Day 2 – New Orleans

This episode comes rather later than planned as the safe in our room malfunctioned last night trapping my ipad within! I began this at 7.40 am on Tuesday (in truth the days are rather blending into each other at present but my watch and calendar assure me that’s correct). 

It was a hot and sultry day in NO yesterday. After a rather indifferent breakfast of tea or coffee and “breakfast smoothie” (“Slush Puppy with seeds in” to our British readers) we set out to explore. In view of the weather we both purchased hats. Mark adopted the “French Boulevardier” look while I took my usual course of opting for the more conventional “Bemused Old Chap/Hobo” style.

Having payed homage to the Mississippi and seen a few river boats our still somewhat confused body clocks decided that it was time for lunch. The town was very quiet today and we had no trouble finding somewhere to eat out on the pavement. In fact the only people about were us and a couple being married in a sort of bandstand  a bit further down! I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind that but alas we’ll never know what it was. 

We lunched on fried oyster poboys (aka baguettes) which were delicious. Moving on, we decided that more oysters were called for and each devoured 12 raw ones sitting at the bar of Mr Ed’s Oyster House, one of the many oyster bars that seem to lurk down the side streets of the French Quarter. Feeling a bit oystered-out after that we returned to the hotel to re-equip and regroup.  Mark then headed off to Union Station to fulfill a long-held dream of seeing the City of New Orleans train come in from Chicago (apparently there’s a song about it!). However it turned out that, due to a fire in a depot somewhere, the said train is stuck in Tennessee. It was just like waiting for a connection at New Street Station but on a grander scale!

The evening proceeded along similar lines other than that the seafood was catfish and shrimp, accompanied, rather curiously,  by fried sprouts, rather than oysters. We ate at an open-fronted restaurant in a side street which afforded us a grandstand view of two security guards, six cops and a paramedic involved in the arrest of a shoplifter in the store across the street. There seems to be a distinctly different ambience in the side streets off the main thoroughfares and when we left the restaurant we found ourselves regularly sidestepping puking drunks and other insalubrious-looking characters as we navigated back to the hotel. 

It’s now 8.30am and we are due to pick up our bikes at 10am at the Eagle Rider depot which is just a couple of miles away. After that all we have to do is to navigate ourselves onto Interstate 10 which we follow most of the way to our next stop. We are heading for Lake Charles today, which is about 200 miles west of here just before the Texas border. Apparently it’s a small town with a lake. Whether it has anything else to offer is something we’ll find out later. The plan after that is to get to Corpus Christi in Texas on Wednesday but as there’s currently a predicted 80% chance of thunderstorms that day we might have to rethink that plan.