Snapshots: New Orleans, Of Course

As many of you may remember, my mother is from New Orleans, and that is a large part of why I wanted to bring my family there. The only one of my children who had ever been was my eldest, and that was when we went for my grandmother's funeral when he was only seven months old. I wanted to show them the place their own grandmother grew up and the place I have so many good memories of.

And so, I did. 

With six people in our family, one hotel room is not enough. Two hotel rooms costs enough that it makes a lot more sense to rent a house through Airbnb. It's also much, much more comfortable for our family to have room to spread out and run around. The house I rented was in Gentilly, which is a residential neighborhood in New Orleans proper*. The house had three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and enough beds for all of us.

I think it was built just about ten years after my mother's childhood home was built.

Just a little old brick house.

Some of the house had been updated, but much of it was original to the house. 

This is a bathroom from an earlier era, for sure.

The kitchen was pretty well-equipped. Given that we didn't arrive until 10 p.m. on Friday night, I was particularly relieved to see there was a coffee machine and coffee already there.

There was even a mug of similar shape to my beloved mug at home.

This house was lacking a good porch to sit on, so I just brought my coffee out to the front steps to enjoy the extremely tropical morning.

It even looked tropical.

I was somewhat dismayed to find that the washing machine at the house was clearly in the middle of repairs and wasn't functional. We had brought limited clothing in our carry-on backpacks, anticipating doing laundry during the week. There was a laundromat about a mile away, but I had zero desire to spend any time in a laundromat. Thankfully, the dryer was working. So I just did a small load of laundry in the bathtub every morning, hung it over a rack in the tub to drip-dry while we were gone during the day, and then dried it the rest of the way in the dryer when we got back to the house at night.

Tub laundry: vacation edition. (I had to rotate this photo, and now it looks funny. Oh well.)

Our rental car had a fun feature on the dash where it gave us our elevation. This is particularly interesting in New Orleans because much of the city is actually below sea level.

Here we were at -5 feet. The lowest we saw was -15.

The first day we wanted to go the Garden District and the French Quarter. My main concern was parking, which is very expensive near the French Quarter. However, there are old streetcars that run around the city. These are fun to ride, so I decided we should go to the Garden District first, where we would hopefully find cheaper parking, and then take the streetcar to the French Quarter.

We ended up finding an unmetered spot on a side street in the Garden District, so parking was free this day.

We wandered the Garden District for awhile, admiring the beautiful homes.

This house had a water fountain for people, and a water bowl and treats for dogs.

The giant live oaks are fun to climb around on.

Poppy found the world's biggest Richard Scarry book at a bookstore.

Eventually we made our way to the streetcar. We rode the St. Charles streetcar to get to the French Quarter. This is the same streetcar my mother rode every day to and from school. The cars themselves are the same, so we might literally have been riding a car my mother rode many years ago. The machine for cash fares wasn't working, and the driver let us ride for free. It was very crowded initially, and we all had to ride standing up until some people got off.

We did get seats towards the end, though.

The streetcar dropped us at Canal Street, where the first order of business was feeding the children. We ended up getting fried chicken, which everyone enjoyed very much.

Poppy did not understand this sign at the restaurant, and honestly, neither did I.

Then we walked. We went down Bourbon Street, where one boy played chess with a guy who had his board set up on the street. We looked in a store that sells antique guns and weapons. We walked around Jackson Square, where a man on stilts was entertaining the gathered crowd, a wedding was happening in the garden area of the square, and psychics and voodoo practitioners were set up literally in front of the cathedral.

We stopped at the Pharmacy Museum, which has some very interesting displays about historic medicine and also a very nice courtyard.

Cool staircase, too.

At this point, everyone's late night was catching up with them, so we decided to get back on the streetcar and work our way back to the house, where the children played with the toys at the house, and I made dinner, dried laundry, and generally got us settled.

Looks like home already.

Okay, I think this is long enough for now. Stay tuned for day two of our adventures!

* The city of New Orleans transitions within blocks from nice neighborhoods to places I definitely did not want to stay. I relied heavily on the Airbnb reviews and Google streetview to find a house in a place I thought would be safe. This house was in a very safe and quiet neighborhood, although just about a mile away was not a place I would have felt comfortable.