New Orleans this Afternoon

After our swamp tour this morning, we spent the afternoon in town.  Lunch first at Coop's Place.

The best soup I have had in a long time - red fish, along with salad.  Dan had the same.  G and Ts to wash it all down.  And then a wander through the French Market (touristy but interesting and a lot of different foods as well, and then down to Jackson Square where we took the opportunity to have a close up view of the Mississippi again.  A huge liner was going past.  We watched ships, dredges and boats from the levee for a while, then Dan got pressured into having his shoes shined by a local but it was entertaining, nevertheless.

Lots of colourful characters down there.  We did a bit of people watching.

 Barges up and down here all the time and freight.

 Riverboat cruising is a thing, too.

 Here is the liner - quite a way up the rivers so there must be a good channel through.

 This is in Jackson Square.

 Here is the French market.

New Orleans

We are staying in the French Quarter at the Provincial Hotel.  Narrow streets and interesting architecture to say the least.

This is a happy place, touristy but not too pushy.   Everyone is relaxed.  Music at many of the cafes and restaurants.

This morning, we set out early at 7 to a local bakery to purchase some croissants for breakfast and then went for a swamp tour around 45 mins from here  - very nice day, blue skies and the swamp was pretty awesome actually.    This view taken as we travelled along the freeway toward the swamp.

We went to the Honey Island swamp tour East of NO.  We saw alligators, raccoons, blue herons, turtles and one very large alligator, but no snakes although the guide told us the place was teeming with them.

This was a smaller alligator next to the boat whereas this big (below) brute was huge!

The blue herons are huge!  Just beautiful.

The raccoons were super cute - families of them coming in the water to get food from the boat operator.  I can really recommend this swamp tour - something I thought would be a bit depressing  (swampy horror stories) was actually just lovely.

Over the Mississippi River

It was great to see the Mississippi again!  Last time was in Minnesota in 2012 and previously in 2006 we had driven down the river in Wisconsin.  It had been surprised how industrialised it was along the river up-country, but down this end, it is even worse of course.

  The water itself is quite muddy.  I spoke to a man fishing on the side at this point and he showed me a silver fish in his chillybin.  He said he was fishing for catfish and said he caught quite big ones at that spot.  I was surprised and don't know that I would enjoy eating fish out of this river.

Further down the river, we drove over the levee and through a quarry trail doing a bit of nature watching as we went.  We came across some stilts, and a blue heron. and egrets.  These are the stilts.

We headed to the LSU Rural Life Museum and experienced some very sobering thoughts about the slaves as we looked through the plantation huts and terrible accounts of slavery including one poster with a whole lot of information about slaves for sale - children of 7 and 13 "able to be separated from their mother if it suits the prospective buyer", as well as one "yellow slave good at housekeeping and some mulatto wenches" etc etc. Certainly an awesome place to visit, but although some of their signage was not good, it is hard to complain about anything of life in general after the reflections of those times.  

Here is the slave jail for any that played up, plus the slave collar with bells if they tried to escape.

These are the slaves quarters (miserable).

And here is the politically incorrect statue of Uncle Jack one of the "good darkies".  Ughh!

I only hope that no-one looks back at any aspect of our lifestyle with the same disgust that I had about the way people were brought and sold, how the rich could do anything that they wanted and looked upon themselves as superior in every way.

Houston Airport to Baton Rouge

We spent quite a bit of time at the airport yesterday waiting for Tom and Janet to arrive from Wisconsin.  One of their flights was delayed.  First we had to find a different terminal - there are 5 and so the information desk man helped out there.  Take the cute little subway train with 3 small cars to terminal A.

Then spend a bit of time people spotting and trouble-shooting the SIM card, sorting out the SIM card details for the phone (even changing the SIM card was a challenge due to the fact that I had no pin to eject the SIM card. ) Reactivating my american SIM card was a problem because the credit card did not have a USA address associated with it -  so - resort to using Tom's home address - accepted.  

Tom and Janet did arrive eventually of course and we set off in a rental car to Baton Rouge for the night calling in at Walmart for some supplies, checking out the Halloween goodies.

 And dinner at the Saltgrass Steakhouse - shrimps of course!

Then on to a (slightly seedy) motel on the West side of the Mississippi.  I slept well!

En route

We can have sausage and baked beans for breakfast or continental. My ankles are swollen - not managing the cramped quarters so well. Oh for a sky couch! But remember these seats were free to me so am being grateful instead.

It has been a turbulent flight and not much sleep but we are awake for breakfast now and it seems to have smoothed out for a bit.

We are crossing over Mexico around now.  

 

And have travelled about  11 hours with just under 2 to go.

Airport Blues

Dan takes a nanna nap.  After all he will need to be awake for all of those movies he will watch!

 

I watch the planes go by - this one a big Emirates beast. How does that get off the ground?

 

Here we go!

 

Out of Taupo and over the lake.

At Auckland Airport