Travel day is always so exciting because of all of the anticipation of your upcoming trip! We were so excited to go on the Carnival Dream that we loaded the car the night before and got up at 6:30 am to begin our drive to New Orleans! And the boys were so excited that they actually stayed awake for the first half of the drive which is amazing because they normally go to sleep immediately in the car that early in the morning. It was Easter Sunday so there were very few cars on the road and we did not run into any traffic at all, also unusual because traffic in Baton Rouge can be a nightmare! But we made great time and arrived in less than three and a half hours into the ‘Crescent City’ aka NOLA aka New Orleans.
We drove by the port and the parking garage to get our bearings and then headed over to the French Quarter to walk and enjoy the beautiful day and kill a couple of hours until it was our set time to board the ship. We parked right along the Mississippi River near Jackson Square so we only had a very short walk to the heart of the Quarter. But first we crossed the trolley tracks and walked up on the levee to get our first glimpse of our ship not far off in the distance. The Carnival Dream and the Norwegian Pearl (I think, or maybe the Dawn…) were the two ships at the Port of New Orleans this morning. Also on the levee was some fun entertainment in the form of… Saints Vader. What is ‘Saints Vader’ you ask? Well this is a guy with a costume that is a mix of Darth Vader and the New Orleans Saints. He was very entertaining!
Walking into the French Quarter we immediately encounter one of the things we love so much about New Orleans and that is the local musicians! They are all over and are wonderful! The game plan of the morning was to go to Cafe Du Monde for some beignets… but I guess everyone else had the same idea as the place was packed and there was a line a block long to get in! Needless to say, we decided to bypass our original destination and just go for a walk. But luckily, just a couple of blocks down, we found yet another café selling coffee and beignets! This was called ‘New Orleans Famous Beignets & Coffee’ so we decided to give it a try as there was almost no wait at all. They did not disappoint and were hot and yummy and we looked like we took a bath in powdered sugar, but that is to be expected. Tummies full and everyone hopped up on sugar, we continued our walk around Jackson Square over to St. Louis Cathedral. Being Easter, there were lots of people all dressed up to attend church but there were also plenty like us in casual clothes so no one felt out of place. There was some great calliope music playing somewhere in the area although we could never seem to pinpoint where it was coming from… But we found something I know had to have been there a while but we had never noticed and that was a huge tree completely covered in Mardi Gras beads! Pretty cool!
Around the corner was another new find for us which was a hot sauce bar… Never seen anything like this before… It was a store with one side all shelves of spicy items like seasonings and jellies and the other wall is nothing but hot sauce! In every pepper, name, variety, anything you could think of this store has it! And in the center is a tasting bar where you can try, if you are brave enough, some of the different sauces and jellies. So we managed to use up all of our free time exploring a very tiny portion of a very amazing city! On to the ship…
YouTube EECC Travels - New Orleans
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Thanks,
Alisa
EECC Travels
Labels: CRUISING
