CROSS COUNTRY

Atlanta
New Orleans
San Antonio
Truth or Consequences
Tombstone
Winslow
Grand Canyon
Las Vegas
Portland
Vancouver
Red Lodge
Wall
Minneapolis
Boston
Washington, D.C.

New Orleans, Louisiana

(The Steamy City Steeped in History)

Excerpts from Kristy:
May 26-27, 1998

There's a lot of beauty in New Orleans and plenty of history filled with love, hardship, success and pain. We ate Creole, we ate Cajun, but the place that sticks in my mind was a corner cafe that we stopped at for lunch. The menu gave the customer so many convoluted rules to follow that I thought we'd wandered into a prison. But, as we teetered on our chairs in the open-air area between the restaurant and the sidewalk, I experienced that easy, laid-back feeling that only exists in New Orleans. Contrary to the sketchy descriptions on the menu, the food was delicious. And our quirky waiter served up a Cajun accent that made the meal absolutely perfect.

Between meals, which is one of the best parts of New Orleans, we traipsed around Jackson Square, the Mint, the Pharmacy Museum and even saw an angel. An angel? Yes, an angel. A woman dressed all in white with her limbs and face painted white, stood in front of the cathedral with the other street performers. Never having seen anything like her, we sat for hours watching. She stood perfectly still and posed with tourists who dropped money in her pristine white urn. She ended her evening by stepping down from her pedestal, which she flipped over to use as a carrying crate for her props.

There's just nowhere else like New Orleans in the United States. Maybe it's the steamy weather that saps the energy out of you or maybe it's the underlying energy that revives and bursts onto the streets at night, but what a way to begin our trip.