Running and not running in New Orleans

Posted by Rachel

Last weekend we took a five day trip to New Orleans and it was a blast! What an interesting city filled with history, culture, and drunk people. I can see this entry possibly getting lengthy, so if you don’t have a lot of time just skip down to the pictures of food.

Here are the tours we did:

New Orleans food tour (“Tastebud”): I would highly recommend this tour. Even though the style of food in the tour wasn’t my favorite (read: low in carbs, high in protein), we got tastings at five different places and learned the history of the food. It was a good time, which I’ll represent below with the pictures of the two sandwiches from the tour (gumbo, jambalaya, beignets, coffee, and pralines not shown).

 Muffaletta. A rough choice for a no olive fan, but it still wasn't bad.

Roast beef po' boy- a sandwich I don't mind eating

Haunted History Tour: This tour was hilarious, probably because our tour guide was hammered. And to catch up the rest of the group, she stopped us at a bar (“haunted”) in the middle of the tour and recommended that we order a hurricane. This strategy worked- the whole tour group had a lot more fun after that! (Except for the teenagers of course, who were pretty much just embarrassed that their parents were so wasted.) Here’s a picture of the “haunted bar” we stopped at:

I think the hurricane was strong enough to count as >> 1 drink, but Travers and Kristen disagreed with me.

Plantation tour: We got a tour of two plantations- Oak Alley (traditional) and Laura (creole). This was super educational (and of course, appalling at the same time).

 

 Oak Alley

 

Swamp tour: This was just cool. Our tour guide was hilarious and we got a lot of neat pictures.

 

Travers holding a baby alligator. I think it's funny how the random girl behind him looks completely disgusted by what is happening.

World War II museum: this wasn’t a tour, but we did it the last day and it was neat. There is also a Civil War museum but we didn’t go so I have no idea if it’s any good. 

What I liked:

-All the tours we took

-The Garden district: one of the 3 runs we did was through this neighborhood. There are beautiful houses (although if you look at one for too long you’re sure to trip over the sidewalk). We actually went back to this neighborhood later in the day by taking the famous (?) St. Charles street car. We saw Archie Manning’s house and contemplated loudly declaring our love for Tom Brady on his front yard, but we ultimately refrained.

-The River Walk: Although only long enough to run about 1.5 miles, it gets you out of the craziness of the French Quarter and onto the water. A nice space, and I would highly recommend to the City of New Orleans that they extend this path along the full length of the Mississippi River. That would be great. 

Travers on the River Walk

-City Park: Once we survived our trek (see “biking” below), the park was really nice!

Me on my sweet rental bike in City Park (no gears included).

-Frenchmen street: Slightly off the beaten path, with live music at every bar. 

-Beignets.

This is the good life. I made the error of splitting this small plate of beignets with Travers. If there's ever a next time at Cafe Dumonde I'm getting my own plate, and recommend that anyone else who goes here does the same.

 

-Pretty much everything else that is not listed in “what I didn’t like”. 

What I didn’t like:

-The weird smell: At first I thought it was drunk people’s fault, but even outside of the touristy areas you’d catch a whiff of it every now and again. In all fairness, they did wash their streets with soap (which of course, Travers tried to cost-analyze and determine the benefits of fragrance versus no fragrance while we were eating breakfast).

-Some of the running: There are very few paths built for running longer than a mile, and the “sidewalks” are either packed with tourists, completely torn up (even in the nicest neighborhoods), or have cars parked on them (was this because of the heavy rain?).

-Some of the biking:  Lesson learned- if the city paints a bike on the road, it does not necessarily mean that you should bike there. It probably also didn’t help that Travers took us down a scary ass road to get to the park. In addition to cars trying to run us off of it (it was a main-ish road), let’s just say it was a questionable decision. We took a different way back. 

-The bread: The bread in New Orleans is freakin awful. It tastes like dry air. Not to mention, carbs (other than beignets) are really minimal other than a few grains of rice here and there.

-Lack of healthy food: On the last day I ordered a sandwich called the “greenie” (a turkey po’ boy). The only thing green on it was iceburg lettuce, and when the lady brought it out she said “oh honey, you must be watching your figure”. She handed it to me with a look on her face that said ‘I have no idea why you would order this sandwich when it’s the worst thing on the menu’, and if I had to do it again, I would just get something fried.

-The formality: Many of the restaurants we considered going to had a dress code of “jackets only” for men. Are you kidding me? Why would a man wear a jacket when it’s 80 degrees out? Flip flops should be allowed everywhere, period. So to wrap up this novel of a blog post, here’s a picture of Travers in I in one of the fancy/historical establishments in NO- Antoine’s. Luckily we went there for lunch, which served 3 purposes: (1) the meal was cheap, (2) martinis were even cheaper ($0.25!), and (3) we didn’t get laughed out of the restaurant because of what we were wearing.

Us at fancy Antoine's taking advantage of the lunch special :p