As keen-eyed blog readers will know, we have just hit the 11 month mark in our grand “A Year On The Road” RV trek across the US. After Louisiana, we arrived in coastal Mississippi, our 23rd state in this epic voyage.
The story so far – 11 months on the road (NB: The pin-points are not our only stopping points – there are more than 60 of those so far!)
Since our last monthly update, we have covered another 181 miles – a totally sedate travel distance at this stage of our journey (especially when we covered more than 2,200 in the first month!).
In the last month we have moved from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and our traveling has been a lot more focused on the areas close by, rather than trying to cover vast distances quickly. Even including the last two months, we have only gone a total of 672 miles in our trusty Winnebago, Indefatigable (or Fati for short).
The last two full months of our journey, from Port Aransas in Texas all the way along the Gulf Coast to Biloxi via Louisiana
Mind you, we have still covered some territory in our trusty tow car, Nippy, putting an additional 2,534 miles on our little Ford Fiesta (and 3,991 in the past two months), which shows that we’ve completely changed the balance of our touring – going shorter distances in Fati but doing more exploration in Nippy.
Now, with just a month left of our travels (but still more than 550 miles from home), it definitely feels like the end of our grand adventure is firmly in sight, which is very hard to contemplate after such a prolonged – and intense – period of traveling.
In total, we have come 9,225 miles in Fati since leaving home, and another 24,604 in Nippy, for a grand total of 33,829 around this amazing country. Eat your heart out, Hardest Geezer!
Susan: Let’s go to the French Quarter on Sunday. It’s Easter. Everyone will be at home with their families having Easter dinner. Simon: Good idea! We’ll grab lunch and then get some beignets at Café Du Monde while it’s quieter. French Quarter: Easter Parade! Gay Easter Parade! Easter Bonnet Contest! Let the parties begin!
We’d been in the French Quarter twice already, but saved a visit to Café Du Monde and Café Beignet for Sunday, when, surely, the area wouldn’t be so jam-packed with tourists and heavy drinkers.
Wrong.
We didn’t know we were wrong when we set off on Easter morning, though, with a few photo ops in mind. First, we wanted to see the oldest fire hydrant in New Orleans, whose technology changed the face of fire-fighting, allowing firefighters to get closer to the blaze and have the ability to pump water right out of the bayou. It took a little doing to find it, but the adorable little hydrant that looks like a character straight out of a Pixar movie was worth the effort.
How cute is this little guy?
Easter is all about death and resurrection, so what better place to remember that reality than a cemetery? We did a little drive-through at St. Louis Cemetery 3, which felt like driving along a street in Death City, where all the homes are as quiet as the tomb. Many whose Earthly remains are experiencing eternity here were famous New Orleanians.
Cemetery 1, the oldest in New Orleans, is closed unless you take a sanctioned tour. St. Louis Cemetery 2, famous for being the final resting place of many who succumbed to the 1823 cholera outbreak, is also closed, in part because of vandalism, but, if the used syringes strewn around the sidewalk outside are any indication, there is a bigger problem at play.
Next on our list was the Lower 9th Ward. We’d been there in 2013, eight years after the horrors of hurricane Katrina, and most of the homes were still in terrible shape, with spray-paint markings on them from the searchers who went into each one to find out if they contained victims of the floodwaters, and how many.
We took this photo during our visit in 2013. This is not the standard Search-And-Rescue X-code, but it appeared to be search dates and number of victims (zero).
Now, nearly 20 years later, the area has mostly recovered. Some devastated buildings and homes still exist, but we only saw one that still had its markings. Some lots remain vacant, but more than anything, new homes have gone up, which was incredibly heartening to see.
Also from 2013. It’s hard to see, but there is a search code on the house, to the right of the left-hand door jamb.
In particular, we were interested in seeing the so-called FLOAT House, a low-cost prototype home designed to rise to a height of 12 feet if, God forbid, another flood-related catastrophe struck. It doesn’t work, of course, and it, along with 190 of Make It Right homes funded by the actor Brad Pitt, which rotted and crumbled in the Lower 9th’s high humidity, stand as good-intentions-gone-wrong for people who had already lost it all. A $20.5 million lawsuit settlement in 2022 helped redress the balance.
After our failed food runs in the French Quarter, we admitted defeat before we tried a third time, and headed back to City Park for its Café DuMonde branch, and had mugs of hot coffee and steamy beignets in hand in under two minutes. Sitting in the sun with the sounds of the community around us, we pretended we were locals, and thoroughly enjoyed a happy half-hour being normal people.
This is the original location, in the French Quarter, and you’re seeing about one-quarter of the line of people waiting to order. That, and no parking, was why we kept failing.
Simon had been to the National World War II museum before, but Susan hadn’t, so we set a morning aside to pay a visit. The museum had a new exhibit, Finding Hope In A World Destroyed, highlighting the Holocaust, recovery and rebuilding, Black service men’s reception upon returning home, and The Monument Men, complete with reproductions of stolen artworks.
We only took photos outdoors, where there are several memorials.
There was also a mockup of the kitchen in The Secret Annex, where Anne Frank and her family hid. The whole exhibit was quite powerful, and it felt disrespectful to take photos, so we didn’t. Susan had studied the Holocaust in depth since she was in her early 20s, but Simon found the exhibit a bit overwhelming. It took him back to our visits to Auschwitz and Dachau, and the painful reality of those terrible times.
Anne Frank perished in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp less than a month before its liberation.
He shook it off with a trip up to Vue Orleans for a 33rd floor overview of the city. Ruthie wasn’t allowed, of course, so she and Susan waited on a park bench while Simon checked out the observation deck.
Vue Orleans is in a building right on the riverwalk, and as luck would have it, a Carnival Cruise Line’s ship, Valor, was just making her way out to sea with a whole new group of passengers. We had actually sailed on her with our three boys many long years ago.
We stayed in the Garden District during our 2013 trip to the Big Easy, an area that, like the French Quarter, is totally reliable. You know what you’re going to see (massive wealth), and we were happy to end our time in New Orleans with a leisurely trip down memory lane.
New Orleans wasn’t a new city for us. We’d been there before, but anyone who has visited the Big Easy knows it’s never the same and it’s always the same and you can’t be certain of what you’ll get. The French Quarter is a perfect example – dynamic and predictable at the same time. We love it and we hate it, so, naturally, we made it our first day’s destination.
As luck would have it, we arrived mid-week, so after we settled in at waterside New Orleans RV Resort and Marina we went into the city for Lafayette Square’s big Wednesday Concert Series. Locals make good use of the concerts, and it was easy to see why. Plenty of food and booze, good Jazz, and the concert was free.
We bugged out after Trumpet Mafia finished their set, and we headed over to the French Quarter to get our fix of iconic New Orleans and massive, inebriated crowds. To be fair, most people were probably at least somewhat sober, but the area’s open-carry alcohol policy is always in full swing, leading to happy pedestrians rambling in the streets and traffic nearly at gridlock.
Bourbon Street, not yet at full capacity.
Lafitte’s dates back to the early 1770s and is said to be the oldest bar in the United States
The upside to driving Nippy through the masses was the chance to thoroughly enjoy the architectural details that make New Orleans such a great city. So much of it is just beautiful. It’s one of those locations that, once you’ve seen it you never forget it.
We drove through City Park the next day, primarily for the big dog park, which we discovered was only open to those with a membership. The park itself, however, blew us away with how much it offered, and we could only imagine how fantastic it would be to live nearby. Anything you could ever want from a community amenity could be found there. Storyland for young children, a mini amusement park for older kids, botanical gardens, Putt-Putt golf, all manner of enjoyment on land and on water, and, we noted, an outlet of New Orleans’ famous Café Du Monde.
We didn’t stop, other than making a sprint for the porta-potties after all our morning coffee and tea, but we would return here later in the week for a good stroll, and during that time we discovered the enchanting Singing Tree, adorned with lots of wind chimes that created a gentle, pleasing sound with each breeze.
Sweet, blessed relief! But not for us. They were all zip-tied shut.
Here’s a sneak peek at the Singing Tree, which we didn’t see until our next visit.
It has some gigantic clangers.
We headed out of the park to San Bernardo Byway, making a stop at Chalmette National Historic Park and Battlefield site of 1815 Battle of New Orleans, between American and British forces. Chalmette Cemetery is right next to the battlefield, with 14,000 graves of soldiers from the War of 1812 through Vietnam. Freeman Cemetery is here, too, with the graves of slaves.
But the coolest thing about the battlefield was, it was inherited by a freed Black man, Jean Pierre Fazende, after the Civil War, who partitioned it off and sold plots to former slaves, creating Fazendeville. The not-cool part is, the National Park Service essentially took back the land in 1966, some say to “honor the sesquicentennial,” other say it was done to break up the community for voting and school segregation reasons. Either way, the thriving village was destroyed, and those who had homes there ended up in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, which later suffered the most damage from the levee failure after Hurricane Katrina.
This plantation home was built on the former battlefield in the 1830s
The Byway also passed through St. Bernard, where 81% of the buildings (20,229 houses) were damaged on Aug 29, 2005, due to Hurricane Katrina. Then Issac hit –twice—in 2012. Seventeen miles south of New Orleans, the area is practically surrounded by water at the best of times, but when the sea moved in during the hurricanes, devastation happened.
A long stretch running parallel to the single road to Shell Beach is lined with dead trees, on both sides.
We ended at the tiny fishing village of Shell Beach, a funny little place that’s pretty much just one street, with a quirky sense of humor.
We took another drive through the French Quarter hoping for a stop at Café Du Monde or Beignet Café, but again, it was a no-go. But this visit turned into a reminder that you never know what you’re going to see, and we saw some stuff.
This lady set up some sort of fortune-teller opportunity, right in the street.
We don’t even know what to say about this. Some poor guy had to stand in the middle of the street to take their photo.
This doesn’t look like much, until you realize that’s Chewbacca in between these two people.
Instead, we stopped at Rouse’s grocery store to pick up something for dinner, and discovered Louisiana is even more serious about its crawfish than we thought. Cookin’ ‘em up in the parking lot, sellin’ ‘em inside the store, fresh and ready to devour. What a wonderful world we live in!
Our next road trip was out to swamp country, starting at Norco, home to the Bonnet Carre Spillway flood control operation. Now, we’re not engineers, so maybe this is an important feature for flood control, but we did wonder how the big spaces between the spillway’s wooden slats were going to stop much water.
You can’t see the wooden slats in this photo, but they had gaps.
So many homes and businesses we saw along our drives still stand as stark reminders of the hurricanes’ power.
This destroyed home still had clothing in the closet.
A few metal roofs told such a detailed story that it was easy to imagine every moment as the roof panels were being tortured and stripped away by the wind.
We then passed through Garryville hoping to find the Timbermill Museum Pond Trail, but when we arrived it seemed the museum and its trail packed up and went home a decade or two ago, and were nowhere to be found.
It was supposed to be here, but it’s not.
But no matter. Our next adventure was a giant gator hunt, so our excitement level remained high. When we found it, we snapped a dozen photos like the tourists we are.
Note the gator’s eyeball. Menacing or comical? You decide!
The next day found us heading south on 310 and 90 through series of small, rural towns, with random ships on one of the canals. Much of the area south of New Orleans is strips of land with water on both sides, so fishing, crabbing, and shrimping are the main ventures, along with big industrial refineries.
Bayou Gauche prompted a little detour off our path, mainly because we liked the name.
Most of the photos of destroyed homes (above) were taken in Bayou Gauche. It’s an area experiencing dramatic change, as you can see by the mansions just across the bayou.
We drove on to Leeville, where we veered onto a massively long bridge to Port Fourchon, the furthest south we could go and still be on terra firma.
There have been many, many times during our trip that we’ve “felt” how hard-working our fellow Americans are, and how much our own lives are surrounded by conveniences of every kind. The rural, coastal areas of Louisiana impressed us with the level of self-sufficiency they require, and the ability to survive in such harsh and natural locations.
We’d packed a lot of New Orleans into just a few days, but we weren’t done yet.
Veness Travel Media 