A short weekend getaway between my Germany trip and my slew of conferences in November, I visited New Orleans in mid-October with Joe. He was there for a school reunion he’d helped organize, and I got to tag along. Since I’m usually sprinting through trips and trying to pack as many plans into my time as possible, a trip like this, bounded by a main event around which we build our activities, is unusual for me and forces me to slow down a bit. I was all the better for it, since I was getting over a cold. I had no complaints about fitting in more naps than normal during my time in New Orleans.
I arrived in the city late on Thursday night and headed straight to the bar where Joe and the other event organizers were grabbing drinks. After a drink, we headed back to the hotel to go to bed. Though not before a quick view out our window to take in the beautiful hotel courtyard.
The next day (and pretty much all days), we slept in. We started our day with an informal tour of the hotel, a walk along Bourbon Street (on which our hotel was situated), and some lunch. Day 1 was “on the clock” for Joe, and I had some homework to finish, so he spent the afternoon finalizing the plans for the evening’s event while I wrapped up and submitted my midterm.
From there, we went back and got ready for the night. Night 1 involved two different events that Joe was supporting. The first was helping for check-in at a burlesque show that the school had bought out for the night. The second was the welcome night event, which involved drinks and speeches in a large ballroom. It was originally supposed to be located in a different part of the hotel, but large swaths of the reception floors had burned only weeks prior and plans were shifted to accommodate. We grabbed drinks, beignets (thankfully, we managed the delicious powdered-sugar fried dough nearly every day of the trip), socialized, and listened to the speeches. Then, we followed to the hotel room in which the afterparty was located (again, original plans having shifted due to floor closures). We got that settled before heading off to bed.
Day 2 started with the event Joe organized, a cooking demonstration at the New Orleans School of Cooking. We got there a bit before 11 to help everyone check in then headed up ourselves to watch the demonstration and partake in some of the food. Our chef made corn chowder, jambalaya, pralines (which I couldn’t eat because of my allergies), and bananas foster. It was awesome getting to try the delicious food after watching the chef cook it and explain his secrets.
After the event, it was nap time. We headed back to the hotel for an afternoon snooze before our evening events.
The evening began with a wander down to the River, walking first through Woldenberg Riverfront park and then up to Jackson Square. We stopped at Café Du Monde, which has the city’s most famous beignets. Back when my family visited about a decade ago, that was the highlight of my trip, so I made it the one priority for me this time. A walk through Jackson Park and a wander through the French Quarter back to our hotel, and then we were already getting ready for our nighttime adventures.
There had originally been different plans for this night, too, which had fallen through because of a broken contract. However, the organizers did an amazing job coming up with late solutions, and we ended up at Emporium, a barcade that has locations in three cities (ironically, the other two cities are San Francisco and Chicago, where Joe and I respectively live). We got to Emporium around 6:45, and shortly after, people started arriving. The event included arcade game tokens, dinner, speeches, and music. I also sprinked in some baseball, since it was essential that I watched the Cubs, even as they failed me and got out of the running for the World Series title.
We stayed there for a few hours before heading off. The area we were in was called Marigny, and it had a nice street of bars on Frenchman Street to rival Bourbon Street. We did a self-guided bar crawl of sorts back from Emporium to our hotel (per the event’s suggestions), although we really only stopped in one more bar for any length of time. It was called the Blue Nile, and had live music both on the main floor dance room and the balcony room above. We spent a decent amount of time in both, dancing and chatting with some of Joe’s friends. We walked back towards Bourbon Street, stopping for a while because Joe wanted a sandwich and found a hole-in-the-wall bodega that was hopping at that time of night. The stop took longer than expected, however, and by the time we got back on track, we were tired. We took in Bourbon Street as we walked back, the only night that we were out and about after midnight. We stopped in at the bar near our hotel, where the crawl was nominally supposed to end, since as one of the organizers, Joe felt some responsibility to check in on the other organizers. However, the bar was just around the corner instead of on Bourbon Street, and i had died down by the time we got there. Although we could have rejoined the crawl earlier or just dropped into one of the many bars on Bourbon, we decided instead to grab one of those frozen daiquiris that are sold on almost every corner and head back to the hotel, talking about our day and drinking our frozen daiquiri as we began to pack for our Monday departure.
On the third day, we headed toward a live music venue called Music Box Village. It really was a live music venue, as it was essentially a large treehouse for adults, where the structure was often made of or contained instruments you could play. We also had a live band playing while we chatted and ate brunch. It was a very fitting last event, and by 2 PM, we were officially done with the planned part of our weekend. I was supposed to head out early the next morning, but instead, I pushed my flight back so that Joe and I could have some time the next day to visit a site.
From there, it was nap time again, though I was finally starting to get over my cold. After the nap, we walked back through the French Quarter, headed off to a restaurant called Zesty Creole for dinner, and then took a walk past one of the graveyards. Another thing I’d retained from my previous trip was the way that bodies have to be buried above ground in small moselums because the water table is so high. This, combined with the heat, creates a weird phenomenon of cremating the bodies. When discussing the trip, I’d told Joe that fact countless times, so even though it was nighttime and the cemetery was closed by the time we got there, I still wanted him to be able to say he’d at least seen one.
A nice walk back to our hotel and, like the thirty-year-olds we now are, we were back in our room before 10 PM (even after sleeping in and having spent an hour or so napping).
Our final day, we woke up, checked out of our hotel, and headed over to the Cafe Beignets across from our hotel. We got our third set of beignets of the trip and listened to the live music. It offered us some respite from the sounds of Bourbon Street.
From there, we walked to the National World War II museum, where we had about 2 hours to wander. Joe enjoys history, so he was telling me about various things he knew, places he wished he knew more about, and where he’d gotten each tidbit of information. For my part, my grandpa flew in the Pacific in World War II, so I spent the time wandering the museum and wondering about his time in the service. He had PTSD and wouldn’t talk about his time during the war. He ultimately died when my dad was only about 20. My mom, the genealogy nerd, never met my grandmpa, so I certainly didn’t have the chance to meet him. (For context, my dad was 37 when I was born. I missed my grandpa by a whole 17 or so years.) So I don’t actually know a lot about my grandpa’s experience, and I’ll never get the chance to ask. But the museum inspired me to learn more about his time in the service. The questions I asked my mom via text while in the museum already turned up more information that she didn’t know that she will now incorporate onto her family tree.
After the too-short time in the museum (it was jam-packed, we probably could have spent all day there), we finally caught our Uber back to the hotel to grab our luggage, caught a ride to the airport, and sat together until it was time for me to board my flight. Luckily, Joe’s flight took off only a short time later, so he didn’t have to wait too long. There were quite a few mix-ups on his end, but ultimately, we both got home on the flights we intended to take when we set out on Monday morning.
WANDERING 