There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the seating system in the cafe, so as soon as we saw a family standing up from their table we swarmed it and waited for our waitress to wipe it off. The servers here aren't exactly known for their mastery of the English language, but as long as you are getting beignets and coffee/orange juice, you should be good. The beignets come three to a plate, so an order is just right for one person. And they were just as good as I remember! It takes a certain skill to eat them and not stand up doused in powdered sugar, but I'm happy to report this was one of my finer performances at Cafe Du Monde. I don't recommend wearing black if it's your first beignet experience!
For the next hour we strolled around the French Market, which is a section of the city lined with antique stores, souvenir shops, etc. We walked the short distance over to Jackson Square, the home of St. Louis Cathedral, for a few photos. Although it was a breezy winter day, this was a beautiful morning to walk around this landmark area of New Orleans.
We decided to make the 20-minute walk to our next stop, the National World War II Museum. Had it been raining, this would have been a cab ride, but like I said before, we were having a cool, sunny day - perfect for a walk. When we arrived, we went to the main entrance and purchased tickets for the 4-D intro film and passes for the museum. We headed next door to the Solomon Victory Theater, where there was already a line waiting for the next showing. I noticed there was a counter to purchase tickets to the film and museum at the theater as well with much shorter lines than at the main museum entrance we had just come from.
I've found lots of these types of introductory videos in museums can be pretty hit or miss, but this one is definitely not to be missed! Tom Hanks narrates "Beyond All Boundaries," a 50-minute film that basically summarizes the history and major battles of World War II, a good refresher for those of us who haven't thought about World War II since high school history class. The film was so well-presented that you just can't skip it if you are making a stop at the museum.
After the film we went through the entire museum back over in the main building. Being the Monday after Christmas, the museum felt a little crowded. There were entire rooms dedicated to Normandy, the atomic bomb, etc. I really enjoyed seeing all the information about the battles in Japan where one of my uncles had fought - I realized how very little we learn about the Japanese theater in the war, as I hardly recognized any of the locations or names. I felt the same way about the battle at Normandy - reading about all the other battles that happened at the same time, it made me realize there was so much more going on all down that stretch of beach, rather than just a bunch of Americans jumping off the boats at Normandy. One of my favorite things I saw was actually just a tiny detail, but it shows how such a small thing can alter the course of history: In a glass case, the museum had the original typed draft of Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech response to Pearl Harbor. The draft also had Roosevelt's handwritten edits all over the paper, including one of the most famous lines in history being re-worded. The draft read "a date which will live in world history," and then 'world history' was scratched out to read "infamy." What a famous line that almost never came to be!
The museum was fantastic. On our way out, we took a quick photo with the Higgins boat featured in the main entrance room. The Higgins boat, which was the landing craft that brought the American soldiers to shore in every major amphibious assault during the war, was built by Andrew Jackson Higgins and 30,000 other Louisiana workers in Southeast Louisiana. Dwight Eisenhower once claimed that Higgins was "the man who won the war for us." This boat is the reason the National World War II Museum is housed in New Orleans today.
By this point, we were all starving so decided to head over to the waterfront where we were sure there were places to eat. This was a pretty good walk, but we stumbled upon Poppy's Time Out Sports Bar & Grill, which hit the spot as a good-chill place for some bar food and lots of big TVs so that we didn't miss the Georgia Tech game. Although with the divison championships coming up, it looked like the New Orleans Saints had thrown up all over the restaurant. :) I had the crab cake po'boy which was very filling and tasty, especially for a sports bar. The most shocking deal, perhaps coming from the land of $15 mixed drinks, was that for an extra $2, you could make a 12oz beer a 32oz beer that came in a souvenir Saints cup. Pretty decent way to spend $6!
It had been a long day at this point, so we decided to head back to the hotel for a few hours to nap, watch basketball and get ready for our evening plans. After a little re-energizing, we walked back down toward the French Market to the #1 thing I was looking forward to doing, the Haunted History Ghost Tour! We arrived a little early for the 8pm tour, which begins at Reverend Zombie's Voodoo Shop, but our tour guide let us know that if we went next door to Finnegan's, they would give us a 20% discount on a drink that we could then walk around with on the tour. Good old New Orleans with the complete lack of open-container laws...gotta love it.
The tour lasted approximately two hours, and I loved every second of it! Our tour guide was full of information and seemed to have a lot of conviction with what she was saying, which pretty much got me completely caught up in the stories. The tour was pretty extensive, taking us all through the French Quarter and filling us in on a lot of the history of the area - the stories that surrounded the ghosts in the area really made it easy to picture the area as it must have been hundreds of years ago. The LaLaurie Mansion provided perhaps the most disturbing of all the stories, so I'm glad our group hit that spot near the end of the tour. It would have been hard for any of the other stories to top that one! Unfortunately, no ghosts showed up in the photo I took:
Another part of the tour that was fun was when we went to a haunted bar, Jean Lafitte's Old Absinthe House. They gave us time to grab a drink to finish the tour out with (a hurricane for me!) and explore the areas where they have the most ghost sightings in the bar. Again, we headed to the spot where the most ghosts had turned up on film - by the piano - but no luck for us:
After being hit up for tips at the end of the tour, we were famished so headed back to Harrah's where the boys wanted to gamble and we all wanted to grab a foot long Lucky Dog. Now I don't know if we were just that hungry, but we parked at a poker table and scarfed those dogs down pretty darn fast. Tomorrow we're going to head to the Garden District and go across the river to Algiers, so time to rest up!
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