December 14-18
New Orleans, Louisiana
 You can love New Orleans or hate it. I loved it; Mark, well, didn't. There is more interesting architecture here than I've seen yet on this trip--from dillapidated fixer-upper Victorians to antebellum mansions on oak-lined boulevards. You can eat fresh pralines and then amazing, cheap red beans & rice, and then drink coffee and eat beignnets (French donuts) while watching shoppers stroll by, then take a real streetcar from the French Quarter to the huge city park, and then wander through the N.O. museum of art, or, like we did, take your toddler to the playground-by-the-lake, with playstructures to play on as well as huge trees to climb (with their limbs reaching the ground), or ducks to feed from beside huge cement lions and Greek architecture. But...

there are other aspects to New Orleans: a stench of beer and/or urine in many places in the French Quarter, hawkers trying to get a buck by singing to your child (the one I'm talking about also had bad teeth and dressed like a pimp. I couldn't tell if he was satirical or serious about his zoot suit and aligator shoes). We hit two such men in one block, and there were more on other blocks too. Also there is Bourbon Street: just avoid it if you're with your family. It seemed to be solely bars, strip joints, and hawkers. It's for single guys age 17-25. And there is poverty, and apparently a parallel between color and economic class. So I don't know if I could ever live here. But I'd love to drink in the buildings, talk to locals about the history, and listen to their beautiful French/Southern accents. Oh, and eat the beignnets.

Here are a few pictures. I wish I had taken more. It was very windy and cold, so we didn't stop often, and I just didn't pull out the camera enough.

one of the streets in the French Quarter, where the houses date back to the 1700s. Some of the buildings were prettier than these by far.


Mark and Katie in front of the big Miss


Katie was pooped at the end of the day, resting in her beads (a shopkeeper asked her to take as many Mardi Gras beads as she wanted).


This is the street our state park (St. Bernard) was on. It was in St. Bernard parish (south of the city, along Hwy 39 which runs beside the Mississippi River), which looked to be a rather impoverished (from what we saw) parish, but of course with all the beauty that even the poor areas seemed to have, like this.