Day 17 - Brangelina in New Orleans!

This is officially the longest I've ever been away from the UK in one go, whoop, still a long way to go but absolutely loving it....long may it continue!!

A big thank you to all of you who are reading my blog, not sure if your televisions are broken and you have nothing else to do but it's fab to know that we've had over a thousand blog views in 16 days:-)  Okay so now I feel slightly under pressure to perform (lucky I'm not a man eh!) as I know loads of you are reading this.....arghhh I can't think of anything to say now!!!

Our hotel - the Hotel Chateau

Panic over, deep breaths and I'll just pretend I'm talking to myself as usual.  We did tonnes of sightseeing today, mainly on foot around the French Quarter of New Orleans, horse carriage tours are aplenty but we thought it would be good to do our own.

Thanks to modern technology in the shape of Oli's iphone (can't get my head around the fact they have no buttons) we had downloaded a walking tour map suggestion so we enthusiastically set upon our route.  Normally I'm not a walking kinda gal but the streets here are fascinating and we were so busy gazing up at the buildings that I hardly noticed how much walking we had done today....perhaps in hindsight my flower flip flops weren't the most practical choice of footwear!

One thing the iphone tour suggested was we pop into was an old pharmacy with an authentic soda fountain from 1940.  The place was charming, all original, the owner explained that the shop had been in his family for 75 years but was built in 1900.  They had preserved the interior and it reminded me of the soda fountain counter/shop in It's a Wonderful Life where a young Jimmy Stewart works at the beginning of the film:-)

After a couple of hours of walking around we stopped off for lunch, the staff were super friendly and found it hilarious when I asked for no "tomato" - tomato he said, what's that, do you mean "toe-may-toe", he shouted it across the restaurant mocking my accent and the staff fell about laughing:-)  Oli had a "po boy", I had seen this word "po boy" advertised all around the area, I was starting to imagine it must be a gay lap dancer, couldn't have got it more wrong as it turns out a po boy is a type of bread!  We also ordered a chocolate cherry freeze drink and it was the most delicious thing I have ever tasted, I wish I could have bottled it and brought it home - with this heat it wouldn't have even made it out of the shop!

After lunch we walked to the Mississippi riverbank and bought tickets to board the last ever steamboat on the river, it was exactly how I imagined it with it's huge paddle!

It took about two hours to glide about 8 miles up the river and back again, the guide pointed out sights of interest and sadly we got to see some of the devastation caused by hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Although a lot has been rebuilt, just remembering what I saw on the news when Katrina hit and seeing it today with my own eyes it's still really shocking.  Around half a million people used to live here and now it's around 220,000 - the city still needs a lot of repair in places but it's come along way from those frightful pictures broadcast around the world on the news 6 years ago.

After we docked we walked around more of the famous streets such as Bourbon and Royal, popping in the shops with more Mardi Gras beads than beads of sweat on Oli's forehead - and believe me that's a lot!  The weather was sweltering, I love a bit of sun but this was borderline unbearable so we gladly went into various shops and cafes just to get out of the heat for a bit.

On Oli's handy iphone suggested tour it pointed out that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had bought a house here and were in the city 6 weeks ago while Brad was filming, like two stalkers we made our way there and it was easy to spot as it had a whopping American Flag hanging - might as well have said "Brangelina lives here"! 

As I mentioned in my blog yesterday no hotels had availability for our second night so after a full day sightseeing we left New Orleans around 6:30pm this evening, passing through the Garden District on our way.  The buildings here were a completely different style to the ones in the French Quarter and then different again in the business district, all these different concepts make New Orleans a place we are glad we stopped off in if only for one day and night.

It's about a 4 hour drive to Florida but as we wanted to spend the whole day in New Orleans we decided that we'd drive for about an hour and half and then stop in a motel along the way.  So here I am sitting in a side road hotel about to hit the hay and then hit the retail park opposite our hotel tomorrow morning before making our way to Florida:-)

J&O