Into NOLA

That’s New Orleans LouisianA to the uninitiated.

[But first, a quick note about Process. Some of you might wonder why this blog is usually 3-4 weeks behind present day. “How hard can it be?” True, it should be as easy as picking some photos and writing a few quick reflections and stories. But on any given day, we’re also trying our darndest to live in the present, and usually there’s also some element of planning for the future. So, balancing time and space is the first hurdle. Then, we have photos on three different cameras, so those need to be reviewed and consolidated. In terms of writing – one of us will start the post and eventually the other will come in and elaborate. Then it goes back and forth a couple times to polish the photo captions or embellish the stories. And then you run into things like long travel days, or the roller coaster of daily news, or Kayla’s job gets really busy, or we’re just trying to stay on top of things like laundry and personal hygiene … and then we wonder why our top fans haven’t commented on our new post and then we realize that five days have gone by and we haven’t actually hit “Publish” on the draft yet. So, yeah. There ya have it. And now: here’s a story from three weeks ago.]

Ever since we hatched this NOLA plan many months ago, we had been holding out our trip to New Orleans – and meeting up with Grace and Charlie (Sitka friends) there – as one of the highpoints of this chapter of the adventure. It also marks an important waypoint: after New Orleans we will be heading north and beginning the last leg of our road travels for the year.

Though we certainly don’t know the city well, we’ve had the opportunity to wander beyond the French Quarter boundaries in previous trips, and were very much looking forward to getting to explore even deeper this round.

October 19 – 26: We bridge the 23 miles of Lake Pontchartrain to arrive at Grace’s nephew’s guest house in “uptown” NOLA not far off St. Charles Street. Darren and his wife own many of the classic dive bars in town, and were so generous to let all four of us stay in their wonderful guest space.

We endeavored to visit each of their bars during our week there.

We went to the City Park sculpture garden. It was the end of October and it was hot. Like, upper-80s hot.

We took an airboat tour. It was hot as well, unless the boat was moving, in which case we had a breeze. However, our captain was more interested in talking than boating, so we spent plenty of time drifting in the hot sun. Plus there was the time we got stuck.

We saw a lot of stuff, consumed delicious food & drink, laughed a lot with Grace & Charlie, and had a truly wonderful time. We’ll be back, NOLA!