It's A Strange Situation, A Wild Occupation, Living My Life Like A Song
I didn't take any notes on our last day, so please forgive me; I'm going to have to go by memory, and we all know that's not the best idea.
We got another really late start on Sunday because we just could NOT wake up. I guess the previous three days of running around were taking their toll. In fact, we got a little worried because we originally had a checkout time of 11 AM, which seemed inordinately early to me, so at 10 o'clock I called down to see if there was any way we could extend our deadline. Holiday Inn offered to enroll us in their Priority Club for free, which would give us a checkout of 1 PM, which seemed much more reasonable, so I gave them our information, and we were able to continue packing at a leisurely pace. I ran out to get us some McDonald's for breakfast, and I will not even go INTO the disaster that was, but it took me over an hour to get an order of hotcakes. Moving on.
We had mentioned to the waiter at Brennan's the other day that we weren't sure what to do with ourselves our last day between checkout and our flight, and he had suggested we go to the City Park. We neglected to ask him where it was, because we're so used to looking things up on Marvel's phone, but when we tried that, we couldn't find a park just called "City Park". Marvel saw a large swatch of green on Google Maps so we headed for that, but it was a ways away and took us out of the touristy part of the French Quarter. In a way, that alone made the trek worthwhile, because I finally got to see some actual residences, rather than the show places that have been turned into antique stores and museums, which I very much enjoyed. When we got to Louis Armstrong Park, we walked a little ways through it before we realized we had made a mistake--the park was almost entirely abandoned, except for seemingly homeless people here and there who were trying to find any shade they could to get out of the oppressive heat. There really wasn't much else to see, and we weren't entirely assured of our safety with so few other people around, so we quickly changed our minds, and decided to head for the New Orleans Museum of Art. I was sure we could find it, as I was sure we had passed it numerous times on Canal Street, even on our first day on the way to the Aquarium. So we started the long walk back to Canal Street.
I had enjoyed the heat of New Orleans pretty much up until this point, but I don't know if we had moved away from the breezes that had been cooled down by the water, or if the intermittent shade of the balconies of Bourbon Street made that big of a difference, or what, but the walk back--although again, I did enjoy seeing more of the less-touristy areas of the French Quarter enough to make this worthwhile--really got to me. When we finally got to Canal Street, we walked until we saw the giant building that said NOMA...or so we thought. We were right in that the giant building DID say that; we were wrong in that it was a giant building SIZED AD that said that; the building itself was the Sheraton. Marvel used this trusty phone to look up the museum of art, but it was far enough away that we decided not to pursue it, as I was really getting very hot. Marvel did a quick search to see what else of interest we hadn't hit yet, and we settled on the Voodoo Museum, and we headed there.
It was at this point that heat stroke set in. No, ultimately I was fine, but my already bad memory starts to get even hazier at this point; I remember telling Marvel, "I feel kind of funny", and then wanting to sit down anywhere--on the curb, in an expensive restaurant, wherever. Marvel kept me going, and we stopped in the first air conditioned bar we came to. In a way, it was lucky we did, because we ended up at a place serving the last New Orleans famous drink we had yet to try--the Hand Grenade. Once again, it wasn't nearly strong enough to knock us out, but we got another adorable novelty glass out of the deal, complete with a little hand grenade that drops as the level of your drink does. And it tasted pretty good, and we got to watch some of Pineapple Express with the bartender who was also a fan, and I cooled down enough so that my brains started working again (well, as much as they ever do), so we were able to continue on to the Voodoo Museum.
The Voodoo Museum was small but very interesting; Marvel took a lot of pictures (I was too wiped out to at this point, although I did snag the pictures of the muscle cars that were outside that you see here because my uncle is very "into" cars), and I got to show off some of my French translation skills again, and we left some pennies at the various voodoo altars, and Marvel made a wish (that came true; he wished for us to have a safe flight back. Personally I think he should've aimed higher, no pun intended). Afterwards we decided to have lunch before heading back to the hotel, and then on to the airport, and we stopped at another small restaurant with a beautiful patio (although it was too hot outside even for me to eat outdoors--that's one of my few regrets about our trip, we never did eat outside) called Sammy's. I was tired of being adventurous so I stuck to a hamburger, but Marvel had jambalaya and...shoot, I forget what went with the jambalaya, but nevertheless he succeeded his mission of having as many typical New Orleans dishes as possible during our trip.
We went back to the hotel, picked up our bags (we had checked them after we checked out, a little service we've learned in our years of attending conventions!), had the bellboy hail us a taxi, and repeated our trip on Thursday in reverse back to the airport. Delta provided us with another smooth flight back, although I'm sorry we didn't have window seats, as one of the major reasons I had decided to push to make this trip a reality was how much I loved seeing the lights of Manhattan and Queens from the sky when I flew home from Colorado last September, and how much I had wanted to share them with Marvel. But I had an easier time getting a taxi back to Queens after we landed due to my bag being one of the first on the luggage carousel, and Marvel having much longer strides than I to get us to the head of the line outside of the airport.
A few final thoughts:
* There are definitely things we missed doing on our trip; we didn't go on any of the tours (mainly due to those requiring a large commitment of time and money that we didn't want to tie up), we missed some restaurants and bars due to various reasons (such as them being closed, or us being busy); that alone makes us want to go back, although in the rational light of day, I think I'd rather go someplace new before we go back--I've had my sights set on Niagara Falls for a while now. But we WOULD like to go back.
* Marvel LOVED New Orleans. He's always said he could never picture living anywhere but New York City, and while he still stands by that, he said that if he HAD to move, New Orleans wouldn't be a bad option. Now, I can handle living out of NYC, having done it before, but honestly I can't see myself living in the French Quarter, where it's Party Central twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. This is all even more unlikely than most hypothetical situations, but it just goes to show what a good time we both had.
* Would I recommend New Orleans to other people? It depends. On the whole, yes--most of my friends are party people. And there is something there for everybody, I'm sure. And Lord knows we saw WAY more children than we thought were appropriate, but that's only because I was bothered by their lack of sun protection during the day (it is FIVE THOUSAND DEGREES outside, and your extremely fair-skinned child doesn't even have a HAT on?) and their...being on the street at ALL at night (past their bedtime by at LEAST two hours!) in the middle of, as I mentioned, drunk people reeling from curb to curb...I don't know how no one spilled a beer into a carriage, never mind accidentally turned one over. That being said, if literally half-naked women trying to convince you to see a live sex show, or the aforementioned crowds of drunk people (or even crowds in general) aren't your thing, either skip the French Quarter, or get inside by sundown. I am a woman of fairly loose morals and high alcohol tolerance, and even I felt the need to get out of there by midnight at the absolute latest.
However, it IS one HELL of a party. :)