October 29, 2009 — Well my great adventure of the fall of 2009 is underway. My niece, her dog Daisy Jane, and I left Austin a bit earlier than expected on Monday. It was almost 4 a.m. when I woke them up along with Wanda and announced that we had better get started ahead of approaching storms. It was good that we did as there was significant rain. We stayed out of most of it until we reached the Houston area where it stormed and we had to deal with rush hour traffic. My niece did a great job of getting us through it all and we headed on towards New Orleans.
We left the Interstate (I-10) at Lake Charles, La and traveled the rural highways all the way to New Orleans. You really do see a lot more by getting off the Interstate as my niece had been proclaiming. It took a total of 12-hours to reach New Orleans, but we saw a lot of things that otherwise would have been missed had we not gone through southern Louisiana. I thought they grew a lot of sugar cane in Hawaii, but that is the major crop around these parts.
(I started this blog in the early morning hours of our last day in New Orleans and have since traveled to Pensacola, Fla. so I am switching to past tense.)
I was very impressed with New Orleans. I thought I would find a dingy city with a lot of "crud" hanging around, but that is certainly not the case. It is very easy to get around by auto except for parking so we did a lot of sightseeing from the car. Our hotel was about a mile (maybe less) from the French Quarter so of course we explored Bourbon St and the surrounding area. I love the narrow streets and overhanging balconies. My niece has been to New Orleans several times before and was an excellent tour guide.
One of the best parts was the French Market area at one end of the French Quarter. It is alongside the Mississippi River and there was so much to see. I enjoyed the Cafe du Monde and the delicious beignets (a French pastry). They were exactly as my niece said they would be. We did some shopping at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville and had lunch there. All of it good stuff!
The first day we traveled south out of New Orleans paralleling the river to the farthest point south you can go in Louisiana by car. It was some 140 miles round trip and about half of that there just wasn't much to see. Down near the end of the road there were a number of heliports where oil rig workers are ferried to the rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. There were a ton of pickup trucks parked in the parking lots of these heliports.
Our second day we spent as described above and also drove through the Garden District. This area of New Orleans is filled with very old style southern homes. Very expansive and beautiful. I believe I got some good pictures. We then traveled around via the Interstate to the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and then took the causeway across the lake back to the city. That is a distance of 24 miles. Lake Pontchartrain is the second largest saltwater lake in America and has an average depth of 12-14 feet. Amazing!
All-in-all I thoroughly enjoyed the sites of New Orleans and look forward to when I might return. So we left for Pensacola this morning and arrived about 4:30 p.m. We again stayed off I-10 most of the way and drove along the beach through Mississippi and Alabama. We stopped at a casino and of course my niece walked out of the place flush with cash. Me I got a little return. Tomorrow I intend to see the National Naval Air Museum. I spent a good deal of my adult life in Naval aviation and it means so much to me...it's what really matters!
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