July 12th, 2001

The day begins with everyone slowly waking up and getting breakfast taken care of. The plan for the day is to eat lunch then for us to leave and make the trip down to New Orleans. It had been discussed that perhaps we should stop somewhere in between Lawrenceburg and New Orleans for the night... but after thinking about it we decide we'd rather attempt the entire drive in one day... basically what amounts to a 10 hour drive.

Dee, Alie and I decide to try to find a hotel in downtown New Orleans. We use Expedia.com (which has turned out to be an extremely useful service during the course of this trip... even if it's owned by Microsoft). We find a place called the Royal St. Charles Hotel... and get it dirt cheap through some special Expedia only deal that's going. Sweet!

Some friends of Alie's family arrive for lunch. We all hang around enjoying Marie's wonderful cooking for lunch.

Soon thereafter Alie, Dee and I get ourselves packed and ready to leave for New Orleans. Alie's family was really good to us while we stayed with them. It was nice meeting you all. =)

The drive down to New Orleans is pretty boring... lots of driving through country roads and through the countryside. We take Highway 43 south out of Lawrenceburg and into Alabama. The road travels through Florence, Russelville, Hamilton and Tuscaloosa. Once we hit Tuscaloosa we hop on Interstate-20/59 and take it south into Mississippi. We travel through Meridian, Laurel and Hattiesburg. We make excellent time in our little POS Chevy Metro... eventually passing into Louisiana and into New Orleans.

I-59/20 eventually splits into just I-59, which runs into I-10, which is what we take into New Orleans.

In New Orleans

We take the highway into the historic downtown district of New Orleans. I have to say that my overall impression of New Orleans hasn't changed since I was there last. It's pretty cool to visit, but it's a dirty city, smells bad and I really couldn't live there.

We find our hotel without any problems. We're situated right off of Canal Street, just a block away from Bourbon Street. We get checked in and it's not too terribly late... so we decide to take a jaunt through Bourbon Street tonight. The whole timing of this is working out well... we've managed to beat a storm system coming into town. It would turn out that had we postponed our trip and waited until tommorrow to do New Orleans we would've been rained out.

Bourbon Street isn't too exciting tonight. It's more than likely because it's a weekday, so the usual cast of crazy characters aren't out in force. I have one drunk guy come up to me and ask me if I was Billy Idol. That was amusing.

We end up walking up and down the street a couple times. Some of the usual Bourbon Street shenanigans are going on... above a bar on a balcony are a bunch of guys with beads trying to entice some women below to take off their tops. Typical New Orleans behavior. ;)

Since things are relatively quiet we decide to call it a night somewhat early. We return to the hotel and watch some TV, chit chat and go to bed. Tommorrow, we drive to Pensacola.