I don’t know how New Orleans got that nickname, but for sure, it has the most unique combinatorics of any city this traveler has ever visited.
Not that it matters, but contrary to movie and TV stereotypes, natives pronounce the name of their city “New Orleans”, not “Nawlins”; those parts of the city through which the Mississippi flows are above sea level; and violent criminals do not lurk on every corner. I walked around unaccompanied during daylight hours, and saw plenty of other people doing the same.
The downtown area seems to have recovered from Katrina. We stayed in a hotel across the street from Harrah’s, and that part of the city, the Warehouse/Arts District, is dedicated to tourism, with hotels on every block.
We got to “the Quarter”, Bourbon Street, took the free ferry across the Mississippi River and back, and in a deliberate homage to New Orleans as literary muse, I made it a point to ride on one of her famous streetcars to the Garden District.
The cuisine is fabulous, out of this world, especially for fish lovers. Every meal, including the Rotary food festival across the street from the hotel where I took supper one evening, was savory and delicious.
The city is very walkable because it’s so flat, but it was hot and humid enough even in mid-April that a half-hour stroll left me totally drenched.
I came back so exhausted that when we got to Boston, I couldn’t find my car or house keys, which it turned out had lodged in the previously undiscovered bottom liner of my overnight bag.
My sympathetic boss, who had volunteered to schlep three of us from Logan, went out of his way to drop me off at a local motel. I insisted on this because of the late hour; by the time I checked in, it was after midnight, and I figured a better plan than the one that was suggested on the way back (pound on my son’s door for a ride to my house, at which point I would gain entrance by breaking my least-favorite window) would present itself after a decent night’s sleep.
I have never quite been convinced of an afterlife, but two things happened on the trip back home, which followed my friend Carolyn’s passing, and they’ve given me pause.
The first occurred when I was on the plane from Charlotte to Boston. I was thirsty and not satisfied with the meager little plastic cup of juice the flight attendant handed me, when a full can of orange juice fell off the service cart and rolled under my feet.
This may not seem unusual, but in the dozens of flights I’ve taken, this was the first time such a thing happened to me.
The second had to do with the misplacement of my keys. I’d emptied both my travel bags at the airport the night before, literally depositing everything, including laundry, on the hard plastic waiting area seats, where I could thoroughly inspect pockets, socks and other hiding places.
I’d even handed my unpacked bags to someone else, an engineer by trade and thus a good person for Q/A. He couldn’t find the keys, either.
The next morning, I found the keys by examining the outside bottom of my travel bag with my fingers and feeling an irregular shape. Why I did this I will never know, except that before Carolyn died, she promised to be “around” me always.
So, I can’t help but believe it was her good influence that led me to find the way to find my keys.
This seems fitting for a trip back from New Orleans, a city whose culture and geography have made it famous as a place that hovers between worlds.