Saturday April 14, 2012

Our last day on the road; 1,100 km to go. We got underway at around 8:00 and almost immediately lost an hour as we drove into the eastern time zone. The area around Bowling Green KY looked interesting and would be worth exploring some day. the Mammoth Caves are near here along with the National Corvette Museum.

The drizzle started shortly after leaving Bowling Green and occasionally turned into a deluge making the drive challenging. By the time we got to Cleveland, the worst of the weather was over. The only other glitch was having the ramp closed at the Peace Bridge but we managed to pick up that warning on the GPS and a traffic sign in time to divert to the Queenston - Lewiston Bridge to enter Canada. No line up at Customs and we were home at about 8:45 pm.  A quick unpack of the essentials and off to Butler's Sports Bar for a pizza and a beverage.

Friday April 13, 2012

Time to head home. We got on the road at 8:30 and got to see some of the post hurricane renewal that is happening in New Orleans as we were driving out of the city on I10. Lots of new housing plus the vacant lots where houses had been removed.

The trip north was quite different than on I75 or I95. No billboards, developed areas, traffic etc. Mississippi was an endless view of trees lining both sides of the highway. The only highlight was the roadkill, saw three armadillos that didn't make it across the highway. I have also never seen so much truck tire debris. Either there is something about the pavement that causes so many tire failures or they never clean it up.

Today's drive was relatively easy except for the traffic through Nashville TN which we happened to encounter at 5:00 pm rush hour.

We stopped at Bowling Green KY, approximately the half way point.

Thursday April 12, 2012

This was our only full day in New Orleans so we got off to a relatively early start. We consulted the Frommer's Guide for a recommendation for a one day tour and it recommended limiting it to the French Quarter. That put everything within walking distance so that was good with us. First on the list was a two hour guided walking tour of the French Quarter which we decided to do. It was led by our Creole guide, Gwen, who was a wealth of knowledge of the history of the area and did a great job in pointing out items of architectural significance and some humorous stories of some of the past residents of  NO.

 

Here are but a few of the interesting buildings and features that we saw.

Our tour ended at Jackson Square, today the opening day of the French Quarter Music Festival. This festival brings in around 450,000 visitors for the weekend!

 

 

 

 

 

Luckily this was Thursday and the crowds were bearable and you could move around to see the acts. There were five open air stages in operation plus a couple of dozen other stages in clubs throughout the French Quarter.

We roamed the waterfront "Moonwalk" which had two stages in operation right along the shore of the Mississippi River. We stayed a while to watch one of the performances and really enjoyed it.

We found out they were performing at one of the local clubs and made a point to go there to see them perform in the evening.


After touring the waterfront, it was early afternoon and what better way to fill one's appetite was to dive into a Muffuletta from the Central Grocery. We decided to split one. We should have split half of one. They are a round sandwich which I would put at the equivalent of a 24" Subway Sandwich!

 

 

From there we waddled off to do a tour of the Museum which had an excellent exhibit of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation that it had brought to this area. From there we slowly shuffled through the Quarter taking in the sights of street performers and shops.

 

 

 

 

After being on our feet for 7 hours, we took an hour break in our hotel room before striking out for a "light" supper of Tapas at Mojitio's where our favourite band from the festival was performing until 9 pm. We had a very nice dinner of local flavoured apps and great entertainment by the band.

Our return trip to the hotel took us the entire length of Burbon St. which was starting to get really crowded with all of the frivolities that one would expect at Mardi Gras.

This is how you encourage strings of beads to be thrown from the balconies .....

We went home bead-less and tired from many miles of walking today.

Wednesday April 11, 2012

Time to check out of our cabin and head into the "Big Easy" for a couple of days. We had a bit of time to kill before we could check into our downtown hotel that we decided to do a bit more exploring on the Tammany Trace. We drove to the town of Covington LA where the rail trail starts.

 

We rode through the town of Abita Springs LA, famous for its microbrewery.

 

We made today's ride a little shorter and returned to Covington for lunch and a brief stroll around town. Very quaint. Not sure what Ronald Regan had to do with the history here though?

 

We took the 24 mile causeway across lake Pontchartrain to New Orleans. The weather was just starting to deteriorate a bit with rain and thunderstorms in the forecast. We got checked into our hotel around 3:00 pm.

Our hotel was two blocks from Bourbon St and we decided to go on a quick exploratory walking trip. It was late afternoon but you could quickly tell what kind of a place this would be after dark.

 

It started to lightly rain and we heard a bit of distant thunder so we retreated back to our hotel at around 4:30.

We checked the weather and it looked like we may get a window of opportunity to get out for supper. Not wanting to go too far with still more storms in the forecast, we chose the #35 out of 665 rated restaurants on TripAdvisor.com, the Acme Oyster House. We figured it must be good because it was the only place we saw on our way there with a line up down the street.

The wait was less than 30 minutes and we ended up sitting at the bar. A small place but the food was local. We had gumbo, a shrimp & oyster po-boy and chicken jambalya.

It looked like things were just starting to pick up on the streets as we headed home, tired from a long day.

Tuesday April 10, 2012

Today we did a bike ride on the Tammany Trace, an excellent rail trail that passes through Fountainebleau Park.

 

We did a 50 km return trip to the town of Slidell which is at the eastern end of the trail.

 

 

Very easy riding with little elevation change, paved surfaces and little traffic. Here is a little bit of the scenery along the way .....

 

 

After lunch, we relaxed on the deck then went to explore the park a bit. We really liked the live oak trees. They were huge ....

We were hoping for another good sunset but an approaching thunderstorm got in the way. (It missed us and we had a pleasant night except for the swamp noise)