The Big Easy

True to form, I am now blogging about New Orleans from Dallas, where we are holed up for one night before collecting our RV.

New Orleans was just as beautiful as I imagined, although still very much recovering from Katrina. The newspaper still had cover stories about Katrina every day we were there, and talking to locals (which is what happens when you get a bus to a shopping area outside of tourist town) gave us a sense of how much the city has suffered. Even downtown there are still a lot of shops closed.

Travelling on a very tight budget as we are, our version of a steamboat trip on the Mississippi was a free ferry ride from one side to the other. Andrew and I amused ourselves greatly by reminiscing about how our own parents would have done just the same thing - always the cheap (preferably free) version of whatever everyone else was doing! The kids just looked at us in puzzlement and asked what the point was. We just wanted to say we'd been on the Mississippi.

We've been generally impressed with the famed Southern hospitality and courtesy - and boy, these people are chatty. People just talk to you when you're on the bus, at a restaurant ... anywhere, in fact. I never thought of Australians as reserved, but we obviously have some English reserve compared to Americans (or Southerners, at least). We met some locals at the Acme Oyster House (no, truly, that's what it's called) and they asked us 'Do y'all think we have accents?' What could we say?!

Anyway, Dallas is not the most thrilling place we've been, but the kids are watching Mythbusters, Andrew is snoozing, and we have wireless internet in our hotel room, so all is good. Future instalments may be even more sporadic - in addition to our natural laziness, I'm not sure how much access we're going to have on the Great RV Journey.

By the way, I overcame that laziness to upload a couple of photos, so please do scroll down and take a look ... I promise to add more once I've had a Jack Daniels ...