Help Is On The Way - New Orleans, LA 8/6/07

We left Atlanta in the morning bound for New Orleans. It would be around a 7 hour trip that took us through our first experience of the deep south. I remember stopping off at some truck stop diner for breakfast and being surprised about the lack of accents and how it all seemed very "normal" to me.

We stopped at every Welcome Center this trip so we stopped off in Alabama as per our custom. Alabama's motto is still "We Dare Defend Our Rights" even though the war ended 152 years earlier.

Both Alabama and Mississippi weren't much to talk about, just miles and miles of highway and land. It was hot but it was August, it was hot everywhere.

We got off the highway to grab something to eat towards the end of Mississippi. I remember the town being more coastal, almost reminiscent of one those towns right on the outskirts of the Jersey Shore. We ate at a fast food chain and got our first look at a redneck in the wild. All 300 + pounds of man came in behind us, ordered three meals in a thick southern accent, turned to his kid (brother? He didn't look much older then us) and said "Whadda ya wahnt? Hahpee Meel?" 

By the time we hit Louisiana the road had changed. Gone were the fields and forests and now everything seemed to be suspended over never ending swamp. As we approached New Orleans, we went over a massive amount of water that, a little less then two years earlier, had decimated the city. Approaching town, the damage was apparent. There was an abandoned amusement park and neighborhoods that now had houses that were half collapsed and vacant. I had never seen anything like this before (but this scene was repeated in November 2012 upon entering the barrier island after Hurricane Sandy).

New Orleans itself seemed like a town that was half there. Downtown there were still skyscrapers with windows blown out and boarded up. We stayed at the nicest hotel we'd stayed at yet downtown not far from Bourbon Street. In its height during Mardi Gras the room was probably $300 but we were there for just 70 bucks.

We grabed a bite and hit Bourbon Street. Everything about it seemed unworldly. There were, for lack of a better term, booths that sold drinks all along the street. The drinks were dispensed out of what seemed like a slurpee machine. Every bar seemed like a borderline strip club from the outside, the promoters in front tried their best to pull you in, and even the convenience stores had beer on tap. We got a few and took advantage of drinking in the street. We were early, it was a Monday, but Bourbon Street was dead. Here we were, two guys from Pennsylvania just wandering a vacant New Orleans street that years earlier, may have been a spot beyond our belief even on a Monday. We had one more and stood on a balcony but called it a night fairly early. We headed back to the hotel to have a night cap at the bar. We both drank whiskey and chatted up the bar tender, a cute girl in her mid-20s (probably) who stuck around the city even though her whole family had left. She still had a job and she loved the city too much to leave. Halfway through our drink I realized our hotel bar also doubled as a gay bar. Some of the sights there made much more sense after this realization and we'll just have to leave it at that.

The next day brought brilliant sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. On a walk to a McDonalds, I shot one of my favorite photographs, just a picture in the middle of Canal Street of a trolley and palm trees. I can view that as my positive memory of New Orleans after a night of wondering if help was on the way.