Audubon Zoo

I guess New Orleans is a big city.  To be honest, I think I'm growing accustomed to visiting "big" cities.  Chicago and New Orleans seem not-so-bad anymore after having visited, driven through downtown, and become lost in both.  Given the climate, it makes sense that the city has one heck of a neat zoo.  We try to hit things for the kids in addition to mom & dad attractions and zoos are a classic place for the kids that's pretty much guaranteed to please.  We bought in to a multi-package which got us tickets to the zoo, the aquarium, IMAX 3D movie, and insectarium.  No, we didn't visit all of them in the same day.  Not to mention, they are in very separate parts of the city.  So, today's post is about the zoo, and a beautiful one it was.  One of the best I've been to.

Yeah, this is the entrance

Elephants!

This guy was so cool, I couldn't help at take a few pictures.

Parker the tourist

I wish my work day was this hard

The center point of the zoo

The kids couldn't resist the jungle house and rope walk.

It really is a kid trap.  We couldn't keep our kids out of it.

The Laura Plantation

We knew that visiting a Mississippi River plantation was on our list of things to do when in the New Orleans area.  We've heard that Oak Alley (think Forrest Gump) is highly commercialized and doesn't have any slave quarters.  Why are slave quarters important?  Well, because they existed.  They were a real part of every plantation whether we like to think about it or not.  As with so many things that Andrea and I like to visit, authenticity is important.  We'd rather see it honest than see it glossed or glammed-up.  We received a tip that the Laura Plantation was one such place.  After visiting, it seemed quite so.  There are still some slave quarters, which amazingly housed workers (paid) until the 1970's.  There is a gift shop that you "must" walk through to get in or out and the house itself was rebuilt after almost complete destruction about a decade ago due to a fire.  Of course, it is no longer a working plantation, but nevertheless the history was there.

Standing out in front of the house, awaiting our tour to start.  I was amazed that there were about 5 nationalities represented in the crowd.  One person didn't even speak English (was there with a family member who could translate).

Wine Wine Wine Wine Wine Wine.  The cellar of the house was quite the wine store in it's day.  They stored and sold a lot of wine in this plantation house.

"...and this holds mommy and daddy juice."

No, we didn't teleport to Central America.  This is in the back yard of the plantation and, yes, there are bananas growing  in October.

Remaining slave quarters.  This is a duplex, if you can believe it.  In the heyday of the plantation, these houses stretched for 4 miles in two rows out from the plantation house and into the sugar cane field.

Another view of the house's backyard and beginning of the slave quarter row.

Amazingly the kids have cute moments.  We didn't even have to ask them to do this.

So earlier I said that Oak Alley was commercialized.  Well, that doesn't mean we didn't visit there, though!  Unlike Laura, we did not tour Oak Alley.  But, they have a pretty good restaurant.  Out where the plantations are located, there's not a lot of "town" there.  So, we were kinda at the mercy of what was available.  So, this was foodie stop #3 in the New Orleans area. I bought the creole sampler which resulted in a bowl of shrimp gumbo, shrimp etouffee, and andouille sausage.  It was pretty good and the price wasn't over the top, either.  As we left Oak Alley, we did like pretty much anyone going by the front of the house and just stopped in the middle of the road to take a picture.  Does it look like Forrest Gump?  I think the trees were a few years younger when it was filmed.

The entrance to Oak Alley from the Mississippi River

Plantations were abundant on the journey.  Houses like these were found all along the road as we drove back toward New Orleans.

...and this one

New Orleans

One of the two major multi-night stops that we were to make on this trip was New Orleans.  Being the foodies that we are, it was a goal to visit sometime in our life.  Having now been there, I can see us going back sometime in our travels.  In the coming days, I'll be concentrating on some of the specific places we went in New Orleans, but this post is about the city itself.  Andrea did her research on this one and had a lot of must-do's mapped out.  We also had the help of a fellow Airstreamer (that we contacted through Airforums.com) that lives locally.  He suggested the state park that we stayed at: Bayou Segnette State Park.   It was a great suggestion and he stopped by with his Airstream to say hello.  He also gave us some hints about where to get the best food.  We met another Airstream in the park.  Ironically, they ended up moving on to the same next stop as us (Gulf Shores, AL) on their way home to Georgia.

There were a lot of house like this "on the Bayou" along the interstate on the drive in.

Shrimpin' boats?

Me in my "work station"

Travelling in style, a bit bored maybe, though.

Bayou Segnette State Park is really nice and very clean. It's rather small but sites are still well spread out. There's not a lot of older and large trees for shade, but hey, you're camping on what once was and sometimes still is, a swamp. The drive from the ranger station to the campground is somewhat awkward, but in the end it's nice because it gets you far away from road noise and you get a nice view of the still ongoing levy construction. The only pain of the park was their newly constructed "speed tables" where my hitch dragged at every one. Stick to speed bumps, not "tables," please. The playgrounds are newer which was a bonus. You never know what you're going to get when you ask to be near the playground. It ranges from a basic bank of swings from 1960 to things like shown below. There are two bath houses at Bayou Segnette and both have laundry facilities. Amazingly, the laundry facilities are FREE. Yup. No quarters here and no half-dried clothes. They have the same home-type machines with all the fancy settings for wash cycle and drying time. Highly recommended campground.

The view from under our awning

The kids kinda just sleep where ever they stop.

As I took this picture of the moon over our campsite I knew that Hurricane Sandy was wreaking havoc back home, but hey, it's vacation.

We needed a pause in the middle of a downright hot day in downtown New Orleans.  There was an open-air bar with a live band so we stopped.

 

We were camped on the south side of the river so we had to take a ferry across to town.  This is a view of the french quarter from our ferry ride.

More french quarter

Downtown

Foodie stop #1

Foodie stop #2 - Mother's for a Po Boy, and a great one it was.

Whadda ya know, another National Park; in downtown New Orleans.  There really isn't much to it other than the visitors center, but the Jazz National Park was still neat and we scored 3 or 4 more cancellations for the passports.

The neat things you find off the beaten path

Something that I like to do, although we don't do it nearly as often as I'd like, is to travel NOT on the interstate highways.  On our route from the Meriwether Lewis Monument to our next campsite in central Mississippi, there really was no way to make it by interstates or 4 lane roads without going hours out of our way.  So, we let the GPS guide us on the "fastest" route through the back roads of Tennessee and Mississippi.  Most of it Andrea found boring and there wasn't much for mobile internet signal so she was relegated to reading books for most of this leg of the trip.  One of the gems that we accidentally happened upon on the trip was the Shiloh National Military Park.  We had no idea it was even on the route and only decided to pull in because we saw a sign on the road that the entrance was in some thousand feet.  We didn't really plan on doing much other than hitting the visitor center and getting some cancellations and moving on.  In the end, we spent about 2 hours there and barely scratched the surface for what one can see at this National area.  Contained with in the Battlefield area is also a National Cemetery and ruins of Indian mounds.

This drummer boy wasn't much older than Parker

The entrance to the National Cemetery

We tried to teach the boys some respect here.  It sorta worked.  It's amazing to think that most if not all of the trees were not present when the cemetery was made.  There's a number of places where headstones have been displaced due to tree growth.  Despite being in Tennessee, the largest numbers of troops buried here are from Illinois and Ohio.  Shiloh has many memorials to troops from many states.  This was a big battlefield.

Whenever we do nature hikes, the boys demand that we stop and read every sign .  Now that Parker is reading pretty well, he wants to try to read them.  Unfortunately, most of the vocab. is too much for him and he gets frustrated.

That big river in the background is the main reason for why so many Ohio and Illinois troops were at this battlefield.  The river can be traced back up to the the Ohio River near the southern tips of Indiana and Illinois.  At the point of this photo, we were on top of an ancient Indian Mound.  The Indians had (apparently) chosen the spot as well for its strategic location on the river.

So eventually we had to get to a campsite for the night.  Finally, we would pull in to a place with hookups and be able to have a supremely warm night of sleep as well as dump the tanks.  We had chosen the Roosevelt State Park in central Mississippi.  Although we took the rural way to it, it is located right off of I-20.  The park is actually two campgrounds and a public-use park around a lake.  We got there on a Sunday night and stayed only one night which worked well for us.  We got there after-hours and a camper explained that there was a big foliage festival during the coming week and weekend and that the campgrounds would likely be packed soon.  But, on this Sunday evening there was a plethora of site choices, most of which were lakeside.  I had to chuckle when the helpful camper (in a 30+ foot motor home) told me that I ought to go to the campground on the other side of the lake because it was, "newer, bigger sites, not so many trees around, and sewer on each site.  That's where I'd be if I weren't here with this group." As he gestured to the other motor homes parked near him as well as one rolling in. That made my mind up for me...I was going for the "older" park buried in the conifers before me.  As you can see below, we had a beautiful site.  I gathered some fallen wood and made the only campfire that we had on the entire trip.  It was really great to sit by the lake around a fire and make some popcorn.  I've learned in the past that the true beauty and magic of sitting around a campfire is very lost in pictures, so I didn't take any.

2 weeks of vacation

For the first time since Andrea and I have known each other, let alone with kids, we took a two week vacation.  We've sorta done that before, but it's been mixed with business trips so 100% of the trip wasn't non-work, family time.  This time, it was a solid 2 weeks and 3 weekends of vacation...with the Airstream.

Originally, this trip was to be just to Disney World and back and we planned to take the Argosy (motor home).  The motor home was bought 1.5 years ago almost specifically for this trip.  But, due to an opportunity afforded to me by my job, it became more beneficial to take the Airstream (trailer).  Also, the more miles that could be driven, the better.  So, our trip went from being to-from Disney World in the motor home to a 3000+ mile round trip including some national parks, a stay in New Orleans, and some beach camping along the Gulf of Mexico.

In the coming days and starting with this post, I'll share mostly pictures of our travels and what the family got to on our vacation with the Airstream.

Our first leg of the trip was to meander our way to New Orleans.  We made no reservations for overnight stays anywhere except for Disney.  Our objective in the first evening of travel was to make it as far as possible and stay overnight in a parking lot somewhere and keep moving the next day.  We did that, and as we continued moving down I-75 through Kentucky, we decided that we could pop in to Mammoth Cave National Park (unplanned).  We figured we'd be back on the road after lunch.  Just before the exit for Mammoth Cave, traffic on I-75 came to a solid stop.  A tanker truck carrying hazardous cargo had been in an accident and spilled.  The highway would be closed for the day.  The state highway patrol was having all vehicles, including semis, motor homes, and cars turn around on the road or back-up until the nearest cross-over and return the other direction to a detour.  So, we too did this and after following the SLOW detour, we ended up at Mammoth Cave at (not before) lunchtime.  We ate lunch, then went on our tour.  Both kids were awesome with the dark and tight spaces.  Surprisingly, neither one got bored or rambunctious.  We had chosen the shortest and most kid-friendly tour.  We wish we would have chosen a longer tour, but didn't have time to do a second tour.

Low clearance ahead.  No problem for the kids, but not so easy for dad.

Going down to view the "Niagara Falls" from the bottom.  It was about 42 steps down at a pretty steep grade.  Half the adults on the tour opted out but the kids charged right down.

 

Our next stop was the Meriwether Lewis National Monument in Tennessee.  The intent here was two-fold.  One, to get a cancellation (rubber stamp) in the kids' National Park passports.  Two, to camp there for free (boondocking) in the campground located within the state park that contains the national monument.  I really wish I would have taken some pictures of the campground because for free, it's an under-utilized diamond in the rough.  Paved roads and pretty level sites, new bath houses, all on top of a hill.  They even have pull-through sites for those staying overnight like me who have no intention of unhitching.  There were a lot of big rig motor homes in there.  There was a communal camp fire, too.  Pretty adventurous for the big-rig full-time crowd.  They said that in the past weekends when the colors were better and the weather a bit warmer, the campground actually was fully filled.  I'm glad to hear it because it's a great place.

There was a cancellation there for the boys' National Park Passports, but we unfortunately found out that the visitor's center is only open on Sat. and Sun. from 9 to 5.  We woke up to a cold trailer about 5:30am (battery ran low and therefore the furnace wouldn't run) so by the time I got up and went out and started the truck, we slept a bit more, and did our morning routine, it was all of about 7:30am.  We saw the monument (forgot to take a picture), skipped the stamp, and hit the road.