New Orleans

Boarding up Royal St.
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(writing this Sunday morning from a darkened, closed and packed Popeye’s at the airport. There is nowhere to get food, everything is closed, except inexplicably the cajun music store)

Saturday - a rumor is going around that the hotel is closing. I call down to the front desk and ask and she says no decision has been made. I go online and book three rooms at the Country Inn and Suites at the airport just in case. We go downstairs to meet for breakfast and find out the hotel is closing and to check-out as soon as possible. We wander around looking for an open breakfast place; the Old Coffee Pot is open but a long line out the door. A waiter at Pat O’Brien’s says to try the Oceania on St Louis St. We walk down Bourbon St and it’s nearly deserted but a lot of the t-shirt stores are still open. We walk in one and the woman is saying. “I ain’t leaving”. There is a lot of frustration that what would be a busy Saturday and Sunday is not happening. The storm is 3-4 days away and they are losing all this business. We find Oceania and it doesn’t look very promising - looks like a fun dive-y bar but not a breakfast place but it ends up being good. The waitress has that super casual vibe that when it works (i.e. she gets the order right) it’s great, but when it doesn’t, its a disaster. It works; she can memorize all the orders, repeat it back, get it right and keep the coffee flowing. We call PapaGee, the man who drove the others into the city on Wednesday and gave them his card for the return trip. Can he pick us up in a few hours? He’ll meet us at the hotel at 130pm. On the way out I talk to an employee who is mad that everyone has to leave, nervous about the next few days but says he plans to see us back next year. It’s a deal.

The Ramada on Bourbon St closed up
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Rick needs to pick up some voodoo dolls on Chartres St and then check out the hair salon a few blocks past that to see if Cutter the cat is still in the same window as last year. The hair salon is now a pet grooming place now but Cutter was still in the window. Sleeping.

Checking out of the hotel we see Joe in the lobby waiting to see us. He was going to take us across the river to a swamp but that didn’t pan out so he just came by to say hi and share his crazy accent with us. Rick told him what he learned the other day: “I better wrench mah hands in da zinc cuz I ‘ad too much my-nez on dat Po-boy”. Joe gave him his seal of approval. PapaGee was ready and waiting for us and when I-10 got too crowded, he knew the fastest surface roads to the motel. He is the founder of the New Orleans Musical Historical Society and told us that we were invited to a blues party at his nightclub on South Rampart next year. Actually we were told we *would* be at the party next year in no uncertain terms. The motel was a bit chaotic - we had to sign a waiver that said there would be no food in the morning and we might have to evacuate at any time. Well, ok. Rick called Domino’s Pizza at 3pm and had them deliver three pizzas to us before they closed down. We all sat in the motel room eating the pizza and trying to pretend we were having our nice meal at Bayonna. You could look out the window and see (and hear) the runway a hundred yards away on one side and wall to wall traffic on I-10 the other way. The traffic was constant, even at 315am when I woke up. For some reason we couldn’t understand why they were only running airport shuttles at 400am, 600am and 800am (the last one of the day) instead of every 30 minutes through out the day and the 800am was already full. She said it normally takes 7 minutes to get to the terminal but it was taking about an hour with all that was going on. After giving her the eye for a minute she added a 730am shuttle which immediately filled up. Our flight wasn’t until 1230pm so it would be a long 4-5 hours at the airport. Meanwhile I heard another employee say they were overbooked. We then spent the next 8 hours watching TV, reading, blogging and avoiding the vicious red ants at the pool. While reading a paper I read about the New Orleans Running of the Bulls - men, women and children dressed in white with red scarves run down the street being chased by the Big Easy Girls Roller Skating Club who whack them with their hockey sticks. And since too much is never enough down here, they are then followed by a pack of roaming Elvis’s. I’ll let the great writer tell more with a Youtube video as well:

A very quiet Bourbon St
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http://blog.nola.com/chrisrose/2008/07/running_of_the_bulls_new_orlea.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx320qnOpzs&feature=related

God bless this crazy place.