New Orleans

I got on the road and headed to New Orleans. As I was approaching, I realized that I had no idea where I was going _ I knew where I wanted to go, but not really which exit I needed to get off on to get there. Oops. I guessed and it worked out perfectly.

Amanda had done a bunch of virtual geocahing in NO and was nice enough (really went out of her way) to print me a map with the points and write down the questions I needed to answer. Geocaching, if you don;t know, is using a GPS to treasurehunt and look for a hidden container. The fun is finding it, but you can also trade junk, and then you log it in the box and online. Virtual geocaching is finding interesting locations and then answering the questions online to prove that you were there. I have never done a virtual cache before, but it was fun.

It was a little chilly and looked like impending rain. I wore my long sleeves for maybe two hours and carried my rain coat all day - it never rained (but only bc I was prepared).

My first stop was a really tall building right near the water. I walked in and asked the lady at the front deck to tell me about the geocache. She called someone and told me to wait. Alfred met me at the front desk and then took me up an elevator, we got off and got on another one, and then we went on the roof. Alfred pointed out all the buildings to me of any interest as we walked the entire circumference of the roof on the tallest building downtown. It was really neat. It was cloudy, so couldn't see too far, but it was still awesome.

After that I walked around the French Quarter looking for the other landmarks that were my virtual caches. In the meantime, I saw everything I probably would have gone to look at anyway. I saw the French Market, perused the flea market, walked down Bourbon Street, rode a trolley down and visited the Garden District, and people-watched. At first, I didn't see anyone wearing green, but as the day wore on I saw more and more people in crazy green outfits. And if you weren't wearing green, you could have easily picked up some beads at any of the fine junk stores.

I took the free ferry across to Algiers to go to Mardi Gras World. Mardi Gras World is a collection of props and floats from Mardi Gras and every other major parade in New Orleans and the surrounding area. They were getting ready to ship things for a barge parade in Houston. It was neat bc I was able to see how things are made, painted, remade, revamped, and put together. They keep everything and reuse quite a lot of it, by repainting it or changing heads. They had an Alien, famous characters, a couple Elvis figures, Spongebob, fairies, everything.

Back to Sun's for dinner by David - yum.