Of all the places I planned to visit on my trip, New Orleans was the one that elicited the strongest positive reactions from the most people. Just about everyone either has been to New Orleans and loves it, or hasn’t been and really wants to go. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a beautiful city full of the friendliest people I have ever met in my life. The food is incredible, the music is incredible, the cocktails are incredible, and everyone just seems to be enjoying themselves all the time.
Unfortunately my time in New Orleans was cut short by the Covid-19 quarantines. I spent a month in the city, but the last week I was stuck in my rental, socially isolating. There are so many things I still wanted to do and didn’t get a chance to. The virus hit New Orleans particularly hard but they’re such a resilient city that I know they’ll bounce back just as hard. I look forward to visiting again when that happens.
Mardi Gras
I arrived in New Orleans just in time for the end of Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras season actually extends from Twelfth Night (January 5) to the day before Ash Wednesday, so depending on when Easter falls each year Mardi Gras can be anywhere from four to eight weeks of partying and parades. I only experienced the last couple of days, and that was more than enough. Also my friends Anthony and Grace flew in from California to join me, and I’m so glad they did. This is a party that’s much better with friends.
Music
New Orleans is one of America’s most famous music cities, and as a lover of New Orleans style jazz I really took advantage of my time there to hear lots of great live music. Check out my blog post about my time in New Orleans to see the playlist I made inspired by the music I heard in New Orleans.
Fritzel’s Jazz Club
Fritzel’s Jazz Club was recommended by multiple people. It’s one of the few original jazz clubs left on Bourbon Street as the rest of the street is now mostly dominated by to-go slushie bars and night clubs playing more modern dance music. I found myself there a few times.
Frenchman Street
Everyone knows about Bourbon Street, which has become the kind of Disney version of New Orleans, but most of the people I talked to about visiting the city all told me to visit Frenchman Street. It’s a short walk from the French Quarter but has a much more authentic feel to it. All the bars are funky and unique, and you can walk into just about any one at any time and catch live music. I checked out a few (both with Grace and Anthony before the left, and solo), but the ones I enjoyed the most were the Spotted Cat and Bamboula’s, which are in the photos below.
Tipitina’s
Tipitina’s is one of New Orleans’ most legendary music venues; I wanted to check it out but I didn’t recognize any of the bands playing so I picked one basically at random and ended up seeing the Bruce Daigrepoint Cajun Band. They play traditional Cajun music featuring an accordion and a fiddle, and all of their songs are in French. Bruce himself spent most of the show bantering on and off in English and French. Apparently this is a standing monthly-or-so show, and most of the attendees came prepared to dance the whole evening. The most unexpected thing was that in the middle they took an intermission between sets, and someone came out and started serving Cajun-style red beans and rice to the whole audience. Like literally they put their instruments down, someone came out with a pot of beans, and then everyone sat around and eat beans and rice before the band went back up on the stage and finished the show. I ended up enjoying the show tremendously. You can check out some of their music in the playlist on my blog page (beans and rice not included).
The Garden District
The Garden District is the site of the original “American quarter” in New Orleans from the time of the Lousiana Purchase when Americans first started moving into this city that had newly become theirs. Now, it’s the wealthiest and most desirable neighborhood in New Orleans. I took an app-guided walking tour through the city and learned all about the history of the houses and the celebrities who live there now (quite a lot!). I rode one of the historic streetcars; it wasn’t named Desire, but I did visit Anne Rice’s neighborhood bookstore and picked up a copy of Interview with the Vampire as a souvenir (I almost got Streetcar Named Desire too but didn’t have enough room in my purse to carry both!).
St Louis CEMETERY #2
One of the most iconic images of New Orleans are their above-ground cemeteries. Southern Louisiana is so marshy and the water table is so close to the surface that New Orleans is basically just teetering on top of a big sponge. In most places if they try to bury anything it comes popping back up in a few years, including coffins (can you imagine??). The result is the above-ground tombs. Essentially, when someone dies, your family puts your body into the family tomb, where high Louisiana heat basically bakes you in there until you’re just bones. Then the next time someone in your family dies, they kind of scoot your bones to the back of the tomb and insert the next person in your place. So some of these tombs, even though they are the size of a small closet, have sometimes dozens of people in them.
I visited St Louis Cemetery #2 (St Louis Cemetery #1 is possibly more famous, but you can’t visit it without paying a tour guide; I was able to visit #1 with just a self-guided tour I found online). The cemetery was started in the 1820s and is still active today; I saw tombs with dates added as recently as last year. However in the 1950s the US government built the I-10 interstate overpass almost directly on top of the cemetery, and the construction as well as the pollution and vibrations from use of the highway are causing the tombs to degrade faster than they should. Some of the tombs are so old that the families inside have long since stopped maintaining them, and as a result a lot of them are reduced to piles of rubble. A lot has changed in New Orleans in the last 200 years, and you can see the modern city creeping in on this ancient cemetery – notice the high rise apartment buildings and the tacky billboard advertising the lottery in the background of some of my photos.
Jean Lafitte National Park – Barataria Preserve
Barataria Preserve Hike
The Barataria Preserve is part of the Jean Lafitte National Park and is less than a half hour drive from where I was staying. The Jean Lafitte NP has multiple locations in southern Louisiana, including one in the French Quarter (which I oddly enough did not make it to) covering everything from the ecosystems of the bayous and swamps to the Cajun and Creole culture of the people living here. The Barataria Preserve features several walking trails (they call them hikes but I think the highest point in the whole state is like 8 feet above sea level so “hike” feels generous!) on boardwalks through the swamp. The park showcases the ecosystem of the swamp and bayou areas of Louisiana, and is home to loads of gators!
Jean Lafitte Swamp Tour
After visiting the National Park area, I also took a boat tour from Jean Lafitte Swamp Tours. (They also have airboat tours but I took the regular swamp tour, where you can see more of the wildlife). There are multiple swamp tour companies around New Orleans, and most of theme even offer pickup service from the French Quarter if you don’t have a car. Jean Lafitte Swamp Tours is the only one that operates in the National Park land. I didn’t plan it that way (to be honest I selected this one because they had a Groupon!) but I’m glad I did this one because, due to their location in the National Park, they are required to take more care with the animals and ecosystem than some other tours. For example, a lot of other tours will throw marshmallows into the water to get the gators to swim up to the boats, which is bad for both the gators and the other animals in the water with them. We saw plenty of gators on this trip (plus turtles, nutria, and lots of cool birds including two bald eagles!) without having to endanger the wildlife.
French Quarter Evening Walking Tour
I enjoyed my walking tour of the Garden District so much that I decided to take the app’s other tour of the French Quarter too. I recently took an online course to teach me how to use my fancy new camera and I tried my hand at some of the things I learned on this tour. The French Quarter is very beautiful at any time of day.
Whitney Plantation
The very last thing I got to do in New Orleans before the virus shut everything down was visit the Whitney Plantation, about an hour west of the city. In my time in both Nashville and New Orleans I’d wanted to take a plantation tour, but wanted to make sure that I took one that was going to be thoughtful about the history that took place there. I’d read that a lot of the plantation tours in the South either ignore the experiences of the slaves who lived there, or try to gloss over the experience of slavery (the “they didn’t have it that bad” view of the history of slavery). The Whitney Plantation was recommended to me by a few people because they are (I think) the only plantation tour that focuses exclusively on the experience of the slaves. It ended up being a really informative and also moving experience. The grounds have multiple memorials to the slaves who lived here, including haunting bronze statues of children throughout the grounds. We got to see slave cabins (which were used by sharecroppers all the way up to the 1960s!!), the fields, the kitchen and the freedmen’s church. We got to see a little bit of the “big house,” but only a little bit, and mostly in the context of the slaves working in it. I cannot imagine being a slave anywhere, but especially in south Louisiana. To give you an idea of how hot it gets there, the museum had to install water misters on the tour route because visitors were passing out in the summer. Imagine it being that hot, and having to work growing and refining sugar all day! Our tour guide did an amazing job describing the misery of being a slave here (the average lifespan of a slave in Louisiana was 10 years!), but also connecting it to modern problems.
Alyson Gagne 