A week of pure bliss

There's a lot about New Orleans to want to leave behind.  But for me it's just the intense 6 month summer heat and humidity.  The rest is great, but tough to see positively in the context of the heat.  I spent 15 straight years there and have been back at least twice a year for the past 30.  But outside of a few funerals, I have not spent a single week there with family in that entire 30 years.   Last week my sister invited me to spend a week there with her and her son, as well as our mother.  Her son has been there before, but only as an infant.  Infants could care less where they are, as long as they are satisfied in every way.  Over the past dozen or so years, the young man has had to hear about how great it was to grow up there, how horrible it was, how great the food was, all the great things to see and do.  Well all that came to a head this past week as we did everything imaginable.  We did everything we could fit into the week and vowed to keep it non-touristy.  What that means is that we did everything we could think of that was within our time and financial budget, as far from the French Quarter as possible, and age appropriate.  What we failed in was the non-touristy part.  But we did it without being touristy, I hope.

We did NOT make it to Frenchmen St. for evening entertainment.  Although the young man was 17, New Orleans is pretty laissez faire about age in bars, provided the child doesn't drink and is accompanied by a parent.  But we were just beat in the evenings anyway.  We did NOT make it to Rock and Bowl.  Those are the two regrets.  The rest was a bucket list of sorts for a Americajun family spread across the southeast and longing for New Orleans.  They were there for a day and a half before I arrived, I work for a living, haha.  I arrived on Tuesday night after most had gone to bed.  The next day we had our breakfast at Camelia Grill after riding uptown on the streetcar. 

Then we did what we all said we would not do, we headed all the way back downtown on the streetcar and walked across Canal St. to the French Quarter with the sole purpose of taking in the Musee Conti', better known as the New Orleans Wax Museum.  Not your average tourist attraction, but we had all done it as kids on field trips and it was surprisingly interesting, and fun besides.  You will not find Marilyn Monroe or Marilyn Manson there, more like Napoleon and the Sieur de Bienville.  There is also a chamber of horrors based on works by Poe and Hugo.  All I remember clearly was a gorilla stuffing a woman up a chimney.  However, I was not to see Napoleon in his bathtub this year, as the MC was closed on Wednesdays.  We browsed the French Market, but even more depressing than missing the wax version of the Battle of New Orleans was the fact that the ICONIC smell of every fruit mixed with every vegetable stirred in with the odor of 80 different kinds of people was NOT in evidence.  And that's simply because that aroma depends on three important factors, none of which were present that morning.  You need to be deeper into the growing season, it needs to be over 90 degrees and the humidity should be over 85%.  But missing that smell is a small price to pay for NOT having the 3 factors hitting at once on that day.   A walk up the Moonwalk got us back to Canal and the streetcar stop.  Never knew why it was called the Moonwalk, maybe the Riverwalk was taken.  We made it back to the house and I smoked the Montecristo Sublime I had been threatening to smoke for a month or two.

Thursday we were back to the Camelia Grill;  when a cliche' offers waffles like that and the only breakfast sausage I ever found acceptable, you gotta go twice.  Then we headed to Audubon Zoo, which never fails to amaze me when I remember back to what it was 30 years ago.  You need to rent the movie "Cat People" to really get the full depressing effect in color.

Granted, this is just the Big Cats area, but almost all of the displays were of this style and size.
Here are a few black and whites to give you the idea.  In the first frame, you get a shot of the cages for the more active monkeys and Chimpanzees.  They had the most room of any animals back then, even the really lucky ones who were 'marooned' on Monkey Island with actual grass (dirt) under their feet.  Kind of like the difference between Orleans Parish Prison and Angola Prison Farm.  My memory is not great on this layout, but the second frame appears to be what I think of as the front of the zoo, which could have been anywhere actually, but I think of it as the front.  I think this was the display for Hippos, camels and something else there, and behind the viewer out of frame left would have been the flamingoes and another pen for the Galapogos Tortoises.

Granted, there were few zoos back then that were forward-thinking, you just crammed as many animals as you could into the space you had.  But New Orleans' Audubon Zoo, as great as the WPA labor-built buildings were, was especially bleak.  Now it seems as if they are determined to go as far the other way as possible, and the facility is incredible, based as it is on the elegance and beauty of the century old oaks which cover the grounds.  I told my mother about Zoo Tycoon, where they tell you that to keep visitors happy, you should make grand entrances.  It sure makes em walk a long way to get to the animals, but apparently the Audubon Zoo is built with this in mind.

That's my nephew taking pictures.  We had a serious competition going on the entire week, where I playfully jabbed at his 'inferior camera' and skills.  Obviously he has great skills, better than me when I am at my best, way better when I am just my regular self.  His eye for light and composition is always on, where I remember to think about it about half the time.  And his camera is 3 times better than mine if not more.  Here is a shot that demonstrates only the fact that he shot what I forgot to, not his great skills.  It's to show that the entrance is just over-the-top grand.

And don't get me started on the canvas they have to paint on at the Audobon Institute.  The entire grounds including the park across Magazine St. are strewn with 100+ year old Live Oak trees.  Everytime they make a new exhibit, they have so much more to work with in terms of ambience and that 'lived-in' look.  Thanks to Cam for this nice photo.  Doesn't it make you want to go to Audubon Zoo as soon as possible?

We crossed the river for supper since my family was crazy enough to allow ME a shot at calling a meal.  I chose a blast from my past, a popular westbank haunt called Perino's Boiling Pot.  The exterior is some kind of reclaimed Comfort Inn or some other kind of used motel.  Inside there are dozens of long tables for eating the messiest food a cajun can eat, crabs, shrimp and crawfish.  Rolls of paper towels are available and necessary.  Thank goodness my nephew likes to photograph food on trips.  Here is more of his work.

The prices were crazy high, thanks BP!  You know, it's hard to 'shout' in caps lock at a company that is so evil and forever damned when just writing their name is all caps.  Oh wait.  THANKS BRITISH PETROLEUM!  Jerks.  The oil spill did not necessarily go into the adult crustacea, but it seems to have killed off a lot of the larval stage organisms that keep the circle going.  Seafood is available now, but expensive for a time.  On the good side, the crabs were FULL!!  That's coon-ass for packed with meat and heavy.  The crawfish I had were also excellently boiled and tasty.  Again, thanks to Cam for the shots.  The seafood is most definitely still ON in NO. 

Two excellent days out and about in the City that Care Forgot and the best was yet to come over the coming days.  That afternoon we took a long walk around Audubon Park proper, and if anything is more impressive than the Zoo across the street, it's that park.  Bounded on the other end by Tulane and Loyola University, the park contains a nice public golf course and beautiful walking and biking paths and the most beautiful views in the Deep South.  As luck would have it, Cam was the only one with batteries again.  His work is again used without permission, lol.  And the boy does have chops.  He makes calendars with his favorite shots of the long list of places he has been that you would pay cash money to hang in your various vertical spaces.  Keep in mind however that these are just pics that show the park as described and are not to be considered his best work. 

In the coming days, we'll visit the City's other major park, the sprawling City Park, including the beautiful Botanical Gardens.  Then we head up to the Lake for a trip back in time as well as one of my best old cruising memories, the lakefront of Lake Pontchartrain.   There were no hot rods and young kids there on our visit, but it was still a treat.