Update Baton Rouge and New Orleans

Sorry for the delay, but we had no internet connection in our "fancy" hotel in New Orleans. Today we already arrived close to Atlanta, but here is the update (without pictures I'm afraid) of the last days.

Baton Rouge is the capital of Louisiana… this is clearly not reflected in what you see in the city center. Almost nobody there, a lack of restaurants and the ones that were there, were closed. So in the end we decided to have dinner in the hotel restaurant, which by the way was an excellent choice.
The hotel was very luxurious and we got a queen and king treatment… yes we did.

Anyway, next day was one to go on the road again for our drive to New Orleans. We arrived in New Orleans around noon and checked in at the Holiday Riverside close to the French Quarters. I’m so happy we did not go for my initial choice of a hotel in Bourbon Street, because when we walked through that street in the evening it was very (yes very) noisy.

So what did we do on our first day in New Orleans. First of all we discovered our hotel. We are staying on the 27th floor, which is the executive floor. Because of our stay on this floor, we are allowed in the executive lounge on floor 29. On this floor we get breakfast, coffee and cookies all day long and hors d’oeuvres from 5 to 7pm. Not bad for my birthday treat.

In the afternoon we went for a swim and the water was very very warm. By 5pm we had to be at the swamp for our swamp tour. We had to drive 35 miles to get there, so we left a bit before 4pm. The tour was incredibly beautiful… it is amazing to see these alligators in their natural habitat. We saw a few big ones and a baby one. Although the baby already looked scary enough to me (lol), I managed to stay calm when the engine of our boat got stuck. I was thinking “this is just my lucky day… turning 45 and getting stuck in the middle of a swamp”.

Apparently it was not the first time the engine got stuck, and so the driver managed to fix the problem in like 5 minutes. After that we had no problems continuing the rest of our tour and getting back to the safe shore.
The tour continued for another 2 hours and the driver told us how he lost everything in hurricane Katrina. Indeed, when we were driving over there, we could see a lot of damaged houses and warehouses along the I10. But when you see how much water surrounds this town, it is no surprise that everything got flooded so easily.

A lot of houses and buildings have already been reconstructed, so it does not really affect tourism I have to say. In the French Quarters I have not seen damage up to now, so maybe that part was not affected?

Yesterday evening, for my birthday, we had a nice meal (French style) in a cozy restaurant. The waiter did not like the way Alain’s meal was cooked and offered a full round of deserts. I have to say the pork was maybe a little bit overcooked, but it still tasted very good… the round of deserts was very welcome though.

Today (Tuesday) we had breakfast with the city view from the 29th floor and we had to take care of some luggage issues. Now we are about to get ready to discover New Orleans French Quarters by day.

You’ll read all about this in the same post… but I write this post in bits and pieces…since I had no internet connection in this hotel ( I had to pay 15 dollars per hour of use, which we refused to do because that might have been included in the stay, since we did not book the cheapest rooms in this hotel).

New Orleans was SOOO NICE… a little bit of a European touch. LOVED it. But never go there in July or August, because it was also incredibly HOT. Temperatures during the day of 36 degrees Celsius and very humid… too much to be comfortable. We had a walk in the French quarters, saw some very nice little pearls of houses. Lucky Katrina did not ruin this district. Again we had a nice dinner, this time in another very old building.
Next day we went to the Garden district. Very big and beautiful houses with big gardens around it… not bad.

Thursday we left New Orleans in the morning and got stuck in traffic because of an accident just outside New Orleans. After that the drive was OK and we did not stop in Montgomery as planned but drove on till Newman, which is very close to Atlanta. We forgot (again) that we arrived in a new time zone… so again another hour to add. Now we are 3 hours ahead of Los Angeles.

Lucky we can sleep in tomorrow, since we have almost no driving left to Atlanta.
We still have some shopping to do tomorrow (need an extra suitcase) and we want to visit a few things in Atlanta. Saturday we need to drop off the car in Smyrna (North of Atlanta) in the Ford dealership. We have to be at the airport at 4pm since our flight leaves around 6.30pm.