Day 18: New Orleans, LA

Stop 15:  New Orleans, LA

Today started out wet.  While we were eating breakfast, it started to thunder, lightning and pour.  We stayed in for a while, hoping to wait it out, but the storm showed no sign of abating.  Finally, I put on yesterday's dirty clothes and my Crocs and waded into the storm.  I got us hooked up in record time and stepped back into the trailer to dry off and put on some clean, dry clothes.

New Orleans is a 206 mile trip from Lake Charles and we outran the storm after about 50 miles.  The landscape today was mostly swamp and jungle.  No hills, the road skimmed along just above the level of the water.  Occasionally, the trees pulled back to show us something like this (Henderson Swamp):

There were several 20 mile stretches where the East and Westbound lanes were 2 long bridges over the water.  Once you entered one of those stretches, the was no exiting or turning around until you got to the end.

As we approached New Orleans, the road along the edge of Lake Ponchartrain wasn't much different.

The Magellan saga continues:  This morning, the Magellan refused to show us any kind of a map.  It showed the step by step instructions and showed a graphic representation of each transition point but that was it.  At around Lafayette, it sounded an alarm and warned me to slow down.  It is supposed to do this any time that I hit 5 MPH over the trailer speed limit but it hasn't done this since Williams, AZ on day 4.  To summarize,  we lost a function and we regained a function.

At Baton Rouge, we were about to approach a big bridge when 2 things happened.  First, Magellan let out a loud clang and announced "Fatal error!".  Kristen was just starting to panic when the phone rang (it was Briar).  About 10 minutes later, we suddenly looked at each other and said "You know, I'll bet that that was the Mississippi River".  With the Magellan acting up, we actually missed the Mississippi River.

Funny this is, since the reboot after the fatal error, the Magellan has been acting like it's old self.  Whatever happened in Williams that it didn't like has probably been working toward this failure the entire time.

We're going to be in New Orleans for 2 nights so, this afternoon, we did a little sightseeing but mostly we scouted out what we want to do tomorrow.  First, we walked around the Garden District:

 

Also in the Garden District, we walked through one of New Orleans' famous above ground cemeteries:

 

 

Next, we strolled around the French Quarter (crazy place!) and had some dinner:

We had dinner at a 225 year old Creole restaurant in the Quarter.  This is our fried alligator appetizer.  It was a little chewier than chicken nuggets but, otherwise, was pretty much the same.

Finally, our New Orleans campsite:

-J-