Spring Break 2013, Day 8

Got up, ate, debarked, hauled luggage to the car, loaded it, locked it, walked to the French Quarter. We ate more beignets at Café Beignet and listened to some live jazz in Musical Legends Park. 

Then we walked down Bourbon Street for a bit,

then decided we’d seen enough stripper bars so we walked on a parallel street- Royal Street.  It was awesome- Royal Street was blocked off so it became a pedestrian mall loaded with musicians, magicians, costumed people, jugglers, and other performers.  It was so fun. 

Jonathan was impressed that the clarinetist in the above picture held a super high note for an eon or two!

Holy Huge Harmonica!

(These guys were bad)

Then we went to the Voodoo Museum and learned about that religion.  Interesting-to-me things I learned… 1) Voodoo dolls are not long distance torture devices.  Instead, they were used as “medical charts”.  The doctors placed pins in the dolls to indicate ailments and complaints that the patient had. 

2) Zombies, in the Voodoo religion, weren’t walking dead who want to eat the brains of the living.  Rather, they were living people who were chosen (and to be chosen was an honor) to be paralyzed with Pufferfish Venom then buried alive for several hours (as a Zombie) so that they could visit and converse with those in the otherworld.  3) When Voodoo left Africa and came westward, the Voodoo followers changed the names of their gods to the names of the Roman Catholic saints.  Voodooism had their god of healing; the Catholics had their patron saint of healing; the Voodoo followers accepted the Catholic and saint and their corresponding god as one and the same, so they accepted Catholic’s names for their gods.  Interesting! 

We went over to St. Louis cemetery, New Orleans' oldest-but-still-used cemetery.  The cemetery (and all of New Orleans) is sinking, so some of the graves that were once above ground are now nearly underground.  

Anyway, Marie Laveau, the New Orleans Queen of Voodoo is buried there.

Then we walked back into the French Quarter and listened to more music.  We ate on Bourbon Street at a Cajun restaurant- Blackened Chicken PoBoy, Red Beans and Rice, Jumbalaya (with spicy sausage), some crayfish thing, and alligator tail.  Then it was back to the streets to roam and explore (LOVED the dwellings),

over to the riverbank and Jackson Square,

then back to the car to make the long drive back to Houston.

Nolan turned a "NOLA" sign into "Nolan"

 

About 20 miles south of Baton Rouge, traffic was backed up as far as could be seen.  The freeway actually went up a slight incline at this point (probably the only “hill” in Louisiana) so we couldn’t see how far the slow down actually went.  We were right by an on ramp, and I looked over to the right and noticed a car pulling off the freeway and backing down the on ramp.  Car after car after car started doing the same.  Then some idiot decided that it was much more efficient to just flip a U-turn and drive off the on-ramp.  That then became the norm.  So on the on-ramp, there were cars backing down it, driving forward on it, and cars trying to go up the on ramp to get onto the freeway.  It was a mess- worse than the freeway slowdown, but much more entertaining to watch. (Notice all the "reverse" lights on theses cars?  Driving in reverse off the on ramp)

Cars that made a U-turn and were driving off the on ramp

The funniest part was that the slowdown only lasted about 5 minutes- at the top of the hill, a minivan had gone off the road and into the marsh, and it was being towed from the marsh covered in mud, and grass, and vines… Then it was freeway speeds all the way to Houston.