Wrap up in New Orleans

A few facts about New Orleans (NO) our Grayline city tour guide told us:

. the first apartments ever built in the USA were built in NO
.  Cafe du Monde (of beignets fame) was the first cafe to open 24 hours a day (it opened in 1803; they must have been confident.)
. NO has the oldest outdoor market in the USA
. the US mint in NO is the only one that minted both currencies in one mint. Not quite sure what he meant by that because according to one source they minted Mexican centivos for a while, but they also issued confederate half dollars (silver) instead of the gold US coins when Louisiana seceeded from the USA. Take your pick.

We visited a cemetery: much is made of how bodies are buried in NO. Because it is built on swamp land,  burying in the conventional way was not an option. At the merest flood, bodies could float down the street. So they bury them above ground as is the practice in Spain for instance. The tombs are used over and over but the practice is not to put in another body until a year and a day has passed.

What if Aunty Ida dies 6 months after uncle Fred who she could not live without? She gets put in a holding vault in a wall waiting for the requisite time to pass whence Uncle Fred's bits (they decompose fast in the heat of NO) are put in a ziploc bag and placed in a corner of the tomb. His coffin is burnt to make way for Aunty Ida's. May they rest in pieces.

Above ground tombs NO cemetery

From the land of the dead to the land of the living. We stopped by City Park (twice the size of Central Park, and the fifth largest in the USA) It houses a fabulous children's park designed around famous fairy stories, a 30,000 seat football stadium, the NO Museum of Art, and a Botanical Garden.

According to Wikipedia:

Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage to the park, with winds toppling an estimated 1,000 trees and damaging many more. The subsequent failure of multiple floodwalls brought about the inundation of much of the city, and almost the entire park was flooded with 1 foot (0.30 m) to 10 feet (3.0 m) of water that remained for two to four weeks, damaging all buildings, amusement rides, maintenance equipment, electrical systems and vehicles, and causing the death of more trees and landscaping - including nearly the entire plant collection in the New Orleans Botanical Garden.

Reconstruction is underway, and to our eyes there was no sign of damage.

Spanish Moss

At last I got to see Spanish Moss hanging on trees. For some reason I have been fascinated by this stuff. Come to think of it I associate it with a book I really like,  'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' set in Savannah. The cover features Spanish Moss dripping from trees making it look mysterious.

Wikipedia tells us that while it rarely kills the trees (usually Southern Live Oaks)  it lowers their growth rate by reducing the amount of light to a tree's own leaves. It also increases wind resistance, which can prove fatal to the host tree in a hurricane. Spanish Moss has been used as insulation, stuffing in the seats of cars (Model T Fords for example) and mattress stuffing.

'Walking Oak' in City Park

We drove by Lake Ponchetrain, second only to Lake Superior in size; a 24 mile-long bridge crosses it.


A swing through the Garden District (mentioned in previous blog) brought us back into the city. Hungry, we headed for Mother's Restaurant for some classic New Orleans home cooking (as advertised in the tourist literature). Proved to be a popular place, we queued for quite a while for our crawfish gumbo, po'boys etc. It was worth it.

The streetcar (started in 1835, with each one recorded on the National Registry) took us back to our hotel and a rest before heading out to Five Happiness, a Chinese restaurant for dinner. Once again we were hungry for vegetables and the restaurant did not disappoint. It has been selected as the best Chinese restaurant in NO for years. Of course we ordered too much and could not take the doggy bag they offered because we were leaving the next day.
 


Recorded 6141 steps on the pedometer but it felt like more.

For some reason this sign caught my eye.