MBW and I took a walk on the wild side today in New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s Thanksgiving here today, and the place was insane.
We started the day by having a sleep-in. We got up at around 8.00am after a good night sleep catching up on a couple of long days driving the last couple of days.
When I say “we had a good night sleep”, I actually mean that I had a great night sleep. MBW not so much.
I had heard that it can be quite noisy around where we are staying with reports of all the usual suburban noises, plus a train nearby. I often keep earplugs with me as I am not normally a good sleeper and easily disturbed, and so I put them in when going to bed last night, put my head on the pillow, and slipped straight into that coma I forecast.
The very next thing that I knew, it was morning and time to get up. MBW reported not sleeping very well because of “that train” – which it turns out runs along at the end of our street, and the driver (engineer?) likes to honk his horn at every level crossing. Long, loud blasts that I didn’t hear.
That plus all of the expected creaks and groans of a house that must be >100 years old, and the fact that the house is actually a duplex, so we hear the noise of the neighbours coming and going as well.
Anyway, we got up, did the usual ablutions, had some breakfast and coffee, and set off down to the French Quarter.
We walked down through narrow, quiet suburban streets that contain houses that are colourful and quirky.
Now I may have mentioned previously that it is only about a 20 minute walk from where we are staying to the French Quarter, so we got there by about 9.30am. A bit cooler again today so we were back into our long-sleeved tee-shirts.
The first thing that we found was the French Markets (typical!) …
… but MBW was particularly keen to get down to Cafe du Monde to try a beignet and coffee. They have been serving chicory coffee and beignets since 1862, and if I understand correctly, that’s all that they sell.
So we got to Cafe du Monde and found the queue of people waiting to get a seat …
… and it was like that all day long.
I mentioned Thanksgiving Day earlier – unfortunately that meant that many shops were closed today, but Cafe du Monde was open and popular.
We had a couple of things lined up for today, specifically a Food tour by foot and the Thanksgiving Day parade. Both were scheduled for the afternoon so plenty of time to kill in the French Quarter.
Beautiful architecture but everything was pretty dirty as we had been warned.
We had (or rather, we thought we had) a Food tour by foot just after lunch, so we had a quick snack on a ‘Gator sausage (don’t ask, because I don’t know … but it was tasty) before waiting for our tour guide …
…who never turned up. It turns out we had mis-read her instructions and the tour is for tomorrow (spoiler alert!!!), so we decided to try again for the coffee and beignet before the Thanksgiving Day parade at 3.30pm.
Success! The queues were short and we got a table in a flash, and before we knew it we were feasting on coffee and beignets.
We headed down towards the Bourbon Street part of the French Quarter and noticed how few people were waiting around for the Thanksgiving Day parade. We asked Siri to ask Google for some advice … and found that the parade is not held on Thanksgiving Day, but rather on Saturday (who would have guessed???) … so we missed that one also 🙁
So we headed further down into the French Quarter towards Bourbon Street, with a stop on Canal Street.
We finally made it to Bourbon Street to check out the sights and sounds.
We hadn’t had lunch, so we stopped in at the Hard Rock Cafe New Orleans for a traditional Thanksgiving Day meal (turkey, cranberry sauce, vegetables, mash, stuffing … and ended it with pumpkin pie.
By this time it was getting cooler and darker, so we did a final lap of Bourbon Street to watch the madness.
Lots of buskers around, lots of jazz bands all playing in competition with each other, some dude in a Star Wars costume doing a dance routine to music that was ear-splittingly loud, and lots and lots of beggars on the street.
New Orleans is one of those places where you can consume alcohol on the street, so it makes for an interesting atmosphere … jazz, kids playing drums on upside-down buckets, noise, people everywhere … a really fun, party atmosphere.
Buskers even take over the street so that cars have to wait until the performance is over. Below is a video of some kids playing drums on Bourbon Steet.
We headed back towards the top end of the French Quarter and booked a Lyft back home.
Tomorrow we have a bus tour of the city followed by a food tour on foot.
Today’s vital statistics are not measured in miles, but rather steps – almost 18,000 steps each today.
The title of today’s post, and today’s song is Walk on the Wild Side (Lou Reed). Not exactly about New Orleans, but appropriate just the same.
Ciao
G&KTAKEUSA2019
New Orleans looks amazing!