After our Texas adventure, we made our way to New Orleans! Landing at the Louis Armstrong airport, the humidity hit us like a sledgehammer and because of the rain it only made things worse. We caught a shuttle to our hotel, so it was a good opportunity for us to sit back and take in all the reconstruction effort that has gone on 9 yrs since Hurricane Katrina hit. NOLA is slowly getting back on her feet but there are still areas that clearly show the devastation of Katrina. After getting settled into our hotel, we decided we would start to explore the city and to have some dinner before our vampire tour that was due to start at 8pm. The heat and humidity was incredible! Even at 8pm, it was still sitting at 35 deg and your soul was being sucked dry from the humidity but we soldiered on. Our vampire tour was interesting but a few people left the tour midway, I think there were expecting ghouls and goblins to be jumping out at them, instead the tour went into the history of the vampire and of course history's real life ones such as Elizabeth Bathory. After the tour we walked a lady back to our hotel. She was from Birmingham Alabama and her husband worked for NASA. He was in NOLA for a conference so she didn't want to be cooped up all day so she decided to explore the city. We decided to call it a night as we had an early start in the morning with our Cajun Bayou Boat tour.
The next morning, Joseph our tour guide picked us up from our hotel. Our group consisted of some Australians, Canadians and Americans. It was a fairly good group so that made the day so much better. Our guide Joseph is NOLA born and bred so he could answer any question we threw at him. Our first stop was the swamp tour. I was expecting a guide who would sound like a character off swamp people or the waterboy but that was not to be the case. 7th generation gator hunter and he was very articulate and was very entertaining. He said that what we see on the shows is exaggerated for ratings and that being a gator hunter is a lot harder than what the tv makes it out to be. We were lucky enough to have some gators come quite close to the boat and they love marshmallows!! Crocodiles are the more vicious out of the two. Alligators will only feed when it is hungry whereas a croc will attack and feed at any opportunity. After our tour was done we were off to do a plantation tour. The two plantations that we visited were oak valley and Laura. These were 2 completely different plantations in how they were run but both had sad and violent history with slaves. Laura was where the stories of Uncle ReMus and Brer Rabbit were written. The original versions were a lot harsher in content and had to be modified for children. After a long day, it was time to head home.
The next day we did a hop on hop off tour which included going to the WWII museum. Bring tissues if you ever get the opportunity. It's amazing In the layout but also the movies, which was produced by Tom hanks that tells the story of ww2. Veterans are on hand to speak about their story which made me cry again!!
New Orleans is a magical place full of amazing history, food and culture but it was time to say goodbye and next stop was Birmingham Alabama!!