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1 to 15 November 2011 16 to 30 November 2011

Thursday, November 16, 2011

It is time to leave.
Good-Bye Memphis!
We decide not to take Interstate 55, but take US 61 road. A secondary highway is just as nice as an interstate.
Less than 14 km later we are welcomed in Mississippi.

Right after leaving Memphis, we can see that the main crop around here is cotton.

Cotton is either packed in bales or into modules.

US 61 is a very nice road. I always prefer the US types of roads to the Interstates. A lot less traffic.

But a surprise is waiting for us...

This transport tried to make a U-turn, but I guess he was not successful...

US 61, like As I mentioned, a very nice road.

It is always interesting to see the name of the places where people live.

Of course, they always have some BIG billboards along the highways and some have pretty good "stories"!

The Macdonald's buildings are different than back in Canada!

We found that down south the trees are so big that they cross the roads. I love the look of this.

We saw some pretty nasty clouds moving to the east of us. We just get the tail end of the rain.
A few days later, a friend emailed us to ask if we were in the big storms that went through the area.
We were pretty lucky to miss all this very bad weather. It is nice to have friends that were worried about us travelling in the area...

One place you can almost always count on to spend the night is Walmart. The one located in Natchez is one of them. We will have to come back a visit Natchez one day.

I have to come back and talk a little bit more about the US highway. They are 99 % great roads. A lot fewer trucks then the interstates. A more relaxed way to travel and you get to see a lot more of the United States. It may add to your travelling time, but hey, we are retired.

Friday, November 17, 2011

Thanks to Uncle Wally, we had a good night of sleep. This Walmart had a security patrol all night long. Not because it is a bad neighborhood, but it is the way lots of Walmart are in the States. Of course, we did spend some $$$ in the store...

Back on US 61, what a beautiful road.

Welcome to Louisiana. In French!

Shortly after leaving Natchez, we had to get back on the Interstate 55. But before we did, we hit some road construction.

Interstates 55, or I-55, was not very busy at first, but soon after, rush hour traffics (for us Canadian).

As we got closer to the coast and New Orleans, the scenery started to change. Bridges that are more than 20 miles long! We are in "bayou" country. I just found out that the definition of Bayou in French compare to English if not quite the same. Here is the French way of explaining it. A body of water created by an old channel left by the main river, an area of water created by the Mississippi River. Check the link above to see the English definition.

Now, these bridges are... well kind of like riding from one wave to the other at times. Lucky me, the little rod that makes my motorhome airbag suspension work, failed. Airbags deflate and we have to crawl at 60 km/h for over 5 km on the bridge until I found a place to stop and fix the problem. 10 minutes from stop to back in traffic, but let me tell you, these things do not happen on a nice stretch of roads. Only places where you cannot stop safely. Boy did I work up a sweat in that traffic.

We finally made it to New Orleans. We found the campground without too many difficulties. The GPS got confused once and sent us somewhere else. We have found that GPS only gives you an idea of where you should be going without knowing the quality of the road. The human is still the last defence (with maps) to get you there safely.

Two good days on the road without too much stress and a few intense moments. Nice roads.

Saturday, November 18, 2011

Today, we take it easy. This is our campground, a little like a parking lot, but this is what you get when you try to get close to a city center. The owners are very helpful and Marla is a very good tourist information "agent". She can tell you where to go and find free parking and all kinds of other stuff. One more plus for the campground is the security. I will come back to this point later.

Right next to the pool and hot tub.

Finally, some short pants weather...

When you live in a motorhome or 5th wheel, you always have something to do. According to my schedule, I should wash the indoor steps of the motorhome. And I do.

Humm! The owner's dog on a B-B-Q?
Is this a hot dog?

I have to talk about the campground we are staying in and the neighborhood. Like I mentioned before, the closer you are to the city center the more your sites will closer together. You want space, go to a State Park or pay a lot more for your site. The area where the campground is situated was a nice neighborhood before Katrina. This area was under 4 feet of water. Lots of people left and never came back. The mall closed, so did two hospitals. With those good-paying jobs gone. I do not want to say anything bad, but here are some realities. Good jobs are gone, low-income people move in. I hate to say it, but with low income, comes crimes. As the owner mentioned, this is not a dangerous area, just be careful. The gate at the entrance closes at 6 pm to open back up at 9 am the next day. You can still get in and out with the code. This just keeps the unsavoury people out. Having said this, I would come back here in a heartbeat. This is a nice area and very nice owners.

Sunday, November 19, 2011

New Orleans here we come...
Less than 10 minutes away from the campground and here we are in the French Quarter.
Every day the market is open.

Without getting into all the details of the place, here is some information about the French Quarter. The French Quarter is 13 by 6 blocks long and the home of about 4000 people.
The French Quarter was mostly populated by the French Creole 150 years ago. The Creole painted their house bright colors where the "Les Americains" painted their house white.
Notice the nice wrought iron on the balconies.

Right in front of the Cathedral Saint Louis, you have Jackson Square. This is where some street entertainers perform.
Here they are in action.

Kind of hard to see in the photo, but one is jumping overall 6 people on the ground.

I just love this old bike.

Many more entertainers are on the streets of New Orleans. A few, all painted silver and not moving at all for many minutes.

Bourbon Street, a well-recognized name. Mostly for the bar life...

We had a beer at the Funky Pirate Blues Club. Very good blues, even if I do not know much about blues... I enjoyed it.

A musician on his way home...

In New Orleans, you can have alcohol on the street as long as it is in a can or a plastic container. The BIG 100oz mug filled with Margarita or other slushy drinks only cost you $32. But if you already have a 100oz cup, the refill is only $28.

We stopped at another bar with some Bayou music with the Waylon Thibodeaux band...

We like all kinds of music. More so if you are in a bar with the right "atmosphere".

And we continue our meandering in the French Quarters.

We had to stop at this bar because the music was from the Caribbeans islands. I cannot remember the name of the bar, but it was nice...

Ouff, some other entertainer on the street?

We had dinner at a seafood place, with a Louisiana flavor.
We had Po-Boys.
A bread with either fried shrimps or catfish or many other things. The origin of the sandwich goes back to 1929 when a strike opposing the tram drivers and the city. An old tram driver, now a restaurant owner, decided to offer a free sandwich to the striking employee to help them out. The sandwich became known as the Poor Boy sandwich. It was shorted to Po-Boys sandwich later on. Very good sandwich.

Huge Ass Beers?

French Quarters at night.

A very nice day and evening spent in the French Quarters.

Monday, November 20, 2011

We just took a drive around the neighborhood today.

Gasoline has really dropped in price lately. About $0.82 a liter for us Canadian.
Too bad the car and the motorhome are full.

This is what we have at the back of the campground. Surprisingly, it is not too bad for noise.

The view from our motorhome. Nice pool and hot tub. Most people that do go in the pool and in the hot tub are Canadians, a few Americans get there too.

It is very nice to take a day off and do very little...

Tuesday, November 21, 2011

We are visiting plantations today.
Further up the Mississippi, they harvest cotton, but down towards the lower end of the Mississippi, it is the sugar cane, white gold.
We started the day with some pretty heavy fog.

You can see sugar canes in the fields and sugar canes in trucks.

Oak Alley Plantation, as the sign says, the oaks are estimated to be over 300 years old.

But before the guided tour, we have lunch at the plantation restaurant.

Michele chose the Turducken. I am going to let the small menu explains what this is. Michele said it was very good. I could not have any because I am allergic to celery and they may have some in the recipe.

So, I chose the half and half of catfish and shrimps. Humm, so good.

This is one of the "young" oak at only 160 years. Can you see Michele in this photo?
We are at the back of the house.

The front of the house as seen from the Mississippi River. Of course no photos inside, but it was very pretty.

A view from the second floor of the house, looking towards the Mississippi River with all 28 oak trees.

A typical drink of the area was the Mint Julep. Very good, but I took only one has it is very minty (and lots of booze).

Some of the oak's branches are so heavy they touch the ground and carry on living.

On our Katrina bus tour (in a few days), the driver mentioned that when he was a young kid, he used to come and play on those limbs touching the ground. He probably is over 60 today.

Oak Alley plantation was a Creole plantation, but as I have mentioned, run the "Les Américains" way. They even spoke English, not French.

Let's continue our plantations visit with a true Creole plantation.

Some more differences about the "Les Américains" and the "Creole". The Americans were very strict and proper. The ladies could not participate in the business of the plantation as they were considered below this task. They were also very modest towards the other gender. Where the Creole, from French origin, were more open about many things. This plantation was run for three generations by very strong women. Also, they could show a lot of cleavage without shocking, but could not show their calves, more about that later. The plantation was passed down to women rather than men. Times and new ways of doing business took their tolls and both types of plantation disappeared with modernization.

Let's visit a true Creole plantation. The Laura plantation.

Just like in New Orleans French Quarters, the house is painted in bright colors. Remember the "les Américains" house was always white. Notice, they always have two sets of stairs going up to the first floor. First, the first floor was the living/business place and the basement, on the ground floor, was for storage. The reason was that with the spring floods you could keep your living quarters dry. Second reason, if a man saw the calves of a lady on the way up the stairs, he had to marry her. So, they both went up to the main floor on a different set of stairs.

Lots of information if you click here and here.

Why have this post with the roman number on wood? Well, back in the days. Jacques Telesphore Roman "borrowed" a very skilled slave from another plantation to build his house. This particular slave's name was never recorded, but he supervised the cutting and the shaping of all the wood in the swamps and had the house assembled at this present location in only three days. Now that is skills!

Here you see the roman numbers and the peg to secure the assembly of the structure.

The back of the house.

First time I see a praying mantis.

The Laura Plantation had over 100 of these slave's houses. The house was split into two and two families lived in them. Most slaves stayed after the American Revolution that freed them. They became "shared croppers". Meaning they worked on the crop like before, but they got their share of the money...

We really enjoyed the visits to the plantations. We learned a lot about the "south".

We were lucky and got a nice sunset on our way home.

Wednesday, November 22, 2011

We have chosen to take a guided tour of the city and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005.

The guided tour was very informative and full of neat details, almost too many details.
At the left of the signal lights you can see some light blue posts. They represent the water level at different time of the flood in this area.

The water table is only a few feet below the ground in New Orleans. Most houses do not have a basement. With the floodwater level so high during the hurricane, lots of houses were floating away.
Here are some examples of houses that have not moved, but still got damaged by the high water.

It is very sad to see all those houses abandoned like that. Even the rich area of town did get flooded. The only difference is the rich people did come back because they had insurance and money where the low-income people did not.

The legendary blues singer, Fat Domino, lives here in a low-income area. A nice house, but nothing flashy.

Lots of houses are long and narrow, they are nota mobile home. They are the results of some laws dating back over 100 years ago. Back then, they taxed houses on the bases of the width and how many rooms they had inside. People then build narrow houses with no or very few walls to make rooms so they could save on the taxes.
This house is currently for rent at $850.00 a month.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie joined a group called "Make It Right" and they gave money (I was told over $1,000,000.00) to help build a new house in the lower 9th Ward because it was the hardest hit by the floods. The new houses had to be "green" and the people applying for them had to meet some basic criteria like, have a job, improve the place and be able to buy the house at cost in 5 years. The idea is to move people with good income in a low-income area and hopefully stop the deterioration of the area.
A very good project. It seems to be working.

A visit toNew Orleans is not complete until you have made a stop in a cemetery. New Orleans has many cemeteries like this one. In the early days of the city, the dead were buried in-ground, but every spring came the seasonal floods and the bodies would float up and "travel" everywhere in the city. No need to say more about that! From that point on, they buried the dead in vaults. Some of the vaults date back to the early 1700s.

The lack of space forced a change in the way the dead were to be "handled". The law stated that you could not open a vault for a year after someone was buried. If someone died during that year, they had to be placed in a "layaway" vault until they could open the main vault again. Of course, the body in the "layaway" was pretty well decomposed by then. They only had to move "dust" into the main vault. This way they could put more family members in a very confined space. Click here for more info.
Here you see the "layaway" vaults.

I recommend this tour for anyone visiting New Orleans.

We had to have a Café au lait and beignets at the French Quarters Café du Monde.
Hummmm!

Our first impression of New Orleans?
So much to see and do, you would need a lot more than 2 weeks to get it all in.
But we are trying...

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

A cruise on the Mississippi River with the steamboat Natchez IX.

What a surprise to see a lady playing some kind of piano, but it uses steam and whistles to make the sounds. Some of the tunes are pretty good while others get on your nerves. No matter where you are in the French Quarter, you can hear her playing.

Built in 1975, the Natchez is a true steamboat unlike other boats in New Orleans.
The piston stroke is about 7 feet long. Impressive to see this engine works.

Fun with the cameras!

We met some very nice people at the campground and we took the cruise together.
Us and our friends, from my left, Diane, Nicole, Serge and Migouel.

The Natchez has a guide telling us all about the Mississippi River and the surrounding area.
He told us the area where the houses are, is 6 to 8 feet below the river.

You can see a barge being empty, but what is in the barge? Sugar!

The Mississippi or more precisely, New Orleans, is either the second or third port in importance in the USA.
So the guide says.

This is why we saw so many towboats and barges.

Us, Captains?

A really nice steamboat cruise and the information we got was just great.

A view down one of the Natchez's deck.

New Orleans city center.

As we near the docks, we can see a street entertainer.
This one does not move for over 10 minutes, just like a statue.

On our way back home, we stopped at this small restaurant next to our campground and buy this meal for only $11.74. We even had leftovers for lunch the next day. This beats MacDonald and much better!

Another great day.

We recommend this cruise if you come down to New Orleans.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

I use this day of rest to do some maintenance.
The wires from our 50 amp plug are starting to show.
Time to change the old plug with a new one.

I also use this time to fix the 30 amp extension cord by changing both ends of the extension.

Friday, November 25 to Sunday, November 27, 2011

Three days of doing nothing more than some shopping, some reading and watching TV.

In the States, they do everything BIG. Look at the width of this bridge!

And the bridge above us is not for cars, but for trains!

I purchased this 4 in 1 grill. I works very well so far.

Sunday is a gloomy day. Michele is watching the Grey Cup on TV.

With Football, you got to have chicken wings...

Kind of nice to slow down a bit for a few days.

Monday, November 28, 2011

New Orleans has three streetcar lines. For only $3.00, you can ride on and off all of them for a full day.

a Really good transportation system.

Our first stop is Mardi Gras World, or in English, Fat Tuesday World.

What is Mardi Gras World? Well, this is a company that specializes in the construction of floats for the Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans. They actually do other floats and characters for casinos and other parades.

While waiting for the guided tour, we had fun...

The tour guide gave us the tour of the "behind the scene" of building a float. From the idea, to paper, to actually creating the character for the float. They use a lot of Styrofoam.

Most of the characters are used only once, but recycling is very big here. They keep all that they build and lots of time they use parts of an old character to joint it with a new one. A nose, a hand, you name it, they will re-use it. They also keep every piece of cut out Styrofoam. It could be used later on by another character.

The company keeps everything, from a floats, to characters, to the tractors used to pull the floats. They own 17 huge warehouses in the New Orleans area. The smallest is only 100,000 square feet. Speaking of tractors, they have over 150 of them.

Why do they keep all this stuff? It would cost too much money for the clubs who participate in the parades to maintain and build the floats. It is cheaper for them to rent them from the Mardi Gras World every year.

By the time we finished the tour, we were hungry. We decided to get a local delicacy at Franks Restaurant, a Muffuletta. A muffuletta is a round bread, about 10 inches across and filled with Italians cold cuts and other things. We split one between the two of us. Muffuletta is a big sandwiche and very good.

A few days back, I talked about the slush drinks. Here is a bar that serves the slush. This bar is pretty small compared to some we have seen. We have seen them with over 20 slush "machines" to serve you better and with different flavors.

Canal Street with the streetcar tracks in the center of the boulevard.

Another busy day.

Tuesday and Wednesday, November 29 and 30, 2011

First, this is laundry day on Tuesday. I would like to tell you all that I am the one doing laundry, but Michele was there to take the photo after all!

Wednesday, our last day in New Orleans.

We were told we could not miss the "New Orleans School of Cooking".
We have a reservation for the 2 pm class.

For the first half-hour, the Chef Anne Leonhard gave us the history/origin behind the Cajun/Creole food and recipes.

Anne preparing the entrée, Corn & Crab Bisque. Just plain delicious...

Anne continued on with the main course, Shrimp Creole. Hummm! Michele told me it was very good!

But, I could not have any because it has celery in it. So, they accommodated me with a Bread Pudding. Oh so good!

Desert, Praline. Simply put, it is pecans with melted brown sugar. Hummm!

Very good and also very interesting. So much so that I forgot to take more photos of our meal.

Another of our recommendation for New Orleans.

I am pretty sure we will come back to New Orleans. So much more to see and taste. We would come back to the same campground for sure.

Until next time.

Life is good...