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Our flight left on time--a double surprise, since it was a Continental flight out of Newark. The book I brought turned out to be a dud, so I slept most of the way. We arrived early (they apparently schedule assuming a ground delay) and the weather felt just like New Jersey -- hot and muggy.
(I must admit that it's difficult to write this trip log. Going somewhere in the United States just doesn't fell the same as going to another country.)
The ride to the hotel took about a half-hour. We went past the Superdome, home of the Republican convention, for which we saw lots of billboards. One was for the Bush/Kirkpatrick ticket and was either very old or very new. (It turned out to be very old.) Another was for Seagram's V.O.
We checked into the Sheraton and after about a half-hour our bags were sent up. By then it was after 11, so we looked through the tour information, decided what to do Saturday, and went to sleep.
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Happy 16th Anniversary! (Actually we're almost to the 20th Anniversary of our first date!)
We decided to walk toward where the Cajun Queen was docked. (This was the boat we decided to take.) Halfway there I realized I had forgotten my hat. At least I remembered my sunglasses.
We went into Riverwalk looking for a breakfast place. Riverwalk is an upscale shopping mall on the riverfront. There seems to be a trend toward this sort of mall. (It turned out that the same company is building most of them.) We had breakfast--cafe au lait and beignets, which are sort of like doughnuts. Afterwards we got tickets for the Cajun Queen cruise and then walked around the plaza until it was time to board.
As we got on, someone took pictures of each group (a lot like rafting trips). It was very hot, but from the air-conditioned part of the boat you really couldn't see anything, so we stayed outside.
We left the dock at 10:30 AM and headed downriver (which is actually north at this point). We passed several wharves, many of which are scheduled to be torn down as part of a riverfront renovation program. Then we passed some plantation homes, which are not scheduled to be torn down. Most of the ships and buildings we saw, though, were commercial or industrial--the sort of thing we'd find interesting in Peru or Finland, but here seems too similar to traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike.
We then turned toward the right and went through the Algiers Lock. This lock dropped us about eighteen inches from the Mississippi River level to the level of the Inter-Coastal Waterway. Along this waterway we saw a lot of boats, mostly supply boats and such for the off-shore drilling being done in the Gulf of Mexico, although there were a few shrimp boats and other fishing vessels.
As we traveled, the captain would describe what we were seeing. During the stretches when there was not much to point out, another captain with a Cajun accent would tell 'Cajun stories.' Cajun stories apparently are Catskill stories told with a Cajun accent. Sample: Mother tells her daughter who's about to get married that every night when her husband gets home, she should sit him down in a nice comfortable chair and prop his feet up. Daughter protests. Mother says, 'But you just won't believe how much change will fall out of his pockets into those cushions!' The only story that seemed like it might be of Cajun origin was the one telling where crayfish (crawfish) came from. When the Cajuns were thrown out of Nova Scotia and went to Louisiana, the lobsters missed them so much that they swam all the way to New Orleans. But it was such a long trip that they lost so much weight that they ended up less than six inches long.
Off the Inter-Coastal Waterway was Bayou Barataria, home of Jean Lafitte, who was not a Cajun, but was rather a pirate born in France. He used to fool the bounty hunters who were looking for him by planting fake tombstones with his name so they would think he was dead, and even now there are towns which claim to be his burial place, but he was actually lost at sea in a storm. (We had earlier passed Chalmette Battlefield, where the Battle of New Orleans was fought.)
The bayou did not look like most people's image of a bayou. When you hear the word 'bayou,' you think of a narrow waterway overhung with cypress trees and surrounded by swamps and more cypress trees. Bayou Barataria looks more like a river (though it has no current--that's what makes it a bayou). It's about 100 feet wider, or wider and only forested on one side, the other being marshland with an occasional cypress tree. You think of bayous as being shaded by trees, but we had no such luck. Luckily sodas were reasonably priced, because the temperature was probably up around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
We had hoped to see some wildlife and did in fact see some egrets, but the only alligators we saw were on people's shirts and in the two films they showed on the way back, one on alligator hunting and one on life in the bayous. For a time, alligators were an endangered species, but a ten-year moratorium on hunting had replenished the supply and now limited hunting was allowed.
Normally the boat returns via a different route (through the Harvey Locks), but they were under repair, so we retraced our steps (wake?) through the Algiers lock instead. This made the trip longer but not quite as interesting. Mark found the lack of wildlife disappointing, much as it was on out trip to the Amazon.
We returned about 3:30 PM and walked through Riverwalk. We got some Cajun and Dixieland music in a record store, browsed through a Brookstones, and looked for a belt for Mark in the Banana Republic. We did not go into the Sharper Image store since there was a waiting line to get in.
After dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we went walking through the French Quarter for a while, scouting out restaurants. When we returned to the hotel at 5:30 Dave and Kate had just arrived, so we hung around a while talking while they unpacked and washed up. Dave had gotten a recommendation for a dinner place nearby--Mother's. Mother's, it turns out, was also chosen by Mimi Sheraton as one of the top ten restaurants in New Orleans. That's odd, because it's pretty much of a corner cafeteria type of place with, however, huge portions. I had red beans and rice with sausage and cabbage, and a bowl of gumbo. The beans were very similar to Puerto Rican beans and the sausage to kielbasa. The gumbo, contrary to my expectations, was not red and had no noticeable pieces of okra. In spite of this, it was good--at least what of it I could eat before I was full. I don't think we'll starve here. Mother's opens early seven days a week for breakfast so we'll have someplace nearby during the convention. Mark discovered Barq's, a local root beer which is available in the hotel machines. While not up to ginger beer, it will suffice.
We stopped at a store and picked up some soda and snacks, then back to the room to watch--what else?--THE BIG EASY. After that was WAR OF THE WORLDS, but I fell asleep on that.
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We decided to walk towards the Ranger Station where our tour left from and find someplace to eat on the way. What we found first was an overly friendly drunk named Oscar who wanted to come with us. The New York technique of ignoring him didn't work and eventually we had to tell him rather firmly to leave us alone. This, at least, seemed to work.
We ate at Van's, on the southwest corner of Jackson Square. They didn't really have breakfast food, so I had a Cajun crepe--a crepe with rum-soaked pecans, chocolate mousse, whipped cream (more like vanilla mousse), and powdered sugar--and coffee. On the wall of the restaurant was a plaque that said, 'On this site in 1897, nothing happened.' The restaurant didn't have air conditioning so the double doors on the two external walls were open and the ceiling fans were going.
We got to the Ranger Station early by about an hour so we walked through some of the stores, mostly of the Times-Square-junk variety. I bought some post cards and ended up in back of someone buying $75 worth of souvenirs--with a Visa card, no less! The rest of the waiting period we spent writing in our logs and posing with the statues in the courtyard. This is when Mark discovered that he had taken 36 pictures without any film in his camera. (Well, if the camera shoots, makes film-advance noises, and increments the film counter, what would you think?) Most of the shots had been of the river and the French Quarter, so he'll have a chance to re-shoot them.
The 11:30 AM tour topic was 'Indians.' While the subject was interesting, the guide was not particularly knowledgeable and the need to walk through the French Quarter while he told us information totally unrelated to what we were seeing remains unclear. In addition to being somewhat incomplete on his subject, the guide was also bigoted, not only against Indians (he seemed to emphasize their 'savagery,' not exactly what you'd expect from a National Parks ranger), but against others as well (he talked about 'jewing someone down' in the marketplace). Naive person that I was, I thought that phrase had pretty much disappeared--I hadn't heard it in over twenty years. Then again, maybe that's a function of New Jersey versus Louisiana.
I have referred several times to the National Park and perhaps I should explain this. The French Quarter (a.k.a. Le Vieux Carre) of New Orleans has been declared a National Cultural Monument (or something like that). No changes can be made in the structures without permission (I think that's permission from the city rather than from the Federal government, though). Actually the whole southern half of Louisiana seems to have been declared 'special' by the National Parks Service, and they have many programs set up throughout the area without having any actual 'park' there.
We did see a few interesting sites on this tour: huge strings of garlic in the Farmers' Market (the French Market), the Beauregard-Keyes House, and Jackson Square, where the guide talked about the Act of Removal which Jackson signed that drove the Indians to reservations. Dave knew as much about this as the guide and probably could have given a better tour in general.
In spite of the disappointing first tour we decided to take the basic French Quarter tour at 1 PM. This was somewhat better attended (we were six out of seven on the first tour) and the guide (Kendall Thompson) was much better. He had better jokes and also a better grasp of his territory. We saw mostly Jackson Square and its surroundings while hearing the history of New Orleans. Since the history of New Orleans is readily available, I won't bore you with it. He did emphasize that history was not what you find in history books, but rather what the gossip is. This is basically what Josephine Tey was saying in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME; if the history books say Lady Smith died childless and a seamstress's bill indicated, '6d for ribbons for Lady Smith's newborn son,' you can bet Lady Smith did have a son.
I probably should describe the French Quarter. |
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