I am writing this the morning after our big night out in New Orleans so you'll have to forgive me if it's not very good, or if there are spelling mistakes and typos! (It's Laura by the way, Dave isn't sufferring as much as I am today).

We enjoyed our fist lie-in on our first day in New Orleans and slept til 9am! We've been getting up early every day so far, but since we have 2 full days here we thought we'd give ourselves a treat and sleep a little later. We made a rough plan (head to the Mississippi and see what happens) and grabbed a complimentary coffee and pastry from the hotel reception. The hotel is lovely, a typical New Orleans style building which is over 200 years old. It has a balcony all the way around it on the first floor and our room leads off the balcony. It's a little rickety and the balcony is uneven so when you sit you feel like you're going to fall off but we like it! The staff at reception are really helpful and directed us to this internet cafe and showed us where we could find a post office, as I've been carrying postcards around since New York (they're on the way now!).

So, we walked through the French Quarter and after stopping at the internet cafe booked ourselves on a 2 hour cruise on the Mississippi for the afternoon, aboard the Natchez steam boat, the only steam boat left on the river. We went into a nearby shopping centre to cool down in the air con then visited a few shops. I loved the shops as they all had really loud jazz music playing in them and everyone was dancing as they were browsing, it's impossible not to shimmy a bit as you walk with that music playing! We had a wander down Bourbon Street which is the famous street in New Orleans, but I think we were at the dodgy end of the street as there seemed to be a lot of strip clubs where we were! After grabbing a sandwich from a cafe we headed back to the river for our cruise.

The cruise was lovely, just what we needed after walking around in the heat all morning. It was an old fashioned boat (there are photos when we get round to uploading them) and played jazz when the guide wasn't talking. The guide pointed out a lot of things along the river including some the devastation from hurricaine Katrina, some areas not being back to normal yet. We saw an old boys school which is still boarded up for instance.

After the cruise we headed back to our hotel to cool down and rest before hitting the night life. Amongst the leaflets and brochures Dave had picked up from reception there was a voucher for a restaurant where you got one meal free when you ordered another. So that's where we headed to on the night. It was called 'The Crescent Creole' or something like that and the food was amazing. Dave had pasta jambalaya and I had crabmeat stuffed shrimp. Dave says it's the best meal he's ever had - even better than a parmo! With full bellies we headed back into the heart of the French Quarter to a place Balet had recommended and that we'd read a lot about - Pat O'Brien's. It's famous for it's Hurricaine drinks, which we had, and it's 'duelling' pianos. As we walked in we saw the 2 pianists playing and singing, with a guy in between them playing 'the tray'. He had things on his fingers that made a noise when he tapped the bottom of the tray he was holding. It was a brilliant atmosphere and the room was full of patriotic Americans, so much so that the female pianst played some american song that everyone sang along to. Can't remember what it was but I'm sure it had the line 'I'm proud to be an american'. We tried to sing 'god save the queen' at the same time but I don't think anyone heard us. I could have stayed in there all night but we wanted to visit some other places we had passed so we left after about an hour.

The rest of the night is a bit of a blur, but I do remember being in a bar drinking the also famous 'hand grenade' drinks and meeting an american couple called Carolyn and Chris. We asked them to take a photo of us and ended up chatting to them for ages and telling them about our plans. Carolyn used to live in Little Rock, our next stop, and they also used to live in Washington DC. The guy reminded me of Colm Wilkinson the famous actor who starred as 'Jean Val Jean' in Les Miserables for many years, but I don't think it was him!

After visiting a few more bars we found our way back to our hotel (somehow) in the early hours of this morning. So that was our first day in The Big Easy!