Cemeteries in New Orleans

As you know, I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing the ones here in New Orleans.  The worst part is that we’ve been warned that they can be dangerous unless you are with a tour, especially Cemetery No. 1 with Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau.  Others say that it’s just fine.  We’re still deciding if we’ll visit that one.  Instead we stopped at a couple of the cemeteries farther away from the French Quarter and mostly drove through the grounds with just a few stops.

There are a lot of cemeteries in New Orleans.  Some of them have names and some just numbers.  All of them have vaults above ground.  Some say the graves are above ground because the water table is so high.  The story is that a casket would rise up over time since the air and gases inside would sort of “pop” them to the surface.  Others say it’s just a French and Spanish tradition.  Given that the water table is lower due to pumps and levees, it’s more tradition now.

The tombs have multiple names of the front and can be a family tomb or an organization like the Elks.  The story is that the heat within the tombs slowly cremates the body so that after a year only bones are left.  Those bones are pushed back into a hole in the floor and another body can be placed in the vault.  Kinda creepy but also more sustainable since not as much ground is needed per person.

Greenwood Cemetery was partly built because of the yellow fever epidemic of 1853 (http://tandtrv.blogspot.com/2012/11/yellow-fever-epidemics.html).   There were somewhere between 8,000 – 11,000 people from New Orleans who died in this epidemic.  This cemetery has about 20,500 lots with many of them family or society types.  In the front are several monuments including a Confederate monument marking the grave of 600 Confederate soldiers, the Firemen’s Monument sits atop a five foot mound (foreground of the picture above), and the Elks’ tomb with an elk above it (background).

St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 was started soon after (1854) on the site of an old leper colony. This cemetery has mausoleums, wall vaults, family tombs, and society tombs.  It’s more active and well-kept than many of the cemeteries since people are still being buried here today.  Interesting places to visit.

 

Nice New Orleans

New Orleans is a mixture of naughty and nice.  We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall type of place and I had a great crawfish etouffee.  John enjoyed the Coop Burger (the restaurant/bar is called Coops Place).

The Historic New Orleans Collection is a museum with various displays with no major theme, just New Orleans.  This sign is from the streetcar named Desire.  Years ago New Orleans had a streetcar that stopped at Desire Street.  Tennessee Williams wrote the play set in New Orleans and including this fact.

For sports fans, this is a shovel from breaking ground for the Superdome.  Below is a sterling silver wine cooler.  During the Great Depression, the Sugar Bowl football game was created to stimulate the tourist economy with the first game played Jan 1^st, 1935.  This wine cooler was donated by a local antiques dealer to serve as the trophy and became the symbol of the event.

 

Interior view of St. Louis Cathedral.

 

Mississippi River view.

 

The French Market is an open air strip of vendors selling everything from clothes to jewelry with lots of bizarre things thrown in like voodoo dolls.  It is said the market began as a Chowtaw trading post and has survived several fires and hurricanes.

The Christmas spirit in New Orleans.
 

Naughty New Orleans

New Orleans is definitely not Disney World.  It’s not particularly clean, there’s graffiti everywhere, and people are sleeping where ever they can find space.  Today we spent the day walking around the French Quarter.  It’s an interesting place to be.  I can’t say that the place is relaxing.  This is a picture from Jackson Square with the Andrew Jackson statue in the foreground and the St. Louis Cathedral in back.  What you don’t see is the several guys sleeping in the park off to the side.

The streets are a bit dangerous.  Everyone seems to be trying to sell you something, whether it’s T-shirts, art, tips for their music, a reflexology session (sort of like a foot massage to unblock your Qi), palm readings, or “free” tour guide (but a tip would be nice).  On the other hand, the food is great, there is music and art everywhere, and there is a certain atmosphere.

 

This guy was being a construction worker statue for tips.  Unique!

There are interesting places like Larry Flynt’s Hustler “Barely Legal Club” on Bourbon Street (no, we didn't go in).  By the way, Bourbon Street is only place I know where it's legal to have an open drink.  Doesn't matter what time of day it is, someone will be walking along with a drink in hand.

 

Ho-Ho-Ho

There is nothing like going to a rum distillery for the holidays.  We went to “Old New Orleans” distillery our first night in New Orleans.  When you walk in you are instantly struck with the smell of rum.  We waited about 10 minutes for the next tour and already didn’t notice the smell.

Turns out the barrels come from whiskey distilleries from Kentucky.  So we may have seen these barrels when we went to a bourbon distillery there (http://tandtrv.blogspot.com/2011/10/frankfort-is-capital-of-kentucky.html).

 

The tour was good with a wonderful guide.  The place is small, but interesting to hear about the process of taking sugar cane molasses and changing it into rum.  They work to be sustainable.  Several of their byproducts are sent out to be used for other products (even nail polish!). BTW, the best rum they had was 10 years old.  VERY smooth!

 

For the price of the tour, you start with a mixed drink of rum and iced tea.  During the tour you get a taste of 180 proof spirits.  At the end of the tour, you drink small shots of 5 different rums that they make.  By the end, we were very happy and everyone on the tour was very friendly.  Plus, the drinks made us more likely to buy a few bottles of rum.  Good marketing! 

After the tour we learned about the life of the other couples that were on the tour. One of the gentlemen was a professor at Bowling Green in Ohio. It was fun to discuss the Bowling Green library and the ice rink at the school.  My oldest brother graduated from there and the library and ice rink is pretty much all I remember of the college.  Fun tour, great guide, and good people!

 

 

Holiday Travels

 

We’ve been busy working on our house but decided to go to New Orleans for the holidays.  It’s funny how much we’ve forgotten on how to use the RV plus the RV wasn’t really ready for us.  The water tank built up yucky stuff and needed to be cleaned.  We had to remember what things to put in the RV and where they fit.  I forgot how to work the TV system for cable versus the antennae.  However, we finally got it all working again.

It was neat to drive in 4 states (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) within 3 hours.  Foggy day (this is Mobile). 

Love the way this tree was cut.

Our lovely GPS is still taking us down ugly small roads.  This one had tall weeds and old furniture along the road.  Plus, we had just heard how dangerous New Orleans is.  Apparently you can get mugged in the cemeteries!  So driving on a road like this in the middle of nowhere meant we locked the doors quickly.

 

And interesting weather!

Settling Down

We decided to change from full-timers to part-timers and have a home base.  So, we bought a small house in Pensacola.  At 1,000 square feet, it is still 5 times bigger than our RV!  The house is a fixer upper and will provide plenty for us to do.  The structure is good and it has wood floors throughout the house, but everything needs cleaned and painted.  The wood floors will take a lot of work too.

The previous owners didn’t mow for months so the grass was two feet high.  On our 2^nd day, the police showed up asking us to take care of the yard!  Either the previous owners were going for privacy or they just didn’t care enough to trim bushes.  So, there is a row of 10-foot bushes surrounding the property.  Personally I thought we should keep it this way for Halloween for a real scary haunted house.

 

 

It’s taken some time to get used to home living again.  Before we only had to pay for phone and the RV park / state park.  Now we have phone, electric, gas, water, sewer, trash, and internet.  I forgot how much a hassle it is having a home.  On the other hand, having separate rooms for sleeping, reading, watching TV, and eating is just wonderful.

Another comment…Craigslist and Freecycle are one of the best inventions of all time!  The previous owners left lots of junk.  With freecycle, we were able to get rid of lots of stuff that someone else can use versus paying for someone to haul it off as trash.  Craiglist has been good for both buying and selling things quickly.  How did we live before the internet?

Hopefully we can show a few before-and-after pictures of the house.  Plus, we plan to travel for the Christmas holiday and at different times.  Our posts will be more sporadic in the future.

Bon Secours Wildlife

Of course we had to hike through the refuge.  There were a lot of gorgeous butterflies and LOADS of very fast lizards.

The plant life looks like dinosaurs could be coming along at any time.
 

The biggest surprise to me was the Reindeer Moss.  Reindeer eat this up north.  I called it fluffy moss.  It’s not really moss but lichen.  Supposedly it’s edible (if you’re desperate) and is even used in making an alcohol called Aquavit which is popular in Scandinavian.  To me it just looks magical!