Tours, tours and more tours.

Based on the recommendation of a neighbor, we went with Southern Style Tours yesterday morning for their 3 hour city tour.  I can say a lot about the tour, but the best way to describe it is Wow.  What a great morning.  

We were the first people to be picked up by our driver, Gary Kuhn who is a Packers fan because his wife bought him a Kuhn jersey some years back.  He is a Saints fan first though. We had a pretty good drive around town while picking up about 7-8 more groups for our bus.  We had everyone picked up 15 minutes early which was a bonus.  

That bonus was stopping at the Happy Raptor Rum Distillery.  With this stop, we were able to get a little fruit juice for breakfast and a bottle of banana rum for Florida.  It’s a small local distillery and their to go drinks were 👍.  We toured all over the city.  I’m sure I’m going to miss some locations.  Gary was joking that getting a degree in History allows you to drive a bus.  I’m not sure if he was joking, but he was a wealth of knowledge.  

After the distillery, we toured the garden district and shown the first neighborhoods of N.O.  Some very impressive houses and architecture.  He also pointed out houses that have been used in movies and for MTV Real World.  We also saw Nicholas Coppola’s house, he is better known as Nicholas Cage and it’s not really his house anymore.  If you don’t pay taxes, the government may take your house.

 We drove by multiple cemetery’s and learned why everyone is entombed above ground.  Nawlins gets about 67” of rain with half of that in June, July and August.  The city is really close to sea level with some of it below sea level.  This rain and high water table would cause corpses to rise to the surface or “boil” to the surface during heavy rains.  More on cemetery history later...ahh, let’s talk about it now.  Later is the day we went to St Louis Cemetery #3 and were allowed to walk around.  It’s pretty macabre to tour  cemetery, but it was also pretty cool.  

The above ground tombs are meant for 1-16 pine boxes.  Nothing fancy as far as coffins go.  For the smaller tombs with large families, there’s a small basement in the tomb or a hatch that goes down.  Embalming is not commonplace here so when you pass, you go in the pine box and get slid into the spot.  One year and one day later, they come and take your bones out of the box, bag them and put them in the basement to make room for other family.  The temps in the tombs get to 230* + Fahrenheit so it is really effective and breaking down a body.  Weird right...

We stopped at the city park and got Beignets from Cafe Du Monde.  The French Doughnuts are like funnel cakes.  We toured the French Quarter a bit, but we had already walked down there.  It was nice to catch a little more history on it.  We learned about the drink of New Orleans, the Sazerac.  It was originally given out at an Apothecary to cure what ails you.  Alcohol in some form was the drink of the day in the 1800’s as it was safer than water.  We also heard about the Sazerac House on our tour and decided to book a free tour there.  That was later in the day.  

Gary then took us out into the 7, 8 and 9th wards.  These areas were profoundly impacted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 9th ward still reflects that.  80% of the city flooded.  These areas got it the worst.  We saw where the levees were breached near the 7th ward, pouring up to 15 feet of water into the area homes.  The levees here let the water in slower than the shipping canal breaches in the 9th ward.  15-20feet of water came rushing in.  This water was mostly salt water and sat on and in these homes for months.  

The city had a reaction plan for a large hurricane, not a proactive plan.  They had room for 800 people at the Superdome and eventually ended up with 60,000.  Gary told us they are better prepared now, but the city is still under the population it was pre-Katrina.  The 9th ward is at 70-80% of its original population.  After our tour with Gary, we came back and walked the kids a mile around the park.  We put them back in the rig and headed for town.  

We had lunch at Trenasse and then walked to the Sazerac House for our tour of their facilities.  They are a sister distillery to Buffalo Trace in Kentucky.  Sophie was our tour guide and she did an alright job.  She was very knowledgeable, but very animated and theatrical describing things.  It seemed a little over the top, but it was a good tour.  The tour starts on the 3rd floor and works down.  We learned even more history about the Sazerac, bitters and how it went from a cognac drink to a rye whiskey drink.  It is now absinthe, rye, sugar, bitters and lemon.  It was very unique, good but different.  

We then learned about rum production and sampled a real Daquiri, not the sugared up slush from spring break, but a real daquiri.  We would also highly recommend this tour.  It was 90 minutes and was free.  

After a little more walking around town and a to-go margarita  we came back to the rig for the night.  Overall, it was a great day.  

Off to Mississippi today.