New Orleans - Mississippi River self-evident. White-dot Super Dome; north-east gold dot French Quarter and Bourbon Street; green dot Creole Gardens.

The St Charles trolley car takes me from Creole Gardens directly to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. I wander the narrow streets and settle on a restaurant for dinner.

Dusk falls, and I make my way back to Bourbon Street. Live music is kicking in, and the street begins to fill with people out for a good time.

One of the liberating aspects of Bourbon Street is that you can wander from bar to bar with a drink in your hand.

 

 

Bars and bands over the next wee hours

Well, that was alot of music and alot of fun.

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Next morning, well fortified by Annie's Creole breakfast at the BnB, it's time to wander around the French Quarter. The trolley into downtown:

Canal Street

French Quarter

Hip hop Buskers, with the star spinning on his head

History Lesson

New Orleans, Like San Antonio, has a chequered history of ownership / political alignment.

La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded in 1718 by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time; his title came from the French city of Orléans.

 

In 1763 (Treaty of Paris (1763)), the French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire and remained under Spanish control for 40 years.

Most of the surviving architecture of the French Quarter dates from this Spanish period. Louisiana reverted to French control in 1801, but Napoleon sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase two years later. The city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, and Creole French.

Statue Art and the ever present White Tip Bucket

Horse Sense

Back to the Night - Bourbon Street Balconies

More Bands

An entrepreneurial Fairy Queen

And for those seeking salvation:

You love the devil if you are one of the following:

Then step right this way and be saved by the shouting blonde young overweight man with the Size-Large 100Watt megaphone.

It looks like salvation is at hand if you are a young heterosexual white gun-toting Protestant- or Baptist-leaning male who likes gas-guzzling cars with alcohol in moderation plus a docile wife who behaves like a sister.....

Otherwise, I think our sweaty hoarse-voiced saviour has something to say to you, and it ain't pretty,,,,,,,

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It's time to fly home.

As I wait for my cab to take me to the airport, I think about the fact that Katrina is still here. Open a newspaper and turn to any section - general news, sports, lifestyle - and "Katrina' is worked into the text.

Talk to any local and within the first three sentences, their Katrina story comes out.

At my BnB Creole Gardens, my room had lost its roof during Katrina. The courtyard I walked through to get to my room was once filled with all manner of junk and dead animals. A massive tree had pierced the building like a large spear. Across the street, a tree wore a piece of aluminum siding from the far side of the house, like a metal scarf.

My taxi driver had survived two floods, Katrina being the latest, and he expected he would see another one before he was done. The interstate highway had a long, long yellow brown line high on the concrete walls that acted as soundbarriers to the neighborhoods nearby - that 12-foot high line was the high watermark for that part of New Orleans for two months.

The Louis Armstrong International Airport was the quietest airport I've been in for a long, long, long time:

It's been a very different trip from my past rides across America.

From the time I landed in San Antonio with the disabled Marines, to the blight of the last five years of hurricanes and storms along the Texas-Lousiana frontier with the Gulf of Mexico, this region is living with alot of pain.

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Back to Ontario's worst winter in 70 years - the bike box makes it back with no delays:

Thank you very much for reading, b