After leaving Orlando, and Mickey, we drove op along the Florida East Coast, to the Pan-handle. We stopped near Panama City to take a rest day and go to the beach(es) – they sure have beautiful beaches here! We talked about maybe staying another day, just to enjoy the beaches, but ended up continuing to New Orleans on Sunday anyway. As you probably know by now we didn’t make it to New Orleans, but got stuck in Mobile, Alabama!!!

To make a long story short, we got a rental car (Chrysler Pacifica) and drove to New Orleans, to wait out the repair. In New Orleans we found a small hotel, smack in the middle of the French Quarter, from where we could walk to everything and at this time of year the price was pretty reasonable.

We had two days in New Orleans to walk around and see city before the bus would be ready and the first day we got quite a bit of rain in the morning, but we still managed to get one of the famous Muffuletta sandwiches for lunch and Beignets in the afternoon.

This being a Monday evening, and a wet day, we were lucky to meet a brass band walking through the city when we searched for some traditional New Orleans food for dinner. We found the “Gumbo Shop”, where we really enjoyed the taste of New Orleans.

Bourbon Street is a busy party street (think “Jomfru Ane Gade” in Ålborg on steroids mixed with a bit of “Red Light District” from Amsterdam), even on a Monday evening. I’m sure it could be fun partying there, but with a three year old in tow you are not allowed in anywhere. We could have got a cocktail in a “Go Cup” if we wanted, but we went back to the hotel to put Felix to bed and drink a beer in the courtyard instead.

The next day started with some good news: the repair would be about $1000 cheaper than anticipated and some not so good: it would also take two days more, so now we had some more time in New Orleans.

We walked down to the Garden District, where there are some really impressive old houses, but it is really a suburb with nothing much more than that. We thought that there would be a bit more “town” there, but it was mainly a living area.

We mostly spent our time eating, it seems…we got a lot of beignets, we got shrimp and oyster po-boys and more muffuletta sandwiches.

We had dinner at Emeril Lagasse’s restaurant (I know, I know…Bam! and all that….), NOLA, and got some really tasty food. It probably is some of the best food we got on the trip. Sabine got a porterhouse pork chop (big enough to feed a hungry brass band), I got smoked duck and Felix got mussels (again) 🙂 .

We also went to the Palm Court, a Jazz restaurant, and got some reasonably good food and listened to really well played New Orleans style Jazz – and Felix again got all the attention by dancing around to the music 🙂

The French Quarter is very beautiful, and easy to fall in love with. We did see some signs of hurricane Katrina, outside the French Quarter, but here it looked like it never happened. The warehouse district, especially, was different.