New Orleans

I'm not much for taking pictures, and find it funny when I get home from a trip and the photos I have are not at all the things that were truly memorable. Because when I'm in the middle of living life, I forget to take a photo. I was in New Orleans last month, right when the river was feared to crest in the city, and before it got disgustingly hot. The first day, all I could do was marvel and how dirty and smelly it was. Seriously, even with my prior job and a dog with a penchant for rolling in small mammal corpses, I never encountered such a grotesque array of smells as I did on Bourbon St. And cockroaches roamed the sidewalks in the good part of town!

But there is something about NOLA. It really gets under your skin, and you can't help but want to return and experience more of it. My friend and I went shopping one afternoon on Magazine St. and stumbled into a movie set - Bruce Willis was in town filming a new movie called Lay the Favorite. He wasn't on site just then, but it was still cool. There's also so many neat old houses and unique sights.

The chimney tops on this house were fascinating. Speaking of beautiful places, we were lucky enough to stay at The Roosevelt Hotel, a newly restored turn of the century hotel. It's the best hotel I've ever stayed in, and had a lot of character that added to its charm. It even had a working brass letterbox. You could drop a letter in the slot on any floor and watch it fall to the lobby letterbox through the glass chute.

So many memories are jumbled - The Sazerac Bar, home of the official cocktail of New Orleans, which changed my view of classic cocktails forever. Riding the trolley, perhaps my favorite way to get around town. People watching was definitely high on the list. The unusual accents from many of the native people. This tree seemed so classic Louisiana to me, I had to stop for a photo.