The Big Easy

New Orleans is known as the “Big Easy” because of its laid-back inhabitants. It refers to itself more frequently as the “Crescent City” from the way the Mississippi curves around the city.

Everyone initially heads for the old town, the French Quarter, established in 1718. First impressions are of a tourist town: masses of souvenir shops, restaurants and bars, street vendors and performers, horse-drawn carriages and tours. A splendid example of tacky trinketry is this voodoo gift shop (voodoo has a history here), with nodding zombie figure at the entrance. Remind you of anyone you know?

 

The right attitude is to treat it all as fun; above all N.O. is a place of party. Some excellent street bands add to this impression, and here’s one motley crew performing in the square in front of the cathedral with a great sound.

The densest nightclub concentration is in Bourbon Street. The most readable sign is for Chris Owens’ Night Club. It’s the most famous one here. Chris Owens is a female entertainer who seemingly hosts a stunning cabaret show- not, as I first thought, a drag artist.

There is a more classy side to the old town. Jackson Square with the cathedral behind is quite scenic, even though my “Rough Guide” says it looks like a two dimensional façade from a film set.

Many of the buildings have wrought iron balconies that look really lovely when decked out with ferns and flowers. You can happily wander the quieter streets looking at the different styles of picturesque old buildings.The next photo is a good example, with the carriage thrown in for extra olde worlde atmosphere. Just ignore the two cars in the background!

 

New Orleans has figured in many songs, with particular streets or buildings mentioned. We decided to trace two of these:

Basin Street

Basin Street Blues is a Dixieland Jazz Band classic, written in 1926 and a hit for Louis Armstrong in 1928, performed since by countless others. So where’s Basin Street? The hop-on hop-off bus supplied us with the answer when we alighted at the old railway terminus, now a museum.

“There is a house in New Orleans, they call the Rising Sun” etc.

Anyone who lived through the 60’s will be familiar with the Animal’s hit record, but there are many other recordings too. Surprisingly, its location doesn’t appear in any of the tourist publicity or on any walking tours’ agendas. Some research on the internet reveals that its identity was indeed uncertain for many years, until the late 1980’s when semi-derelict premises was being renovated: 

Workmen at the site discovered risque postcards of half-dressed women from the 1800s behind a wall and uncovered fancy fluted columns and a ceiling mural of a golden rising sun surrounded by three cherubs. Levy says the house was a bordello operated by a succession of different madams for many years before her husband bought the building. 

This is now generally accepted as the true House of the Rising Sun. Oddly, no attempt has been made to capitalise on its past and the building is today an estate agent. But perhaps that’s an appropriate change, from one notorious commercial operation to another!

Keeping with the party atmosphere, there were three parades on Easter Sunday. The theme of all three was Easter Bonnets, so here’s a few photos just to give a flavour. It was crowded and hectic, so almost impossible to take a decent snap. The gay parade was the best. Here’s a fairy coach, which is entirely appropriate.

 

 

Now some gay hats.

And here’s the tooth fairy, as he told us, with his gold teeth!

 

The floats in all parades threw huge quantities of beads into the crowd which we all wore and gave us a feeling of participating in the merriment. Bands, too, and majorettes, but how many more photos can you take? It was all party, what New Orleans seems to do best.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday March 24th: New Orleans

We motorhomers formed a little group in a corner of Walmart Pensacola car park. But not in a circle, covered-wagon style, against the marauding Indians, in case you were wondering. It’s now just 200 miles to New Orleans and we arrive by early afternoon.

The first thing we notice is the huge levee across the road from the campsite, holding back the waters of the mighty Mississippi. Later on we climbed up the bank to find a tarmac footpath/cycle track on the top that runs all 12 miles into the centre. Great idea.

We walked along the path and from that elevation could appreciate the size of the Mississippi and its importance for shipping. It is navigable for 1,800 miles, as far as Minneapolis. The port of New Orleans claims to be the centre of the world’s biggest port complex. The airport is right here too and the next photo catches a landing plane in the evening light with some shipping on the river. It’s a bit dark, so you’ll have to use your imagination!

A programme on TV just before coming to the States linked the two previous photos. A commercial passenger aircraft heading for New Orleans developed engine problems and the pilot realised he wouldn’t quite make it to the runway. What do you do in an area of swamps and marshy lakes? He spotted a flat area on a levee, like the area to the right of the tarmac path in the first photo but without the power cable pylons. He then made a perfect landing: all passengers unharmed. The landing site was quickly located and the passengers bussed away to onward destinations. Job done, you might think. But now we have a plane with wheels slowly sinking into the soft riverside soil. So a quick-fix repair was made to the engines and the pilot took off again while it was still possible, and flew the short distance to the airport. Round of applause for that man! 

Staying with the Mississippi, on our first day in the city centre we took a Steamboat trip. The Natchez is an old style stern-paddle wheeler. It’s a replica, but looks convincing.

There’s an informative commentary on the 10 mile trip downriver, with lunch and a jazz band, so a pleasant two hours. You can see the brown muddy colour of the Mississippi waters. Before the boat sets off, an organist plays a steam organ located on the top deck. This echoes loudly over the whole dock area in ice-cream-van quality tones. Here's the organist & organ emitting steam, looking like more like a hog roast barbie than a musical instrument.  

Still with the Mississippi as our theme, just down from the campsite on the riverbank is a bronze statue of two bare-knuckle prizefighters. It commemorates the first heavyweight boxing championship of the world, in 1870, on that exact spot. “Gypsy” Jem Mace of Beeston, Norfolk beat Tom Allen, another Brit, for a purse of $2,500. In 1870 bare-knuckle fighting was illegal in the UK but still flourished in the USA, particularly in New Orleans. “Gypsy” Jem had been a talented violinist, of all things, but was a big-time gambler so had nothing left from his very sucessful boxing career.

March 20th: Homosassa Springs

The campsite here is altogether different. Plenty of space, and pitches carved out of the forest. However, the jungle is on your doorstep, and the security man warned us to be careful if we went on a particular circular path cut through the undergrowth because it was infested with rattlesnakes. Too late! We’d just walked it, birdwatching, fortunately without incident. This is the lots of space.

We are only a couple of miles from the Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park. It used to be a zoo until 1984 when the State took it over and now they only keep animals native to Florida, many of which are endangered species. The big attraction is the manatee where they treat injured specimens and return them to the wild later if possible. Manatees are aquatic vegetarian mammals whose nearest relatives are elephants. So they’re large, weighing up to a ton. These are gentle, sociable creatures, as the next photo shows.

They are injured most frequently by motorboat propellers, often fatally, but you can see one of the luckier ones with the healed prop scars on his back.

Manatees need warm water, above 20°C (70°F), and Homosassa River Springs provides it when the ocean winter temperatures don’t. The Park only encloses a small portion of the river and wild manatees use the main river to access the same warm water. It’s more difficult to photograph them in the main river, but this one came up to the surface at just the right time. It looks like a WW22 barrage balloon.

Can’t say we’re big fans of zoos as such, but here the same natural habitat applies to both wild and captive manatees that will be released anyway if possible. Other species held in the Park provided some good photo shots and seemed happy enough but perhaps held with less justification than the manatees.

Barred owls. Ideal as bookends.

Florida Puma. Melts into the background even on a sunny day.

Florida Black Bear. Cuddly looking, but powerful. Nowhere near as dangerous as the grizzly. Wouldn’t like to check that out.

The Park runs a boat up this creek to connect with their main visitor centre and car park. We didn’t have time to take it but it’s very picturesque and junglified. Watch out for those rattlesnakes! 

We spent a most enjoyable two days here, and now it’s time to move on to New Orleans. This will take us two days drive to cover the 600 miles. Many campers we’ve met here say we ought to stay overnight whilst in transit in a Walmart supermarket car park. Lots do, and Walmart is camper friendly. Also they have 24 hour security patrols, so it’s safe. We’re going to give it a try for our en route night, and we’ll let you know how we get on.

March 16th: Pine Island

Pine Island sounds like paradise, and the photo above looks the biz. Jane is beachcombing on white sands lapped by the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

 However, all is not as it seems. Pine Island is 12 miles by 2, and has no beaches. It’s encased in the dreaded mangrove swamps. The campsite runs a weekly bus to the beautiful beach above, but it’s a two hour ride (two hours there and two hours back). The site itself was large and anonymous: it was ok, but we weren’t enthused.
We did a couple of pleasant walks, and next is a photo from one where we reached a viewing balcony overlooking a sea inlet. An unusual feature, just visible in the photo, was that every piece of wood on the balcony was carved with a person’s name. This had been done professionally all in the same lettering, so presumably these were benefactors of the small wildlife preserve leading up to the balcony.

I used the US word “preserve” for what we would call a nature “reserve”. In the UK, we use the expression “preserve” to describe best quality jam! Jam here, by the way, is called jelly. And jelly’s called jello. This could go on forever, so I need to get to the pic before you forget what it was about!

On the way was a field of cows with a much bigger flock of cattle egrets. These feed on insects attracted by the cows and happily co-exist with their bulkier benefactors.

We strolled past this quirky boy-toy with a for “sale sign” in the window. It looks great fun.  Imagine off-roading through marshy scrub and boggy tracks. But how safe would it be on the highway. In an emergency stop, would the wheels part stop dead and the passenger part just carry on?

So we left a few days earlier than planned as we had heard of a wildlife park where manatees were fairly common, at Homosassa Springs, 200 miles north. Here’s Jane driving on the Sunshine Skyway that crosses Tampa Bay, an impressive road with an even more impressive bridge. See y’all at Homosassa.

Park Ranger-led Events

This is a summary of some of the programme that we attended, available to all park visitors. Apologies if even the edited version is a bit long-winded.

1.      The Mosquito talk.  43 species of mosquito in the Park. Only the female bites. 13 out of the 43 bite humans. If I don’t use repellent, all 13 will bite me. It’s the low season now, but in summer, in ideal condition, one square metre of shallow water can produce one million mosquitos. The Park reduces to a skeleton crew after the end of March because of the increasingly immense numbers and extreme irritation of these insects.

       There are other biting insects my can of repellent claims to deter, like “chiggers” and “no-see-ums”, whatever they are, and obviously you won’t spot them to find out!

2.    Manatee Talk. A large aquatic mammal (approx.1 ton weight). Gentle sea  grass        feeder. Nearest relative: the elephant. We didn’t see it.

3.    Dawn Bird Walk. The ranger pointed out some interesting birds in the dawn bird walk. Some, like the osprey, are rare in the UK but common here. This one’s caught a fish and is eating it on a dead tree. My picture was taken through the ranger’s bird scope, hence the wedding-photo halo.

Vultures are common throughout Florida: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. They do a grand job of clearing up any dead creatures or holidaymakers. However, you do wonder how the fallen manage to support such large numbers often seen wheeling in the sky.

 It won’t be of general interest to detail the many smaller birds we saw, but here’s a couple of quite nice photos. First one’s a black-necked stilt, then a cardinal.

5.   Different Habitat Areas. Another ranger took us to several locations some miles apart where various micro habitats existed. The most unusual was called a hammock, a kind of small island rising only about a foot above the swamp, but high enough to support a mini forest of tropical hardwood. This is the raised walkway to Mahogany Hammock that shows the hammock’s slight elevation.

 

Inside the hammock it’s a tropical jungle. But no monkeys. That’s Jane in the red trousers.

The hammock contains the largest mahogany tree in America. It’s big, but a more interesting tree is the gumbo-limbo tree, or the tourist tree as it is known locally because the bark is red and peeling.

The name gumbo-limbo comes from its Caribbean origins and refers to the locals’ ancient practice of using the sticky sap to catch birds. It has some medicinal properties: the bark is anti-inflammatory and antiseptic. So you could presumably use it if you fell foul of the manchineel tree.

A more sinister tree is the strangler fig. It slowly engulfs its host, which then dies and rots away, leaving just the strangler fig.

The Everglades was a magical place. All wildlife is sacred, apart from mosquitos. Now to Pine Island, 250 miles north on the Gulf of Mexico.