AWESOME trip, all things considered (post Ida, pre-Nicholas and during Biden, and a Monday/Tuesday trip.) Drove down Sunday. Roughly 13 hours. Love the gas prices in Alabama and Mississippi. HATE the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge.

B&B was nice. Room was cute, bathroom was clean and the location (corner of Bourbon and Dumaine) was darned near perfect. Breakfast at Cafe DuMonde. TONS of walking around in the Quarter – VERY hot and humid and I didn’t hydrate enough. Lesson learned. Ghost tour Monday night was fun and we were exhausted. Rain from Nicholas rolled in Tuesday morning so we did a lot of stuff between the raindrops. Breakfast at Pere Antoine’s. Best omelettes EVER! Kim did her souvenir buying. Armstrong Park? Closed. St. Louis Cemetery #1 (Marie LeVoux and Nick Cage)? Closed. Mardi Gras World? Closed. VooDoo Museum? Caught fire day before we got there! Closed.

Lots of top-end restaurants close Mon/Tues anyway but Ida resulted in more closings than usual. Same for a lot of stores. No sense paying to open the doors if nobody’s gonna walk in the door. Bourbon Street had maybe a hundred people at the peak in Monday and Tuesday night. Hint: that’s almost NONE. But the places that WERE open LOVED us. Great service, traditional friendly people. Was awesome to walk into a store on Tuesday where we’d shopped on Monday and be recognized! The folks who depend/rely on tourist business to survive were glad to have what they had.

Rumor was that the hotels were filled with first responders and FEMA working in “outlying areas.” The Quarter was in reasonably good shape. A lot of trash piled on the side of the streets but most of it was plant life and roofing slate. As usual the residentialy challenged were present and the low number of tourists made them MUCH more visible but no more aggressive than usual. What else was missing? Zydeco music. Virtually none! Buskers. Only a few and they weren’t as good as usual. No talk of MArdi Gras (although this WAS 6 months away in both directions.) And there’s the Pandemic Theater. A quarter of businesses don’t take credit and another quarter don’t take cash – and it’s for the same reason – SCIENCE! Mask silliness in place. We can walk around the Quarter without a mask, licking all the doorknobs we’d like, but we MUST wear a mask while taking the five steps from a restaurant door to our table. No. Just no. NO!

Drive home was pleasant once we got out of the rain (halfway across Alabama.) We’re already looking forward to our return. Maybe next October?