New Orleans – We’ve Arrived!
We arrived in New Orleans without incident on Tuesday May 10th, late in the afternoon, and checked into the Hotel St. Pierre. Whoever was responsible for the photos we viewed online before booking deserves an award for home staging! It is certainly not all it was reported to be, but the bed is comfortable and the water pressure in the shower is good, so we’ll manage.
Friends of ours from Woodstock happen to be holidaying here as well, Garry Honcoop and Dianne Loft, so we met up with them on Tuesday night and experienced Bourbon Street together before going to Pier 424 for a seafood supper. 
Bourbon Street. Hmmm. What can I say without sounding like a prude? It’s a dirty place, without a doubt. The smell of urine and vomit permeates the air, but people are out in droves, drinks in hand, music blaring from literally dozens of different venues, all trying to lure you through the doors with promises of “3 for 1 drinks”, live music, and scantily clad young women. It is legal to consume alcohol on the streets of New Orleans, and vendors take full advantage of this fact, with kiosks set up throughout the French Quarter where you can stop and by a Hurricane, Margarita, or any other fruity concoction you can think of. As a matter of fact, New Orleans is the birthplace of the cocktail, invented by local pharmacist Antoine Peychaud, when he combined cognac with his own bitters recipe, a drop of water, and a pinch of sugar. Mixed in an egg cup, “coquetier”, which his English-speaking customers mispronounced as ‘”cocktail”.
For our first full day in the city we checked out Cafe du Monde and tried the world famous beignets, which were every bit as delicious as their reputation suggested. We then stopped at the local visitors centre and booked ourselves on a series of tours, the first of which was a Swamp tour.
After a 45 minute drive east of New Orleans, we found ourselves at Honey Island Swamp, where we were treated to a two-hour excursion deep into the swamp, by Captain Bishop. With a degree in marine biology, he really new his stuff. 
The alligators were aplenty and had no qualms about coming up alongside the boat, coaxed by the occasional offer a marshmallow from the Captain. We learned that the distance between a gator’s snout and its eyes is in direct correlation to its overall length – a gator with a 7 inch spread from nose to eyes will be 7 feet in length, etc.
We finished our night back on Bourbon Street, enjoying live music in an open air cafe, followed by more live music in Pat O’Brien’s Piano Bar, before meeting up again with Garry and Dianne for dinner in an open courtyard. 
We’re looking forward to Day #2!
