New Orleans, Louisiana Day 2

Our only full day in New Orleans was very wet.

Walking around the French Quarter, we happened upon the visiting film crew of the CBS Daytime Drama The Young & The Restless. They were in town for some on-location shooting scheduled to air around Thanksgiving Day.

The Presbytere, one of the Louisiana State Museums, houses the new interactive multimedia exhibit "Living With Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond" which opened on October 26, 2010.

Unfortunately, our full day in New Orleans was Election Day and all the Louisiana State Museums were closed today.

The first New Orleans streetcar line dates all the way back to 1835!
This is Natchez IX, a sternwheel steamboat which has been running harbor and dinner cruises since it was built in 1975. It temporarily relocated to Baton Rouge following Hurricane Katrina.

One of New Orlean's newest attractions is the Southern Food & Beverage Museum located at the Riverwalk Marketplace.

Little white lunch buckets full of red beans and rice were common at the workplace in New Orleans in the mid-1900's.

Prices at the turn of the 19th century were quite a bit less than those at the turn of the 21st century. Who says we don't have inflation?

Southbend has been making commercial cooking equipment for over 100 years. Here is a range from around the time the company was founded.

Here is a modern range from the company. Complete with its own PC!

Here is a range from Munchkinland.

While at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, you can learn how to distill your own rum and gin, just like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Marlon has decided bartending may be a good profession for him.

Eddie Gabriel was known as "The Rhythm Man" by tapping taped thimbles on the metal tray he carried. He died during Katrina at 95 years of age.

In 2009, Rick and Monica Defenbaugh donated these file cabinets full of literally thousands of recipes they had collected over the years.

Yeah, the drawers really are filled with recipe cards! The couple discovered recipes on the internet in 2002 and now print their recipes instead of writing them on index cards.

How about a little something from the Katrina Deli?

Yummy!

Shop here for all your Mardi Gras needs.

This would be a great place to relax on a nice dry day.

The rain of the day provided us with the opportunity to catch this nighttime picture which we thought was pretty neat.

For more pictures, click here .

To be continued...

New Orleans, Louisiana & French Quarter RV Resort

Our final major destination before reaching Florida was New Orleans, Louisiana.

On the way, someone lost their load of big, rusted metal pipes.

Our entire trip from West Yellowstone has been dry, but it looks like we may be heading into some storm clouds.

The skyline of Downtown New Orleans includes the Superdome, home of the New Orleans Saints.

The French Quarter RV Resort features rv sites with red brick pavers and plenty of room.

The office is designed to remind visitors that they are very near the French Quarter.

Amenities at the French Quarter RV Resort are among the nicest we have seen.

The best amenity is its close proximity to all the festivities of Bourbon Street.

On a stroll down Bourbon Street, we spotted some horse-mounted police.

For more pictures, click here .

To be continued...

French Quarter & Super City Tour

Following the Hurricane Katrina Tour we had a couple of hours before we took our Super City Tour, so we walked around the French Quarter and down Bourbon Street.

New Orleans wants you to know that the French Quarter, and most everything tourists come to New Orleans for, is open for business.

Whoever owns this door wants you to know its lack of importance.

The Super City Tour was another bus tour which gave brief overviews of the City and its history...which included a brief view of another FEMA trailer park.

We also viewed several homes in The Garden District.

Marlon caught a little bit of footage as we drove through The Garden District.

Right outside one of the older St. Louis Cemeteries (there are 3), we viewed this school parade.

This is one of the St. Louis Cemeteries where whole families are encased in a monument. A detailed description of these "Cities of the Dead" can be found at http://www.experienceneworleans.com/deadcity.html .

We also viewed both the Loyola and Tulane University campuses on this tour.

Here's the bus we rode in. It was about twice the size of the Hurricane Katrina bus but had only half the passengers.

Back in The French Quarter, we waited for someone to toss us down some beads.

We found this guy, Hand Grenade, at one of the Tropical Isle bars on Bourbon Street. We decided we needed to try a couple of Hand Grenade drinks...not bad at all. When you're on Bourbon Street, try one or two.

Here, Hand Grenade shows us a trick.

It was now about 6:00 pm and Bourbon Street was still very subdued. That would change in a few hours.

The Cajun Country Store on Bourbon Street had this recommendation for future hurricanes.

Bourbon Street is populated by street performers such as these cowboy statues much the same way we have seen in both Key West and Honolulu.

A tall New Orleans building...

For more pictures of The French Quarter and our Super City Tour, go to http://public.fotki.com/Marlonfleenor/1/2007/september/french-quarter--sup/ .

To be continued...

New Orleans & The Hurricane Katrina Tour

The most direct route to New Orleans from our campground in Robert was to travel across The Lake Ponchartrain Causeway. At almost 24 miles in length, the parallel bridges which form the causeway are the longest bridges in the world.

For the privilege of crossing the longest bridge in the world, you must pay $3 going into New Orleans. In 1999 the toll was eliminated for the trip across the bridge FROM New Orleans (it was $1.50 each way before that).

Here is one of the Historic New Orleans Streetcars available to transport you through the city.

We went on a 9 am Gray Line "Hurricane Katrina tour". The four hour tour gave us fairly up close and personal looks at the remains of the devastation that happened two years ago.

The tour guide kept us informed with details of her personal experience with Katrina, as well as updating us on the progress of the neighborhoods which we drove through.

Here was one of the first items of interest the tour passed...the Louisiana Superdome as it appeared after Katrina...

and the Superdome as it appears today.

This was the first of many houses which provided an illustration of the rescue attempts during the Katrina aftermath.

Each time rescue workers approached a house, they marked it with an X (or one diagonal of an X). In the top, they wrote the date. An indication of who searched the house was put on the left. This would often be initials of a state such as AZ for Arizona National Guard. On the bottom, they would indicate the number of bodies found...in this case, 0. In the right hand side of the X they would put any hazards anyone else coming to the house should be aware of such as missing staircases, etc. When they left the house, they would mark the other diagonal of the X to indicate that they were not still inside. On the right hand door you can see "ho" which is the beginning of the word "hole". This apparently means people in the house were rescued through a hole in the roof.

Many of the neighborhoods were filled with street after street of houses still unoccupied. Some streets would have work being done on about every other house...other streets would have work being done on about 1 house in 10. Still other streets appeared to be totally abandoned.

On the tour, places were pointed out where the flood wall around the city broke.

The still damaged abandoned homes ranged from very small shotgun style houses to houses worth over $500,000 pre-Katrina.

In most neighborhoods almost all stores are still closed. Whole strip malls for miles going down major streets are abandoned.

These are some of the FEMA trailers provided to those who are working on restoring their homes.

Many house structures are still sound, but have to gutted from the inside out and completely redone.

The Botanical Gardens was a brief stop on The Katrina Tour.

Another less-horrific casualty of Hurricane Katrina was Six Flags Over New Orleans. Six Flags has decided that the New Orleans proper population, which was 460,000 and is now estimated to be 250,000, is not enough to support a park. All useful rides have already been moved to other locations around the country. What remains is considered scrap metal.

This is an example of a Katrina Cottage costing about $75,000 which is about the amount the federal government is paying for the FEMA trailers, which in our opinion probably retail for $20,000! To our understanding, because of governmental red tape, it proved more difficult to get a Katrina Cottage than a trailer even though they were costing the government the same amount of money.

Marlon captured part of Katrina Tour on video below.

For more pictures of the Katrina Tour, go to http://public.fotki.com/Marlonfleenor/1/2007/september/neworleanshurricane/ .

To be continued...