New Orleans

Friday morning, woke up at the park less than an hour from New Orleans, our destination for the day.  First thing we had to do was cross the Mississippi for the last time, this time from north to south.  Found a place to park (only $5 for 10 hours, could have paid $50 and slept there overnight).  Crossed the street and we were right in the middle of the French Quarter.  Not sure what either one of us were expecting, but this is a beautiful area that I think we could have walked for days.  We rambled around for a bit and then stopped for coffee and beignets (aka square elephant ears).  Joe tried to use the bathroom, but there was someone in one of the stalls for the past hour, and he gave up waiting once the cops showed up.  We walked northeast to the French Market and found a public bathroom.  Everyone there (except Joe) was clearly using it as a place to do whatever drugs they had.

From here we walked up and down many many streets.  We were stopped by a guy claiming he could tell Joe the exact city and state "you got your shoes at".  We laughed because there was no way.  They scam is that you take his bet, and his answer is something along the lines of "you got your shoes on your feet in New Orleans", but this guy must have failed out from hustling school because instead he said "if I can guess you will pay me to clean them", made no attempt a real guess or the "on your feet answer" and instead put hand sanitizer all over the toes of his shoes.  We walked away.

Next stop was a voodoo museum.  It was a thing, I guess, and took less than 10 minutes.  We should have just read a wikipedia article.  Here you go: wikipedia.org/wiki/louisiana_voodoo.

Another guy tried to guess where Joe "got his shoes".

Even though it wasn't quite 11:30 (but we are on eastern time still!) we stopped for lunch - a muffaletta from Central Grocery.  We ate it on a park bench overlooking the river.  It was a great sandwich and a pretty view.

The trolley ran right behind us and we wanted to take a break from walking for a bit.  The ride took us north for about 30 minutes, past a lot of gas stations and a tent city, before turning back to where we started.  We got off at Bourbon Street and walked past a million bars.  We also kept running into these trucks advertising "weed candy" and some women with rice krispie treats yelling "edibles" every few feet.  Google tells me that weed is still illegal in Louisiana, and these groups are selling some very expensive baked goods and suckers to unsuspecting suckers.

We decided to head out, and I told Joe to pick any bar he'd like along the way.  The gay bar he picked had a great selection of local beers and a scruffy dog named Chico who was clearly a regular.

Back to the van and wanted to head northeast out of town.  My google map default was set to avoid highways, so we went through some pretty rough sections of town.  I'm sure every big city has their less desirable areas, but New Orleans seemed to have a lot of them.  If we went back, I would want to do one of the bus tours and tour one of the cemeteries.

Our plan had been to drive to Gulf Islands National Seashore for the night, but we probably wouldn't have made it there before dark.  We crossed back into Mississippi and stayed outside of Bay Saint Louis at a state park.  It was Saturday night, so the park was pretty busy.  We went on a nice long walk around the campground and then made some pasta with shrimp for dinner.

85 miles
134.21 spent
5 parking
11 Coffee & beignets
14 voodoo museum
14.28 lunch
5 trolley
9 snacks/drinks
45.97 Grocery store
29.96 Buccaneer State Park