Our Far-Flung Correspondents: New Orleans, Part 1

(I’m posting from an Internet cafe in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  We’ve been here all week at the AG, and we’re leaving in the morning.  We thought of leaving earlier, but once it became obvious that MSY was only going to be brushed by the western side of the storm, the need to flee went away.  I think now that the parish government is regretting that they let employees go home early on Friday.)

We left Austin Monday morning fairly early, having decided already that we were going to avoid major highways (i.e., I-10) as much as possible.  With that in mind, we ran down US 290 to Brenham and cut off to Texas 105.  That let us avoid Houston almost completely; the worst traffic was at Conroe, which we couldn’t avoid.  After that we had a clear run to Beaumont, where we stopped for lunch and I had the luck to pick up two swimsuits and two pairs of walking shorts at Penney’s for less than $50 total(!).  After lunch we did have to get on I-10 to get across the river, and we stayed on through Lafayette and the Atchafalaya basin.  It’s been almost forty years since I was in southern Louisiana, and I’d forgotten about the elevated road through the swamp.  Even with the traffic, seeing the lagoons, cypress pools, and mixed forests was entertaining.

We ducked back off I-10 at Grosse Tête, a few miles short of Baton Rouge, to Louisiana 18.  Neither L nor T had ever seen what Louisiana calls a state highway, and but they readily conceded that my descriptions had been on target, and I wasn’t surprised to find that Louisiana state highways haven’t changed in any major way in forty years.  We drove through field after field of sugar cane.  I told M that was what sugar came from and described the basic process, but I don’t think she really believed it.  (And nobody get on about beet sugar.  I know about beet sugar.  This is sugar cane country, so that’s what I talked about.)  We crossed the river at Donaldsonville and picked up US 61—the “Highway 61” of musical legend.  I now kinda wish we’d gone on down 18 all the way to US 90, since that would have given me a preview of the River Road, but it came out all right in the end.  We ran in to the city past Kenner, Metairie (ick) and the airport, came in Tulane Avenue and found the hotel (the Sheraton, at Canal and Camp) with very little trouble.

Since we were such early check-ins for the AG, we got a good choice of rooms, and ended up with a room on the sixteenth floor and a river view, ideal for watching the fantastic and astonishing fireworks show the city put on for the Fourth.  The fireworks were all let off from two barges anchored out in the river—an excellent idea in case of short-fires—and set several hundred yards apart so the show was “in stereo.”  One barge was in plain view, but the other was hidden from us by another hotel tower.  We all crowded around our window to watch.  M later declared that her stuffed cat, Zoom, had been a little scared by the fireworks.  The rest of us were just flat-out impressed.  The New Orleans show has the reputation of being among the five best in the country, and I have to agree.  Two or three of Austin’s shows put together wouldn’t touch it.

Tuesday T started working on setting up the teen room for the AG, while L, M, and I played at tourists.  We went through the aquarium, where M was frightened half to death by the sight of divers cleaning one of the tanks.  I don’t know whether it was just because they were big black THINGS, or whether she was influenced by Finding Nemo, where the divers are Bad Guys, but whichever it was, they reduced her to screaming terror.  We calmed her down after a few minutes, but the incident left her skittish for the rest of the tour.

Once out of the aquarium we went for a river cruise on the sternwheeler steamboat Natchez.  This was something I particularly wanted to do, because when I was only a little older than M, my parents took me for a similar cruise on the sidewheeler President.  Of course L was happy at just being on a boat.  She took up a station on the forward texas deck (fortunately covered by an awning, since the approach of Tropical Storm Cindy, which hit that night, meant it rained the whole afternoon), and stayed there save for a quick trip to the gift shop to buy a book and T-shirts for her and M, and to the engine room because I told her she ought to go see it.  I took M down to see the boilers, engines, and wheel.  Again, she was skittish about the machinery, but I’m about decided she’s just a skittish child.  T, at that age, would have been all over the boat.  (An amusing side note:  the Natchez’s two boilers are named “Thelma” and “Louise.”)

Tuesday night we stayed very much in the hotel, not even venturing out to eat, because Cindy was drenching and blowing away everyone who was silly enough to go on the streets.  It made spectacular watching, as the wind beat on the palm trees in the esplanade on Canal Street.  T, who had gone out before the wind and rain got up, came back with some guy she’d met who was trying to get back to his hotel down someplace in the middle of the Quarter.  Eventually, after he’d had dinner, he managed to find a cab that would take him.

Next time:  breakfast at Cafe du Monde and the plantation tours.