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Published: November 8th 2010
New Orleans Much to Tracy´s dismay, as she said last time, we left Texas on October 18th and made our way to the home of the big easy, and I am not talking about the home of golfer Ernie Els, no, New Orleans or as the locals call it Nawlins.
We arrived in around 6pm to the Queen and Crescent hotel, probably the nicest place we have stayed since the Hilton in Bangkok at Christmas, and immediately did what all tourists do and went and visited the famous Bourbon street in the French Quarter. Well even at 6pm the street was pretty busy with lots of people walking round with beers in hand, wearing, it seemed, hundreds of different bead necklaces and neon lights flickering from everywhere advertising many bars and many exotic dancing bars, otherwise known as strip clubs. It appeared that there was live music coming from just about every bar and club on the street, and there are lots of them, it all seemed very lively. However the other side of the street is its seediness, though I couldn´t really see any, the street smells quite badly of urine and trash, there are lots of people
drunk and vagrants just sitting around, whilst not bothering you, they don´t add anything positive to the view of the environment. As the night progressed the street got rowdier and busier and messy now with broken bead necklaces and plastic/aluminium beer bottles all over the place. There was also plastic beer cups sitting half empty on the side of the street everywhere.
In our case we did grab some food, wandered the length of the street and a couple of others around it taking a few photos and taking in the ambiance generally, eventually visiting a bar on bourbon street for a couple of hours listening to the Jazz being played (the only bar on the street playing jazz incidentally, the rest all playing rock), it was quite good but also quite expensive, drink wasn´t cheap in there, at $6 for half a pint.
Bourbon street is fun enough I suppose, but it reminds a bit of a poor mans Montreal with all the strip clubs, which I didn´t visit, or almost a poor mans Blackpool with all the neon lit bars, similarly to both these places they seem to attract a lot of visitors looking to get
drunk and quite a few bachelor and bachelorette parties and not too many locals. Its OK for one night I reckon, but if I was a local I wouldn´t be visiting the area either and indeed over the next three days and nights we never stepped foot on it again.
Now a week or so earlier whilst in Texas I am sitting watching the TV, Jim Cramer on CNBC to be exact, when it goes into commercial break and he advertises that he is doing a ´Back to School´ episode from Tulane business school in New Orleans on October 19th. Keen as mustard as I am to go see him, we look online to fill out some application forms and think ´that´s all she wrote´. Oh no, on October 17th we got an email confirming we got two free tickets for the show on October 19th. Probably a good thing to be honest otherwise we may never have left Texas.
So midday on October 19th we headed out towards Tulane university to see Cramer. The trip out to the location of the university was beautiful as is the universty itself, all the way down St Charles Avenue it
was tree lined with massive detached houses on both sides of the road and right before we arrived there was a massive park, again it looked magnificent, really pretty.
So the show itself, though its only an hour on TV, Cramer filmed from about 3.30pm to about 5.45pm with breaks and as guests we had to arrive by 1pm and didn´t get out till after 6pm so it was a fair time commitment. It was fun though, Cramer was in fine form ranting and raving for the camera and when he wasn´t filming he took time to talk to the crowd as well as sign books etc after the show. As I said it was good fun and I am glad we went. That evening we just chilled in the local sports bar in our now new hotel (Holiday Inn) as our great deal at Queen and Crescent was only for one night, still at least the Holiday Inn was actually in the French Quarter unlike the Queen and Crescent.
The following day we wandered around the French Quarter looking at the buildings and generally people watching. The place is pretty cool in parts, some of the buildings
are beautiful especially down by the market at the waterfront. I liked the way a lot of the buildings had balconies that wrapped around the buildings. There were, however, many places in the French Quarter that were in a bad state of disrepair unfortunately, whilst many others were being rebuilt or at least getting a makeover. I am not sure if this was due to Hurricane Katrina and some people having got their insurance pay outs and others not but I say its unfortunate because its a little sad, it shows the potential of the place without actually getting there. Indeed the Lou Armstrong park looked like it could be beautiful but it was being done up post Katrina and apparently money had dried up and so it was sitting half done, very sad.
After getting a tip from the bartender in the sports bar the previous day, we headed away from Bourbon Street this night and towards Frenchmans street. He said it was where the locals would go and it wasn´t so much of a drunken scene. The area was great. We took in some live blues and jazz in two different bars and a bit of food,
At the Mardi Gras museum
With some old float props!much classier but not expensive or nearly as busy as Bourbon street at all.
On our final day in Nawlins Tracy and I did something quite unusual for us, we went our separate ways. Tracy went to the Mardi Gras museum and I went to the National World War II (WW2) museum. I believe Tracy enjoyed the Mardi Gras museum although she was only there for 90 minutes. She saw quite a few floats being built and apparently they are so expensive for the ´Krewe´s´ (the groups that organise each parade) to have made that each person that rides on the floats sometimes have to pay $1000 or more towards it (just for the prestige of being able to ride on the best floats).
In my case the WW2 museum was fabulous. You walked in the door and there was a B52 hanging from the ceiling, there were Jeeps and Higgins boats to view as well and also a British made (but salvaged by the Americans) Spitfire. The museum was massive, I spent 7 hours in there reading all sorts of information, watching videos and looking at loads of military equipment. Now everyone knows that USA won the
Pacific part of WW2 by dropping the bombs on Japan, but what I didn´t know was that President Harry Truman (who had just replaced the recently deceased Franklin D Roosevelt) had approved a land invasion of Japan. The intention was to invade with some 335,000 troops over two days (nearly a million in total was expected to be needed) also 967 ships and 1.35million tons of ammunition. To put this in perspective the USA committed 150,000 troops to the D Day landings in Normandy, 327 ships and 600,000 tons of ammunition. To top it off because they didn´t think the Japanese would surrender easily once on Japanese soil (as to be taken captive or surrender was more shameful than death), Truman and his advisors expected anywhere between 15-35% of US troops would be lost in the invasion. Incredible, maybe that´s why they dropped the bomb. Anyway as I said I thought the museum was fabulous, very informative and not nearly as biased towards the USA as I thought it was going to be.
The following day we waved goodbye to New Orleans but not before taking a drive through the Ninth ward, which was badly hit by Hurricane Katrina
in 2005. The area was pretty overgrown with extremely long grass in places and a lot of houses just deserted and left to decay, some houses had the big X cross on it to say it had been checked for bodies etc. It was a bit sad driving round, but just as we were leaving the area we saw a part of the Ninth ward where new houses were being built. These houses were amazing, they were all very big and all very funky weird designs. They all seemed to have solar panels on them as well, maybe the designs had something to do with being energy efficient.
Brief stop in Mississippi Anyway so on we went to Mississippi and in this case Jackson Mississippi. Unfortunately we didn´t have much time to waste in Mississippi so we made the call just to check in to a motel for the night and get on early to Memphis, Tennessee. Shame because I would have liked to have spent more time in Mississippi and furthermore Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, but time is always against us and choices have to be made, so the King of Rock N Roll it was.
Memphis Arriving into Memphis late Saturday afternoon we decided to visit the other thing that Memphis is famous for (other than Elvis) and that was the national civil rights museum which is in the former Lorraine Motel. The reason this is famous is because this is where the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) took place on April 4th, 1968. In town this day was also an art festival, with many stalls selling different forms of art from pottery to paintings to leather items, pretty cool actually and there were numerous stages set up playing live music. Unfortunately we spent too long taking in the arts festival and music and didn´t give ourselves enough time to take in the civil rights museum. Luckily enough though we found out as we were being booted out at 5pm that our ticket was good for Sunday too, so we went back again the following day. The museum I thought was pretty good, it did start off with civil rights from the civil war and briefly touched on things like the Klu Klux Klan, but mainly it focused on 15-20 years that MLK was involved in the civil rights movement from
the early 1950´s. We read about many civil rights successes and shameful acts against the black people such as education discrimination and also public transport or restaurant discrimination.
One great story was how the black people (lead by MLK) in the late 1950´s boycotted the bus service in Montgomery as they were being discriminated against by having to give up their seats (oh and blacks were not allowed to sit in the first five rows of the bus anyway) or even get off the bus if white people wanted the seat at the back or to get on when it was full. The boycott protest lasted a year but in the end the peaceful protest worked because the bus company almost went out of business and they allowed blacks to sit at the front of the bus and rerouted the routes such that they stopped in black communities, which they didn´t do previously, basically being treated the same as the whites. The power of the peaceful protest. There is a section on the MLK assassination, killed by James Earl Ray, but the main focus of the museum, probably wisely, is not on the assassination but on the civil rights
discrimination and successes. It was good, I would recommend it.
Now bearing in mind that it was Sunday and Sunday is football day that put an end to our tourist activities for the day and Buffalo Wild Wings it was for NFL Sunday.
Monday morning, October 25th, 2010 and day 403 of our travels, if you were interested, we shot off to Graceland to see the King of Rock N Roll´s home. Elvis´s home and grounds are not all that big to be honest, that´s not to say that it is small but its not gigantic either, It is incredibly extravagant though and the house is eccentrically decorated. His TV room was all yellow and his pool room was covered in cloth, even the ceiling, that looked like it should be on the windows as curtains. The front room he called the Jungle room because it looked exactly like that and has an indoor waterfall, very unique. The whole experience was great, obviously we saw the house, we got to see a load of Elvis´s jumpsuits, his countless platinum and gold records, his 20 plus cars, two planes and most important of all his final resting place right
beside his mother and father, beautiful. I did enjoy the visit and on this day it wasn´t that busy thankfully but it really is like a tourist park now and not a home. It has about ten different stores (I am not kidding) selling Elvis paraphernalia and a number of Elvis restaurants, I was just glad I wasn´t there for his birthday or anniversary of his death as apparently its chaotic at these times.
Nashville Time being against us always that afternoon we drove the 200+ miles to the capital of Tennessee namely Nashville and that evening we took in Monday night football and saw the NY Giants give the Dallas Cowboys a lesson.
The following day the weather was absolutely terrible, heavy rains and heavy winds, in some parts slightly south in Mississippi and Alabama there was flooding and twisters as well in the midwest I think, but having only one full day in Tennessee, we had no choice but to head out for the day anyway.
We took in the bicentennial park (built in 1996) which I thought was really beautiful, it was celebrating, of course, the 200 anniversary of Tennessee becoming part of
the USA. It was pretty damn big too and at the end of it was the State Capitol building and being that it was raining we decided to do a tour of it. The building was pretty impressive, not as impressive or as big as the Texas State Capitol I think (well everything is bigger in Texas) but pretty spectacular none the less. We also (as it was raining) took in the Tennessee state museum. Now this was one big museum covering the cave man right to the modern day, it seemed to spend quite a lot of time on the civil war, former President Andrew Jackson and the slave movement issue in the south, pretty good. Well all this touring made me thirsty and with it raining it meant we really had to take in the thing Nashville is truly famous for and I don´t mean the Tennessee Titans, no, country and western music.
Before we headed to the bar to listen to a couple of different bands we took in the old fort which wasn´t all that interesting to be truthful and a few shops including the Dolly Parton shop which was as bad as the Elvis
stores for unneeded paraphernalia. Still in my opinion is was better than the music. Tracy enjoyed the country and western but I couldn´t stand it, I definitely couldn´t live in Nashville I think. That evening after grabbing some BBQ food, which was excellent, Tracy took in a line dancing lesson, it was fun to watch and to be fair she was very good at it too.
This brought Nashville to an end for us for as the next day we were on the road again. Initially we were going to head to Knoxville but decided instead that we´d had enough of the big town´s/cities and would take in a little nature, so instead we headed to Gatlingburg to take in the Smoky Mountains National Park and the start of the Blue Ridge Parkway which I will let Tracy bring you next time.
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