New Orleans: Day 3

Had another early morning today! Started with the complimentary buffet breakfast downstairs in the casino. Describing it as "mediocre" may misrepresent it too positively. Next time - we go out for breakfast. We got exactly what we paid for on this one! After studying the streetcar maps for a while, we felt pretty confident about using it as transportation for the day. It still wasn't that simple, and there was some initial confusion about where exactly the street car going to the Garden District stopped, but we ended up waiting for only 5 or 10 minutes and along it came.


It took 20-30 minutes to get to the Garden District from the shopping area where we caught the St. Charles streetcar. The Garden District is my favorite area of New Orleans - it's clean, it's leafy and it is full of Old South plantation goodness. The Victorian homes in this section of the city have been around for centuries, which makes them seem even more grand as you drive past them on the streetcar. We decided to take the streetcar all the way to the end where it turns around, but to be honest, there's not much to see once you pass the Tulane and Loyola campuses. We also walked through a little bit of Audubon Park across from the campuses then hopped on the streetcar and headed back the way we came.

Our next stop was to head to the Canal Street Ferry to go check out the historic town of Algiers across the Mississippi River. It all worked out because we didn't really have anything else to do, but if we had, this would have been a monumental waste of time. We grabbed a map at the ferry building that indicated all the historic landmarks in Algiers to check out. The ferry ride took less than 10 minutes to get across the river. Algiers is a small area laid out in a grid, but after about ten steps in, we realized there was nothing to see or do here. We went and found a couple of the locations on the map which were pretty unremarkable, and then headed back toward a restaurant we had seen at the ferry, the Dry Dock Bar & Grill. We got just enough to tide us over until our dinner reservation and headed back across on the ferry, joking about how we should tell everyone waiting on the ferry at the other side to "Turn around - there's nothing to see."


After we got back from Algiers, we decided to use the streetcar pass we had that was good for the whole day to take the Riverfront streetcar up the Mississippi River...just a way to kill some time and see a little more of the city from a different perspective. This ultimately turned out to be pretty pointless, as there wasn't much to see from where the rail runs, but it did provide some much-needed time off our feet. Bottom line - the St. Charles streetcar line is the only one worth taking if you are looking for a sightseeing-type ride.

By this point it was time to go take a nap (yay) and get ready for our dinner reservation at Emeril Lagasse's restaurant, NOLA. And what a delicious meal this was! I had the Barbecued Gulf Shrimp with Rosemary Biscuit as an appetizer at the suggestion of our fantastic waiter. For my entree, I went with the Grilled Seasonal Fish with Fingerling Potatoes, Sweet Corn, Portobello Fries, Grape Tomatoes and Black Truffle Butter Sauce (I can't remember what type of fish it was, oops!). But anyways, everything was amazing. I love restaurants where all the plates are set down at the same time and they use the little crumb sweeper to tidy up your table between each course. I had a bite of the NOLA Banana Pudding Layer Cake off my dad's dessert plate, but I couldn't hold much more food in. Next time, that banana pudding is MINE!


We have to be up quite early tomorrow morning to catch the return train back to Birmingham, so making it an early night. Goodbye New Orleans...until next time!