Our first family have arrived to visit us in New Orleans, this coincides with Mardi Gras which despite meaning Fat Tuesday is the complete season of parades around the city.  We booked into the Fairview-Riverside Louisiana State Park, which I believed was perfect as it is simply a 26 mile drive across Lake Pontchartrain, of course I reckoned without the complete and utter lack of any public transport outside of main US cities so while we can see New Orleans we can’t reach it as Reg isn’t built for small narrow streets.

The only option was to hire cars as it’s too far for any taxi and we can’t use Uber after Alex sued them.  So we first had a Hyundai Elantra and now we have something far more exciting in a Dodge Charger, which despite having a five litre engine isn’t as fun as you’d expect as Alex won’t let me simply scream down the interstates (sigh ….).

Anyway, enough about cars, lets talk about New Orleans, it is a beautiful city, the French Quarter is as attractive as any we’ve seen with fine town houses with balconies and galleries (a gallery has supporting columns).  We took a guided walking tour around the French Quarter to get our bearings and learnt about the Ursuline Convent (Gemma you’ll be pleased to hear it’s very Catholic, i.e. they all go to church with hangovers), we also saw the ‘most haunted house’ in the USA.  This is a mansion owned by a French family in around the 1830’s that had a large fire, when the fire brigade broke into the house to look for survivors they discovered the bodies of seven slaves in various stages of dismemberment chained in a room, consequently the house is said to be haunted by their ghosts.  This story was allegedly disputed by Nicholas Cage (he of the acting fraternity) to one tour group from the balcony of the house, which he owned for a period of time.

On Friday afternoon we went for a walk down Bourbon Street, the main thoroughfare of the French Quarter and the location of many bars.  It was a sunny day and the street was blocked to traffic and quite full of people enjoying the sunshine but more interestingly also standing under the galleries of several bars trying to catch bead necklaces thrown from above by groups of people on the balconies. The best group were a number of ladies, all dressed in vaguely nineteenth century fancy costumes, obviously having a marvellous time with quite a few libations in them, throwing not only beads but bras decorated with beads too.  It is remarkable the number of groups of women dressed up and out to have a good time, although by the end of the evening not too many are still in heels!  As we walked on we were stopped by a cavalcade of police motor cycles and into view came the marching band for Talladega College led by five young guys who proceeded to do a spectacular dance routine with drum major batons, closely followed by the full band blasting out as they marched down the road.

Helen and Steve arrived Saturday night to join us and Andrew and we got to see the downside to Bourbon street when walking back to our hotels, the street was now rammed with large numbers of predominantly drunk people creating an incredible crush with the remnants of bead necklaces, drink containers and a fair amount of vomit across the ground.  Add in a contingent of police on horseback trying to control the crowd and it was quite unappetising.  All enlivened with, on every corner, a bunch of proselytising Christians telling the revellers they should repent otherwise they’ll be damned for eternity.

Sunday we found the better musical district of New Orleans along Frenchmen St where we watched a jazz quartet with a female tap dancing singer doing jazz classics in the Spotted Cat bar, enlivened by an old couple coming into the bar and dancing joyously along to them.  We had a few beers and wandered across to Lafayette Square to enter the grandstand that we booked to watch the Bachus Krewe parade on Sunday evening.  We encountered the horror that our grandstand didn’t possess the bare necessity of a bar, so sent off the girls to hunt down drinks and they returned with a dozen beers and two pints of white wine.  After chatting to a couple in the queue that turned out to be good friends of the lady who ran the Shelby General Store we camped near in Memphis we got into the grandstand and found positions to watch the parade …

OK, so Rio it isn’t, there were thirty-one floats and despite one float decorated as an alligator and one as a whale the big issue is most of them are very similar, i.e. they are trucks with two rows of large white males throwing cheap plastic bead necklaces to the screaming crowds below.  After two or three it all gets a bit too similar for this group of British onlookers.  What did enliven it was the school marching bands between each ‘float’ with varying levels of skills with their instruments and cheerleaders but they were more interesting than the floats and we cheered them on enthusiastically.  We went to the bar of the Waldorf-Astoria afterwards for a post parade wash up which is a very atmospheric bar for late night drinking should you ever be at a loss for where to go late at night in New Orleans.

We left H, Steve and Andy to their own devices for Fat Tuesday (what Mardi Gras means in English) and they promptly told us it was the best day of the festivities with many more people dressed to the nines and several more women with their breasts out.  Alex and I meanwhile spent the day cleaning Reg, doing laundry and grocery shopping, how rock-and-roll can you get?

Wednesday we picked everyone up from their respective hotels and went on a short road-trip along ‘Plantation Road’ which is a strip along the Mississippi of plantation mansions that are open to the public.  We settled on visiting ‘Laura’ as it has the same name as my niece and because it is the best example of a Creole style house.  The history of the sugar plantation is very interesting as it was owned by a French aristocratic family for four generations who owned 400 slaves at one point, then by a German family for one hundred years who believed that electricity was a passing fad.  The tour was led by a young woman Lindie and in the house concentrated on the family and outside concentrated on the slaves.  The saddest part was after the civil war when there must have been so much hope for the now ex-slaves the introduction of share-cropping meant they were almost just as poor and exploited as before.  The point that has weighed on our minds since is that the last four black families were forced off the plantation only in 1977, i.e. when many of us believed that the south was rid of the inherent racism of the region after the civil rights legislation introduced by Lyndon Johnson.

After our tour, we had H, Steve and Andy over for our first guest barbecue and stayover, the heavens opened just as we’d finished eating and Steve and Andy got caught in the downpour and came back looking like drowned rats.  Non-the-less I think they enjoyed their night in Reg, despite Andy’s cough keeping us all awake for much of the night.

On Thursday, Andy returned home and H, Steve, Alex and I went for a road trip in the Dodge Charger (named Jean-Claude as he’s a muscle car) to a small town called St Francisville.  We booked what looked like a lovely B&B on-line to discover that the photos must have been taken shortly after it opened approximately 30 years ago and they haven’t decorated, or cleaned it that deeply, since.  We visited an ante-bellum plantation house called Rosedown, this is an example of a Greek Revival mansion built by a British family, the Turnbulls, (get over that smug feeling of the Brits having ended slavery before the US), the family finally sold the property in 1966.  Beautiful gardens and house, unfortunately again all funded on the exploitation of the black slaves.

Friday we walked around the historical district of St Francisville, very beautiful with an ‘open air market’ that I suspect was the slave market originally before returning to Reg and camping overnight in a Kampgrounds of America campsite near the airport from which H and Steve have just departed for their trip to Mexico.