Big Time In the Big Easy

D and I took a little road trip to New Orleans to celebrate MLK Jr. Day. Mardi Gras isn't for a couple more weeks, but the city was already preparing for the festivities. The next few pictures are from our first night in town walking down Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. It definitely lived up to the hype - there were drunk people yelling from the tops of balconies everywhere. I wasn't quite prepared for what we encountered, so didn't spend too much time there.

This was about as crazy as it got for us on Bourbon Street:
D shaking hands with an alligator.
Me with a fun hat on.
There was a parade through the French Quarter that night. I guess there are several parades or "krewes" in the weeks leading up to the big Mardi Gras parade. The one we saw was called the Krewe du Vieux. The above picture is of the devil on a float with Hell behind him.
If you look closely, you can see the logos from Allstate and State Farm in Hell. People are still really upset about how things were handled after Hurricane Katrina. There were signs and pictures everywhere trashing the insurance companies and FEMA.


We rode a street car all through the Garden District of New Orleans. It was full of beautiful, Southern-style mansions.

The next few pictures are of buildings in the French Quarter. We both kept saying how much New Orleans reminded us of Europe, especially Italy.



One of my favorite parts of the trip was driving through the lower ninth ward, the area hit hardest by the hurricane. It's a total ghost town. There are tons of abandoned houses. The next several pictures are of trashed houses. It's amazing that more restoration hasn't been done in the area since the hurricane hit 2 1/2 years ago. We didn't get a picture, but we saw a few houses being built with hot pink framing. I guess those are the ones that Brad Pitt is building in the area. You'll notice the roofs of a couple of the houses are destroyed because the area was so flooded, barges from the Mississippi floated through crushing the houses from the top.









We ended the trip with a little stop at Insta-Gator Alligator Farm just outside the city.

This alligator is just a few months old.
We got to feed the alligators mini marshmallows.

The crazy lady in white was part of our tour group and she was obsessed with alligators. At one point, she was petting the alligator in the picture and said in her best baby talk voice, "Oh you would make a good purse."

The final crazy thing we saw were these cemetaries where the graves are above ground because the ground is so wet. I'd only ever seen this in Mexico before.

You'll notice that little C isn't in any of these pictures. She stayed behind with D's sister for the weekend. It was sooooo nice to have a child-free weekend even though I missed her.