beignet, done that.

so where did we leave off?

we left austin pretty early because we knew that we’d want to get the full new orleans experience. and we certainly did. the drive from point a to point b was actually pretty interesting, too, especially compared to what we’d been driving through previously. it was boring boring dirty south for a while, but then all of a sudden we were driving on these extremely long, extremely low-lying bridges that were just about skirting various bodies of water (mostly lakes, i believe). we saw some abandoned/destroyed houses along the way, but i think we were all a little surprised by how few there really were. we go stuck in some ridiculous traffic in baton rouge, but otherwise it was pretty smooth sailing. smooth SLOWER sailing.

we had made hotel reservations for new orleans before we left the austin hotel to make sure that we ended up in an area that we were all comfortable with (aka, not sketchy), and we decided to splurge a little in order to do that. so we drove right up and did a little valet action (ooh la la) at the lovely sheraton hotel, which just so happened to be right at the edge of the french quarter.

so when we finally got through the hoopla of getting to the room and whatnot, we prettied ourselves up and headed out. we had gotten recommendations from a handful of people of places to check out, and on our way to those locations we stopped for dinner on chartres and happened to get the best waiter eveeeeeeer. super fun. he enabled our drinking for a while, and gave us a couple of gay bar options to check out, so after we were finished taking pictures with him, we headed on our way.

we stopped at pat o’brien’s on our way (which was one of the recommendations) and got a hurricane for the three of us, which was basically just fancy jungle juice, watered down. but we had some nice photo ops in front of the blazing fountain we were standing near. and then we found the apparent “gay corner” of the french quarter, and watched some boys in thongs dance on the bar. hilarious.

by the time we walked out of there (around 11), the streets had been blocked off and there were people EV-ERY-WHERE. it was pretty much complete madness. i’m still on the fence if it was the remaining spring breakers or if it’s really just like that all the time, but i’m leaning towards the latter. but it was super fun, and we saw people trying to get beads, and lucy and mariel got awesome giant plastic cups (with drinks in them, of course), and we just hung out on the balcony of some bar with a live band watching everyone. we finally stumbled home around 1230 and went to sleep. for four hours.