My good friend Matt lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, aka NOLA, and once we got to his place we decided to hole up there for a couple months. NOLA is a place I’d been to once before and spending more time getting to know it was on my to-do list.
The city is a great city. Even the ground is cool – mixed in with the dirt are little pieces of seashells, all over the place – I’m guessing from all the floods? The streets are all broken up everywhere from the constant land subsidence – by this point I only had my (very sturdy) road bike, but a mountain bike is honestly the way to go in this city.
And houses all look kind of awesome. They tend to be around 100 years old and show the influences of the Spanish, French and Italian cultures which went into this city. They are built high up to avoid most flooding. A balcony and porch seem to be mandatory.
And New Orleans is just about the friendliest place I’ve been in America. Strangers frequently greet one another with genuine warmth.
Here are some in-depth looks at the Big Easy:
Solid things to put in your mouth!
Liquid things to put in your mouth!
This just in! (June 2021). At the end of my trip, I circled back to New Orleans, as described in the last section of the “traveling around America” section of my site. So, I added a few more places to eat and drink that I didn’t get to my first time around.