The Great Southern Adventure: New Orleans & The Swamp!
207/3,252 miles traveled
Days 6-7 exploring Southern Louisiana from NOLA to the Bayou!
New Orleans can pretty much be summarized by the state of the sidewalks on either side of a new day. They’re bustling with tipsy people as colorful as the architecture in the evening, and being hosed down like produce in a grocery store to wash away the smells of the night prior’s debaucheries in the morning.
We found there are two modes in this town: fancy or greasy, with nothing in the middle. Think vegas, but with a lot more authenticity on either end of the spectrum due to the simple laws of history. With New Orleans having a couple of centuries of history over most of our western cities, everything had an extra genuine layer to it.
April 27, Day 6 Cont.
When we checked into our surprise hotel from Hotwire, it took every bit of acting skills I had to keep my jaw off the marble check-in counter. We decided that to get the most out of our time in NOLA we needed to get a hotel downtown so we found one of the cheaper options on hotwire and booked it without knowing what it was going to be. Our “cheap hotel downtown” that we’d been going for turned out to be The Rosevelt Waldorf Astoria and the absolute definition of FANCY.
I’m talking marble floors and walls, chandeliers taller than Alex, and soaps by Ferragamo.
The Lobby of ‘The Roosevelt Hotel’
The night before we had literally slept in the Subaru at a horse stable, which only added to our amazement at all the fancy amenities, including full-size champagne bottles from actual France in the room’s “minibar.” (We did not partake as I’m sure they cost about as much as the room, lol!)
A Southern Sampler Plate from ‘Coops Place’
We eventually pulled ourselves together and went out in search of a greasy dive bar called Coop’s where we’d been told the best Gumbo in Louisiana is made. I haven’t ever had gumbo before, so I can’t verify or deny it, but I will say I could have taken a bath in that Gumbo. Sharing a small cup is the only regret I have from our trip so far. Thankfully we had also ordered a sampler plate of other Southern specialties such as Jambalaya, Red Beans & Rice, and Fried Chicken. It was super loud and we were crammed into a little corner to eat, but the food was the best Southern food we would end up having on the whole trip.
We wandered the French Quarter, taking in the beautiful old greasy buildings and people watching.
Before coming into NOLA proper, we had stopped to tour Oak Alley Plantation. It’s one of the most photographed homes in the state due to its row of 250+ year-old oak trees that line the driveway from the Mississippi River in front to the slave quarters in the back. I enjoyed the tour of the home because our guide did a great job sharing the history of the home from both the owners’ and slaves’ perspectives.
It was a big change going from the grand splendor of the house and gardens to the gritty narrow streets of New Orleans. After dinner at Coops and lots of exploring we stopped for frozen custard that had us both surrendered in silence to its creamy goodness. We savored each bite until there was nothing left but sticky fingers, which seemed to only make us fit in with our surroundings more.
The Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone
A Carousel… In a Bar?
We dipped into another grand hotel to wash up, then wandered into the bar where an entire turning carousel has been built into the room. We didn’t feel like spending $20 a piece for drinks, but we did mooch off the atmosphere for a while on a couch between the carousel and the stage where a jazz band was starting to set up.
We stayed for a half dozen songs, watching the lead singer electrify the room in a red fedora with his soulful tenor and antique accordion. I sent a photo to my grandpa who used to play the accordion and who has recently taken up wearing a red logger’s hat that wins him lots of compliments. The tiny woman in front of us asked us to hold her purse for her so she could go dance, and we obliged. She was about 65 and has the moves of a 20-year-old, or at least she thought she did, which was even better. We became pals with a group of old men in town for the jazz fest and debated about which one of them should ask her to dance.
We were the youngest people in the whole place, which makes sense as there seemed to be plenty of cheaper places to get drunk at. The server didn’t mind that we were hanging out enjoying the music sans drinks, but we decided to not overstay our welcome and move along.
The Germaine Cazenave Wells Mardi Gras Museum at Arnaud’s
We went through a very fancy restaurant up the stairs to a random little exhibit room featuring a somewhat haphazardly arranged fashion collection of Mardi Gras royalty ensembles. There were towering plumes of feathers, sweeping trains, and enough sequins to fill a swimming pool. I delighted in each absolutely over-the top outfit laden with fruit, flowers, and fur. Humans sure are silly creatures, but we can be a lot of fun sometimes.
We didn’t make it late into the night before our throbbing feet and ears had taken all they could handle. We made our way back to the hotel with the ambition of a swim in the rooftop pool overlooking a cathedral, but the room was so luxurious that we fell asleep so fast it was a wonder we’d taken our shoes off.
April 28: Day 7
Pretending to be really fancy at the hotel…
In the morning we sat in the hotel’s resplendent emblemed bathrobes and pretended to sip espressos out of the heavy porcelain cups. We didn’t dare partake of any of the foods or drinks in the mini bar for fear of how much a cup of Waldorf Astoria coffee could set a person back. Pretending was just as good and without any risk.
We eventually swapped out the sumptuous robes for our real clothes and made our way to a french cafe for some real coffee, and more importantly, an almond croissant.
The majority of our fellow tourists were still in bed nursing their expensive hangovers so we had only the locals to share the streets with. Manual and automatic sprinkler systems cleaned the streets and we were shocked to find a schoolyard full of children playing just a few blocks from Bourbon Street.
We tried to stop by The Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau’s, tomb, but when we got to the cemetery on our way to breakfast an actual bouncer told us it was going to set us back fifty bucks if we wanted to go in. We decided to pull up a documentary about her life on youtube, for free, instead.
There was a line of locals out the door of the French cafe, so we knew we were in for a treat. We sat in the window, munching and sipping and taking in the morning. After our breakfast, we walked the same streets from the night before, but they were completely new in the morning’s light. We stopped for “lunch” at Cafe Beignet because anything can count as lunch when you're on vacation. We shared an order of pillowy little dough squares with a half-inch layer of powdered sugar over each one.
“How much powdered sugar do you guys use in a day?” I asked the server, who was also dusted in a white sugary layer.
“I’d suppose about 200lbs or more on a busy day,” He said.
We’d learned about how sugarcane is harvested and refined at the Oak Alley Plantation the day before. I figured two hundred pounds of sugar per day could have kept a whole plantation in business back in the day!
We spent an hour or so at the pool back at The Roosevelt before hitting the road. It was hard to say goodbye to our robes and the grandiose lobby, but we managed.
As we were checking out we made friends with the doorman, Kermit, who was a big fan of Alex’s 1970’s brown striped slacks and vest I thrifted in Oregon that make him look like Remington Steele, or rather, we like to think it does.
“I just need your hat size and we can make a proper gentleman out of you,” He said. We got a picture together and he asked us to send it to him for “his wall” of favorite guests, so I suppose we left feeling pretty special. Thanks, Kermit!
The Swamp
No trip to New Orleans is complete without a swamp tour, so naturally, that was our next stop. It was a last-minute decision, so we felt pretty lucky when we called Honey Island Swamp Tours 30 minutes before to find that there were exactly two slots left for their last tour of the day, and they were ours if we could get there in 25 minutes.
We got there about three minutes before take-off so I quickly put together a pair of peanut butter sandwiches for us to get down so we would have something a little more hearty than the pure sugar and caffeine we’d dined on so far that day.
We didn’t have time to change out of our “fancy” clothes, so we got plenty of odd looks from the rest of our group looking like we’d just come from the ballet and munching peanut butter sammies. We crowded onto a boat surely too small for all of us, and our guide, Captain Colin, put the boat into high gear and sent us cruising up the river.
A fishing cabin built around a protected cypress tree.
We went by a little community of fishing cabins that you can’t access by car. Each one had to be built by hauling in supplies by boat. Next, we turned into a little bayou where we spotted our first turtles, egrets, and even a diamond water snake.
Our guide told us about all of the different types of vegetation and the role each one plays in its ecosystem. He showed us the little red cocoons of apple snail eggs hanging from low branches that are one of the swamp’s more invasive species that eat up plant roots and cause erosion. There is a black rooster-looking bird that has come up from Florida to eat the snails and their eggs, so that has helped a lot, but I can’t imagine how strange it would be to see a rooster in a swamp.
A Marshmallow Feast
Our next creature sighting was a family of raccoons. I had no idea that raccoons lived in swamps, but it turns out a swamp is a great place to find all kinds of wonderful raccoon-friendly snacks like guppies and frogs and in this case, marshmallows from Captain Collin.
He would toss them a mallow and they would do everything they could to reach the sweet offering without having to get wet. They were just like cats when it came to water, but their love of mallows was far too great to keep them dry.
Gators love marshmallows as much as raccoons, it turns out.
We came into a little sun pond off one of the bayous and a handful of female alligators, 5-7ft long started swimming toward the boat, which in their minds equates to free marshmallows.
Captain Colin gave them a few freebies before putting a mallow on a stick and holding it up high so they would have to jump for it and let us see them in all of their creepy glory.
Down a very narrow little passage of the bayou, we came upon the famous wishing tree from Disney’s Princess and the Frog, which happens to be one of the oldest Cypress trees still standing.
We fed more hungry raccoons and tried to coax some swamp hogs out of hiding but they weren’t having it so our next attraction was a very large lady gator who was probably about 11 ft long.
One of the marshmellows landed on the other side of a tree root and she was too big to go under to reach it. We watched her struggle for a few minutes. She was very depressed about not getting that treat so our guide threw her a few more that wouldn't requre quite so much work. She was very grateful.
The next part of the tour was much more Brothers Grim than Disney. We learned that there is only one male alligator per three miles of swamp. The sex of the alligators is determined by the temperature when the eggs hatch. To keep his three miles of ladies to himself, the alpha male gators will eat the baby male gators. Yikes.
We came for the gators but overall Alex and I agreed that the raccoons were THE best. The turtles were pretty cute too, having their sunbaths with their legs outstretched.
Cajun Boil!
We drove out of Louisiana along the gulf line and into Mississippi. We stopped for dinner and our first real adult meal of the day at a hole-in-the-wall cajun crawfish place where Alex and I got a good Yankee sweat on from our massive order of spicy crawfish and shrimp. There was also gumbo, jambalaya, and a bowl of hushpuppies involved.
We camped at a little biking trailhead, had a good walk through the trees, wildflowers, and fireflies, then settled in for a good full-belly sleep to the sound of heavy Southern rain on the Subaru.
Two songs I used to listen to on road trips with my brothers and grandparents were Bobby Bare’s Marie Laveau and Jerry Reed’s Amos Moses. My grandparents are pretty great, I know. I concluded the day quite satisfied to have had a little peek into the inspiration behind both.
In true New Orleans fashion, we had started the day in fancy mode at one of the city's most glamorous hotels, and we’d ended it greasy out boondocked in the woods with crawfish brains on our shirts.
Up Next: Saint Augustine, Florida
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Our Mississippi Campsite
