Tripometer – 14,812 mi
Gas Gauge – 1152.255 gal
Location – French Quarter RV Park, New Orleans, LA
Lodging – $105
Cans of OFF – 4
Today was a better day! Kelly decided over coffee this morning that she was feeling queasy but acceptable. She continued to feel intermittently queasy and generally fatigued throughout the day, but this didn’t stop us from continuing the grand tour of New Orleans. It also didn’t stop us from making reservations at a nice restaurant for Thanksgiving in NOLA.
The Garden district was the focus of today’s touring. We started our day at Lafayette Cemetery #1, the oldest cemetery in the Garden District. We had stopped at St. Louis Cemetery #1, the oldest cemetery in the French Quarter on our first full day in New Orleans but found that the local catholic archdiocese operates the cemetery and was charging $20 per person to visit. Needless to say, we didn’t take them up on that offer. We did, on the other hand, accept an offer for a free (tips only) tour of the Lafayette #1 cemetery by a local pastor. Victor gave us a really nice tour of the most interesting, beautiful, and noteworthy crypts in the cemetery. This included the grave of John H. Ferguson of Plessy v. Ferguson fame, not the most popular person in this area and probably the most reviled occupant of this cemetery according to our tour guide. While the cemetery had tons of old gravesites, most were very plain in design. Before we left, our tour guide recommended that we visit St. Louis #3 Cemetery north of the French Quarter. He said St. Louis #3 has much more decorative graves and doesn’t charge an entry fee. We put that on the to-do list.
We spent the next several hours strolling amongst the gorgeous old mansions of the Garden District using a guide book, Wikipedia, and a handful of tourist pamphlets to tell us what we were looking at. At the turn of the 19th century the entire Garden District area was a plantation that was sold, broken into urban blocks and resold for housing. Most of the beautiful old homes we were interested in seeing were built between 1840 and 1870 in a menagerie of different architectural styles. One of the most striking things to us were the tremendously old trees and overflowing gardens that obliterate any chance of a clear photograph of the beautiful homes. The old homes and gardens in this area are truly spectacular and in many cases are also very well preserved. It is very easy to imagine exactly what this area looked like in the mid 19th century with horse drawn carriages in the streets and elegantly dressed townsfolk occupying the street corners. As far as urban hiking goes, this is by far our favorite to date.
After a light lunch at a restaurant on Magazine Street, Ranger decided that he would love a walk along the Mississippi levee. We drove to Riverbend Levee Park but were unable to find parking. There were plenty of people walking the riverfront trail, but we could find no parking lots or even roadside parking nearby. Clearly we were missing something. Frustrated we decided to take an exploratory drive through Frenchman Street. Frenchman is considered the live jazz home within NOLA. We knew this was on our short list of things to see here, but we had no idea what to expect so a drive thru was in order to get the lay of the land.
Driving along the Mississippi in a non-tourist area we got to see a good bit of the water management infrastructure required to keep New Orleans above water. The size and number of pumping stations and piping was astonishing. In one drive we saw somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 pumping stations with several very large diameter pipes (8-12 feet?) attached to each. It’s pretty astonishing to think that in periods of flooding and hurricane-strength rain these pumping facilities manage to pump out all of the rain that falls on Downtown New Orleans.
As we drove around the Mississippi looking for parking, Paul began to feel a bit queasy. We decided to call it an early night. Rest might help everyone feel better.