul by taking pictures in her general direction. We’ve got two wonderful shots of the towers of St. Louis Cathedral just before sunset, the first dark and gothic, the second is the exact same shot, but blurred because by that time the lady was shouting and waving her arms at us, and Shannon was a bit startled. Eventually we gave up and went back to the hotel to sleep.
Thursday 31st All Hallows Eve
The day was clear and cooler than Wednesday, and after café au lait & beignets we set off. There was a cemetary tour we wanted to take, with the same gentleman who was our ghost guide earlier. A cemetery tour on Halloween in New Orleans, how cool is that!? On our way we saw what appeared to us to be sacrilege -- people were actually leaving hoses on to spew water out into the street gutters! In Albuquerque you would get fined for that. It struck me as fundamentally wrong. Not to mention that it made no sense. But it was explained to me that these hoses were draining the standing water that had accumulated during the recent rains. They weren’t wasting water, they were disposing of excess water. I need to travel more. This thought didn’t even occur to me.
But New Orleans is, essentially, underwater. The elevation ranges from 12 feet above sea level down to 5 feet below. When the first settlers started to bury their dead, they were quite upset when the coffins began floating back up to the surface when the rains came. Through trial and error, they created a system of above-ground crypts, sometimes called ‘cities of the dead.’. And it is a remarkable sight. St. Louis Cemetery #1 is just outside the French Quarter, north of Rampart Street, and is the oldest cemetery around, dating from the 1740s. Other cemeteries were established as this one filled up, but many illustrious people are entombed here – Marie Laveau, probably; there are a number of tombs that might be hers, in a number of places. Shannon felt this one might be right, and left a little offering, as many who come by a certain tomb do.
We saw some Japanese tourists offer their respects,
as they clapped their hands and bowed. It was an odd mix of customs, Shinto
and voodoo, but not so strange as the customs
of the cemetery itself. Now, bodies floating up from the grave present
certain problems, and one of the fixes they tried before they began building
tombs was to lay a slab of stone on top of a grave, so there are some places
that look like paving stones that you would never realize were someone’s
final resting place, even after you walk across ‘em. But
the strangest practice was the economy of it all.
Take a body, and place it in an upper tomb, about the size of a casket, in a vast structure akin to a morgue, where they have long drawers that they keep the bodies in. No drawers here, but the same basic structure. Let ‘em bake in the summer sun for a few years until they’re nice and desiccated, then gather the bones and slide ‘em into another crypt down below. Any bones in there already? Just shove ‘em to the back. There are thousands of these, many with inscriptions listing whole families that are in one single drawer. Organizations, like the fire department, would sometimes buy one large crypt, and use it perpetually. A very odd custom, it seems to me.
On the way back from the cemetery, we stopped in at a gift shop (still looking for a chess set) and found we were just in time for a tour of the Hermann-Grima House. Now, as you may realize, a plantation was a wonderful thing to have – it produced the crops that allowed the owners to live a lavish lifestyle. But one inescapable drawback to them was that they were always out in the country, miles from neighbors or any kind of civilized gathering. So it turns out that almost all of the large plantation owners maintained houses in the city as well, for use during the off season. The Hermann-Grima House was built in 1831, and is itself a very large and impressive mansion. But we had lucked out and found the only such mansion in New Orleans with an intact stable and open-hearth kitchen. And it was such a kitchen! Every now and then, they pull out the stops and make a meal in the exact way it was made a century and a half ago, and today was the day. The smell of roasting meat was exquisite! I don’t know what they did, but our mouths watered as we ended the tour with the kitchens. It was state-of-the-art Victorian technology, with multiple ovens, and ingenious swinging metal hangers to allow for different cooking temperatures over the same fire. We didn’t get to taste any of it, but the aroma alone showed that they knew how to do things right, back then. In the gift shop, Sarah bought a period coffee grinder, of cast iron and highly polished wood, which was cranked by hand.
We stopped at Café Beignet for lunch. This was not Café Du Monde which served only beignets, but a real restaurant – well, diner – and lunch consisted of sandwiches, I believe I had a turkey club. We argued about gumbo and goulash – Shannon saying that they are basically the same thing, me siding with Sarah arguing that they are very different. Gumbo has seafood (shrimp, oyster, crab), roux (flour & oil), onions, bell pepper, celery and garlic, stewed up and served with rice. Goulash is a slow-cooked meat & potato stew mainly, possibly with flour, tomatoes, and paprika. Not at all the same thing.
On the way back to the hotel to drop off stuff, I had to stop by Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville shop to pick up a souvenir for my mom. Hey, she’s got a soft spot there. The girls almost didn’t want to enter the place. Not their style at all. Although I wondered a bit about what their style was, as we stopped in a few costume places along the way. The things those two pulled out … made me wish we’d planned it all a bit more.
Next was Marie Laveau’s Voodoo shop again, where I purchase a small vial of cinnamon oil. We did make it to the French Market for a short while, which is a huge covered marketplace, full of vendors selling fresh produce, sunglasses, trinkets, and all sorts of knickknacks. Our quest for a chess set was completed at a toy store just down the way.
The streets were starting to get crowded as it neared sundown, and we were accosted by a shoeshine guy, who proceeded to shine my shoes with his own line of snappy patter. The girls were severely annoyed, but I had grown soft, and was taken aback by the horrible scars on his legs. But we escaped and got back to the hotel to prepare for Halloween night.
Now, neither of the girls was prepared to dress up to the extent of the crowds outside. Sarah became a catholic school girl, because of course, she had been one; and Shannon became a vampire, in makeup and suggestive clothing. I dressed all in black, and had my fingernails painted black, and was annoyed when the girls though I looked very natural. They called me, in fact, a closet goth. Now, to me, this is not a complement, as I have a low opinion of goths, or actually, goth-posers.
But I was completely inconspicuous at the Bourbon Street
Halloween Parade – and it was packed. I mean, there were times in the
middle of the street when you could lift both legs up off the ground and
not fall, the press of bodies was so tight. This year’s theme seemed to
be priests and nuns. And both genders wore either outfits. Or less. There were gentlemen in suits – from the front,
and more than half naked from behind. In fact, many costumes (mostly male,
alas) seemed to be thongs and straps. Every now and then during the parade,
the paradeers would toss out Mardi Gras beads
and such treasures, especially to women who flashed their breasts. Now,
I never caught any such thing happening, but the girls and I did receive
a good number of bead necklaces of various colors.
After the parade, the girls were a bit overwhelmed by the press of humanity – well, so was I – so we attempted to find a place to get dinner. An upper-floor balcony would be perfect, but it seemed they were all packed. We eventually settled on the Copper Pot, and regretted it immediately. The food was bad, it cost a fortune, and the waiter was inattentive and surly. Perhaps he was just pissed-off at missing the parties, but we resolved to tell everyone to avoid that restaurant forevermore.
So we ended up at O’Flaherty’s again for a beer, but Beth Patterson was elsewhere that night, and a thoroughly inferior Irish guy was a poor replacement.
Eventually, we ended up back in the hotel room, where the girls played a game of chess. I watched, and coached a bit, but I’d actually lettered in chess in high school – yep, I even admit it, and Sarah had only recently learned the game, so I didn’t figure it would be fair.
Fri Nov 1st All Saints Day
Clear and cool, like the weather, we headed off to catch the St. Charles Avenue streetcar to the Garden District. The streetcar is the nation’s oldest working streetcar line, more than 150 years old, and is a quaint portion of the mass-transit system today. The Garden District began back in the days when the Americans first moved into the area. The well-to-do French and Spanish creoles that ran the place had no use for the crass newcomers who flooded the place after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and united to keep ‘em out of the French Quarter. Undaunted, the Americans moved into a former plantation just up the road, and began to build their own mansions.
So the Garden District/Lafayette Cemetery Tour wandered
along a number of impressive houses, many owned by celebrities such as
author Anne Rice and rock musician Trent Reznor of
Nine Inch Nails. Here is the house where Peyton Manning grew up, and over
there is the house where Confederate President Jefferson Davis died.
The Lafayette cemetery was originally designed for the recent non-catholic arrivals, but what with the yellow fever and such, it was almost full by 1850. It was here that a particular scene from the movie The Vampire Lestat was filmed, and we got a picture of Shannon in front of the tomb where Lestat rested during the day.
While some of the finest restaurants in the world reside
in the Garden District, we weren’t prepared to pay the world-class prices,
and so ended up, after much wandering, at the Croissant d’Or on Ursuline, a place recommended
by our previous tour guide. It was perfectly adequate food, and it was
indeed inexpensive. Shannon was taken with a carousel
horse they had in the front window as a decoration, as her mom collects
horses, and another argument ensued when Shannon wanted to see if they would sell it, or even knew where she might find
another one. Sarah declared that she would be mortified to ask such a
question, and eventually I took Sarah outside where no one would know we
were associated with the strange girl inside asking about the carousel
horse. Turned out that they didn’t know and couldn’t help Shannon with her project.
But the next few stops lifted Sarah’s mood again, even though she was starting to sunburn -- a bookstore! One that I’ve forgotten the name of, frankly. But it was filled with multiple floors of wonderfulness, and we spent a good amount of time wandering the shelves, in sections that perhaps might never warrant our attention, normally – religious studies, for example.
We made it to the French Market, and had our fill, finally. Shannon bought some fresh-cut sugar cane, and I marveled at all the amazing chatchkas they had gathered for sale.
Dinner was at the Hard Rock Café, where I had to purchase a shot glass for a collector I know back home, and later I snuck out to Wendy’s for munchies and dessert.
Saturday November 2nd
The day started out clear, a bit windy, a bit chilly, and we had coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde. We considered getting a few pastries to take with us, but decided it would be too much trouble. And I thought we might have some trouble at the airport anyway, because Shannon had picked up a giant peacock feather (about four feet long) and a black wooden cane. We had nothing we could pack these items in, so Shannon had to carry them on. But nobody batted an eye, and she was fine. All I can say is, these people never saw her at the dojo with a bo staff or escrima sticks in her hands; they might not feel so safe.
But anyway, we grabbed a taxi to the airport and as we were a little early, I bought a cup of gumbo, which had rice and seafood, and was very good. The girls both tasted it, but didn’t comment further. We boarded without incident. A short flight up to Houston and a short layover ensued, during which I found a frozen yogurt booth and bought a cone – we used to have such places in Albuquerque, but they all seem to have shut down.
Oddly, right there at our gate in Houston, one of the huge windows was duct taped to hold it together. It had cracked some time in the last week, I guess, and a huge “X” of duct tape was the fix. I could tell we were heading towards New Mexico.
By mid afternoon, we were approaching Albuquerque from the east, over the Manzano mountains, which was a unique experience for me – I’d always flown in from the west, before. New Mexico is a big square with the Rocky Mountains running down the center. The eastern half of the state is flat farmland, fairly green. But over the mountains on the west, it’s dry desert, and as we flew low over the last few ridges, it really hit home what a hot, dry, brown place we live in. I actually felt myself dehydrating at that moment, though it may have been the airplane’s air conditioning.
Another nice fact, Continental actually had the second best keeping-track-of-luggage rating last year, and was number one in on-time flights.
But after the week we had, the plane flight home took its toll, and we were all exhausted. Chris was there waiting for us, and we tried to fill him in on our week as we sorted out the luggage and drove toward home, but I’m sure we were only marginally coherent. I was the first to be dropped off, and I just went in to collapse. Luckily I had arraigned for Sunday off from work, so I could recover. Even so, it’s always somewhat depressing when you get back from a vacation more exhausted then when you left.
Mistakes I made? I regret not exploring the Moonwalk along the Mississippi River. I would have liked at least a short ferry ride; a steamboat tour might have been loads of fun. I regret not planning more for Halloween – costumes, times, places to be. I kinda wanted to have a real New Orleans po-boy sandwich at the Central Grocery, and at least taste a Hurricane. In the future, I think I might want to arrange some time apart for the girls to do their own thing without the other present; it might help them get along a little better if they’re not constantly together. I’d visit the Dueling Oaks, and in general allow more time for contemplation.
And, of the seven rolls of photos we took through two different cameras, only three had anything resembling a real picture, and not all of those turned out either. That’s what comes of buying expired film at 29 cents a roll, I guess. So I’d get a real camera that I know how to use, ahead of time.
But despite the cost, it was
a great week, and I’d do it again – in fact, the current plan is for two
weeks in the
Do I Snore? Shannon mumbled something about it, but Sarah’s never said …