Tripometer – 14,841 mi
Gas Gauge – 1152.255 gal
Location – French Quarter RV Park, New Orleans, LA
Lodging – $150
Cans of OFF – 4
Feeling better when we woke this morning we decided to drive into the French quarter to both grab a bite to eat and visit a few more shops. It took us less than 15 minutes to realize that shopping ANYWHERE on Black Friday was a huge error in judgement on our part. We immediately turned the car in the opposite direction and drove away from the shopping areas.
Sam and Z had both recommended a restaurant north of the tourist district but still within the city of New Orleans, Willie Mae’s Soul Food Restaurant. We had not run across any mention of this restaurant in any of our research, but the online reviews and award history of this little place warranted a visit (They received the prestigious James Beard Award for ‘America’s Classic Restaurant for the Southern Region’ in 2005, bringing this little home town restaurant to national attention). Arriving in a rather bad part of town we stood in line for almost an hour to get a table in what appears to be an old home. Sam’s instructions were clear. We were to order fried chicken with sides of our choice. Holy… Cow… We both consider ourselves to be fans of fried chicken (who isn’t?) and this is by far the best fried chicken we’ve ever had, hands down. If you ever happen to be in the New Orleans area, we highly suggest this restaurant.
With full bellies (and feeling a bit queasy as is usual these days) we went North a bit to give Ranger a nice walk in the New Orleans City Park. Having visited a couple of the big city parks in Baltimore we were both a bit surprised with how beautifully maintained the city park in New Orleans was. The park was decked out in Christmas attire with lighted Christmas displays hanging from trees and floating in the waterways surrounding the park. There was a beautiful playground, a 24 hour concession stand, the city’s art museum and a child’s amusement park all within the bounds of the park. There must have been a few thousand people here on a Friday afternoon enjoying the park with their families. Baltimore could learn a thing or two about running city parks from New Orleans – We’re looking at you Druid Hill.
After beating some of the energy out of Ranger on a walk, we took him back to the trailer and set him up for an evening in the trailer alone. He doesn’t object to being left alone in the trailer these days. He recognizes it as his de facto home in lieu of the real thing and as long as the temperature is lower than about 70 degrees in the trailer, he’s happy to spend an evening resting up for more. We realized a few days ago that the hassle of finding a parking spot combined with the cost to park a vehicle made the $14 round trip Uber fair to and from the RV park a high-value proposition. One quick Uber ride later we were standing on Frenchman Street listening to a wide range of different music styles coming from a dozen different restaurants and bars up and down the street. Throughout the evening we stopped in several different places to hear several different bands, dined on gourmet hot dogs, bought our first and only souvenir from New Orleans and generally had a good time
We had to pay a premium rate for our RV site on Friday and Saturday this week. The Bayou Classic, an annual football game between Grambling State University and Southern University played at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans attracts spectators, football players, and marching bands from the areas all around NOLA this weekend every year. We highly suspect that some of the marching band members found their way to Frenchman Street this evening to play on the street corner. The Frenchman Street jazz area is a mere 3 blocks long and this very enthusiastic and rhythmic brass band was dominating the crowd and had all but frozen traffic on this relatively busy section of road. We watched the band play for a while before we went to Dat Dog, a nearby hot dog restaurant for a late night snack. A server in Dat Dog explained that the marching band competition was earlier in the day and the football game is tomorrow. That would explain why the energy level of this group of musicians was so darned high! They were still playing the crowd on Frenchman as we climbed into the Uber for our trip back to the RV park.
Returning to the trailer this evening we fell asleep remarking across the length of the trailer that there sure seem to be a lot of ambulances in this city. A quick google search showed that the Tulane Medical Center was located just on the other side of the I-10 from our RV park. This explains the large number of ambulances but doesn’t really explain why they seem to run non-stop all night long yet are fairly infrequent during the day.