Crescent City Downtime
Living just an hour from New Orleans, the wife and I tend to day trip it frequently and have a list of haunts we stop in at.
Last weekend, being great weather (60-70 degrees, unlimited visibility), in need of some R&R time after a week in Vegas for SHOT, and a week before New Orleans is slammed by the Superbowl and the start of the larger Mardi Gras parades, seemed good timing.
The city was the cleanest I’ve seen in a long time, with seemingly every other building in the high-traffic touristy areas catching a new coat of paint. Also lots of new barricades and bollards, and a larger LE presence, specifically Orleans Parish S.O., for obvious reasons.
Plus, I was able to check in at a few of my favorite antique stores in the area and pick up several WWII-Cold War vintage French Foreign Legion badges, a familiar site in the city, and a couple of 54mm Wheat’s Tiger Rifles (1st Louisiana Special Battalion Zouaves), the latter from the Black Butterfly on Royal Street.
I don’t collect lead soldiers, but I do like the Tigers as I haven’t seen them anywhere else (they are made by a local hobbyist for the Black Butterfly) and Wheat’s motley crew of Zouaves certainly had one of the more colorful backstories.
Sadly, my first (and so far only) visit to New Orleans was for disaster relief following the floods in 1995. New Orleans is one of those places that is off the beaten path, so, like where I live now (Puget Sound), you’re either going to it or bypassing it on your way to somewhere else.
Anyway, the organization I worked for at the time, put us in a hotel with a nice restaurant, but in those days I was a lot less adventurous when it came to food. By the Maître d would absolutely not let me order standard staples. every time I would order a cheeseburger or some such, he would override the order and bring me some local dish with the promise that if I did not enjoy it, he would get me the cheeseburger for free.
It was absolutely amazing food, and I enjoyed the game he played as well. Great food, interesting people… but no time to get to the French quarter for music and drinks… alas…
Hope to get back some day…