NOLA, then home

A view from Bourbon St.

We last left you as we were about to grab some dinner, which was excellent. As she has done all trip, Amy found a great (cheap) place to eat... Gumbo Shop, just off Bourbon Street. We had all kinds of great food brought to our table: Amy had crawfish pasta, Chris: jambalaya, David: blackened chicken, & me: a little sample of Creole shrimp, jambalaya, and crawfish etouffee. Everyone's meal was delicious! From there, we headed to Cafe Du Monde for some beignets. These little gems are delicious, deep-fried, and doughnut-like... covered in powdered sugar. Or, as Chris described, "funnel cake on steroids."

The last remaining bite of our beignets. 

From Cafe Du Monde, we walked back towards the French Quarter & Bourbon Street, where we all tried an authentic Hurricane from Pat O'Brien's bar. We all agreed that it would never again be our first choice... with everyone having a slightly different explanation of how (badly) it tasted. My personal example was cherry cough syrup, which you can imagine I was not a fan of.

New Orleans has open-container laws, so we just walked around, sipping our Hurricanes and taking it all in. We stopped in at a few different places, to get a feel for the atmosphere. Bourbon Cowboy was playing 100% country music, another bar (Saloon) had a great live band, and Old Opera House played some epic live 80's music.

We left this morning after a filling, delicious breakfast of eggs, waffles, and a mystery breakfast potato at the hotel (coffee for David & I of course), and decided to take a drive through the Lower Ninth Ward, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We were expecting to see total decimation, but what we saw really surprised us. The total devastation existed, but there were also quite a few houses that had been repaired and looked very nice. In some areas, entire blocks were boarded up, but in others, about every other house looked to have been repaired. One block even had brand new houses. It makes sense; Katrina was 6 years ago, but I guess we were just still expecting the damage to be more raw. That close to the water, they put their houses up on blocks about 2 feet off the ground, which makes perfect sense, but I had never known before and it was interesting to see.

We got delayed by about an hour coming out of New Orleans this morning due to an entire interstate closure. None of us had ever heard of an entire interstate closing, save the time that President Obama came to Peoria and they closed 474 and 74 there. So, maybe the President was in town? Though frustrating, it did allow (force?) us to drive over Lake Pontchartrain, which is HUGE. The bridge is about 24 miles long, and is the Guinness World Record holder for longest bridge over a continuous body of water.

We're about an hour south of Memphis, TN now, so we'll be getting home pretty late tonight, and back to work tomorrow for everyone but Amy! We'll have a couple more posts with best/worst of the trip, and a time lapse video of the trip at some point. Thanks for following! :)