... and admittedly, the middle of hurricane season wasn't the brightest choice of a time to go. But NOLA was on our way, we wanted to see it, we had a friend there for goodness' sake - what could possibly go wrong?
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| Enter Hurricane Isaac ... |
On Sunday, August 26th,
at around 3.30pm, Bex and I arrived in New Orleans on the
Amtrak train from Memphis (see separate blog post for the
details of the nine-hour journey and the folk we met on it). The
weather was fine; steaming hot, as is usual for the South in August,
but not unbearable. There was not a breath of wind – the proverbial
calm before the storm, in fact. There was no wi-fi and very little
mobile phone reception on the journey, so we were effectively
incommunicado for most of the day, having boarded the train just
before 7am.
We heard scraps and rumours of a
tropical storm heading through the Gulf on the journey but didn't pay
much attention to it, concentrating on getting our stuff to the Hotel Royal (a lovely bijou boutique place on Royal Street, in the
French Quarter) and planning our visit to the Big Easy. Oh,
the swamp tours we would go on, the cemeteries we would visit!
We wandered around the quarter taking pictures of all the gorgeous
ramshackle Spanish Colonial houses – of which there are many –
and doing a bit of souvenir shopping. We made it halfway down Bourbon Street, which is reminiscent of some of the nastier alleys in Soho,
with its sex shows and drinking dives, before the smell of stale
beer, sick and fermenting garbage drove us back.
