New Orleans, part deux

Mr. Lina packed a lot into the short time we were there. The day after we booked the hotel, the Stephen King fan club whatever sent him an email saying he would be in NOLA when we were there.  So he bought tickets.  So one day we took the street car out to Octavia Books to pick up our tickets.  This gave us a reason to take the street car, visit the garden district, a cemetary and then push on to Audubon Park.



Mr. Lina at Anne Rice's old house.



Wild turkey at Audubon Park





A few houses were still decorated for Halloween



Mr. Lina at Audubon Park

I liked the street car.  For $3 you could ride all day and step out of the French Quarter.  The St Charles line runs through the middle with two lanes of traffic on either side.  Some people are not so smart, forgetting that there is actually traffic and there is possibly another street car coming.  It's also very well used, the cars were packed most of the times we were taking it.  Fortunately not so when this happened:



Street car vs Mercedes



No one was hurt, the fire truck just happened to be driving a few cars behind the Mercedes and we were about 2 blocks from where we were going to get off anyhow.  May I say in a street car vs. mercedes situation, the street car will always win.

The Lafayette cemetary was sad.  Beautiful, but oh so heart wrenching.  We weren't on a tour so I was just reading the plaques and wandering.  So many children died so very young.  There may have been some leaky moments before we left.  I don't think I'd seek out a cemetary like that again unless I wanted the emotional tidal wave that goes with it.

Saturday we split our time in three parts, French Quarter, then the WWII museum and finally the Stephen King reading.  First stop was Muffaletta's for breakfast from Central Grocery.  I can't eat the olive spread, so I really can't comment on the true Muffaletta but the bread, meat and cheese were tasty and Mr. Lina really liked his full version.  Good thing we went at 10:45 for that, by the time we walked back from eating on the boardwalk, it was lined up down the street.

Next stop was the Museum of Pharmacology.  Small but pretty cool museum, I thought it was about the right price at $4.  It looked at medical practices in general and specifically in NOLA.  There was a section about prohibition and alcohol and how labelling laws impacted a lot of "tonics" which were alcohol based.



Allergy testing equipment.

 

Whole section on alcohol as medicine.

The WWII museum was pretty cool.  We could have spent more time there but we were running out of day.  It's interesting to see a different perspective on the war.  Omaha beach was not something I remember spending a lot of time talking about, and in kind, I only saw the word Canada twice.  This picture amused me.  To hide the actual plans to enter France, they had fake planes, tanks and vehicles in England to make it look like they would attack the closest point to England at Calis.  This is 4 soldiers moving an inflatable tank.

We cut things pretty close getting back to the hotel to change and off to Stephen King.  There was a restaurant near the reading we figured we would have dinner there.  As we got off the street car, the line for the show was literally out the building and around 2 side streets.  Food was more important than the line so we went to Pascal's Manale and both had their signature dish, BBQ shrimp.  No idea why they call it that, those shrimp never saw a BBQ, but my goodness was it tasty.  I should have caught more of the table in that picture for scale, the shrimp were HUGE!



That is not a dessert bowl.




Served with a bib for good reason.



View from the balcony of Stephen King.

Stephen King is really great to listen to.  We saw him in Toronto when the book about a town in a dome came out.  It was an interview with David Cronenberg so a different style than the NOLA reading.  He talked for a bit, covered a few FAQ's, read from the book then took questions from the audience.  Time went by in a blink. 
 We were pretty tired and not into a visit to Bourbon street that night.  So we took the ferry across to Algiers again with the good camera to take night time pictures that didn't suck.  It's such a pretty city from a distance.  There are a few more things to wrap up but this post is long enough.  I'll end with the skyline for now.