The Big Easy

Day #2- New Orleans 

                

      It is a 7 hour drive to New Orleans from Atlanta, and we had originally planned to stop in Birmingham and go to the civil rights museum, but decided once we were on the road that we would rather just keep going and have more time in NOLA. We did decide to stop in Tuscaloosa, AL to see all the damage from the April tornados that came through. It was pretty crazy to see how much damage it caused and to see that it doesn't look like much has been fixed/cleaned up at all. Amazing how one house could be basically torn apart and the house beside it be perfectly intact. So we drove around there for a few minutes and then kept on truckin'. 

      

        
            I was driving this stretch and it was getting prettttty boring by this point, so we started playing some fun car games like "celebrity" (BOOM!) and "never have I ever" to entertain ourselves. The best part of the long stretches is stopping at all of the state signs to take pictures because something interesting seems to happen at every sign. (except the one below)

Timing a jumping picture with a self-timer = impossible

We've seen flying crickets, reallly tall grass, viscous ants, meredith peeing…which is something we see A LOT! Meredith pees approximately every hour on the hour, and the only way we tolerate it without denying her anything to drink and making her wear diapers, is if she asks us to stop so she can us "the terlet." Who can get annoyed by someone when they are saying the word "terlet??" Not this gal!  

     We finally got into New Orleans around 7:30 pm and it was quite the entrance! Well first of all, driving into downtown NO I was thinking this stop was going to be a let-down because it is just dirty out there! Everything is really sketchy looking and desolate. But once we got to the bourbon street area I knew we were in for a good time. There were people EVERYWHERE…and by people I mean lots of men wearing red dresses (which we later found out was because there had been some red-dress run fundraiser that day), men wearing booby tassels, women in curlers, men in nightgowns, and so many inappropriately sized clothes I can't even describe it. It was like the circus meets the state fair…and trying to drive through it when you don't know where you're going and have "pees-a-lot" as a co-pilot was not ideal, but we made it! Allison's step-dad Mike booked us at the Historic French Quarter Inn for Saturday and Sunday night. It's a really cute hotel and it's right in the middle of everything which was great! We got all fancied-up and hit the streets with the crazies! It's hard to sum up the kind of people you see here and everything we did, so I'll just let the pictures tell the story of the night! It was a great time!

we clean up real good!

please don't miss the woman who thought it appropriate to go out in curlers