HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM/GRANDMA!!
So, no post yesterday because we weren't up to much, just a bit of exploring and booking some tours. Today, however, we definitely made up for it! We started out by heading down to the French Quarter to catch a Cemetery/Voodoo tour which began at 10:00 a.m. We managed to get in quite the tour of the French Quarter, as well, because we got lost trying to find our starting point and got lost again trying to find the parkade where the van was. But we did get to our tour guide in time. Anna Ross Twichell (call me Anna Ross, "two words, not hyphenated - I am definitely a Southener") took us on a walking tour of the St. Louis Cemetery Part I (there are 3 parts), which included some very interesting things, such as the grave of Marie Laveau, the Queen of Voodoo, and the grave of Nicholas Cage - oh wait, he's not dead yet! It is his crypt, though, as he is a resident of New Orleans (apparently he lives in Ann Rice's house now, though he used to live in the most haunted house in New Orleans). Burial space is at a premium here, so you need to know well in advance where you will be buried, we did see a number of examples of individuals who have purchased their crypts and are still alive. Nicholas Cage's, however, was definitely one of the more ..... interesting ones. We took a walk from there to a Voodoo Priestess' temple, where we got to sit down and listen to her chat for a bit.
Then we had to hotfoot it down the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain over to Slidell, to catch our boat for a tour of the bayou - which means slow moving river. FYI, swamp literally means flooded forest. The alligators just didn't stop coming, we saw tons of them. We didn't get to see the male, though. One of the females came storming out to meet us with her back up out of the water, turns out she had babies that she was trying to protect. Gators appear to love hotdogs and marshmallows, as that is what our guide was feeding them. There were no mosquitoes at all, though there were lots of dragonflies (Taz does have the right idea - apparently they are the reason the bayou is clear of mosquitoes). It also did not have a bad smell at all, in fact it was odour neutral (another misconception about swamps). The tour operator took us for a run down the West Pearl River, where we saw a blue heron, lots of turtles sunning themselves, a tiny chameleon, and evidence of Hurricane Katrina....
We are totally exhausted, but all quite happy with the day. Tomorrow the trip home begins....with a few stops of interest along the way!
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