Trip Day #1: New Orleans

I am so sad to say I am back from my cruise.

To remember it forever, I'm going to attempt to recap all of the fun!

We started our drive at about 5am and it FLEW by! I couldn't believe how fast it went, thank God!
Seemed like we were driving through the swamp lands foreverrr.....everything seemed to be dead. Bummer.

We started getting close to New Orleans and I was "co-pilot", so I put the address of the hotel we found into my phone's GPS.
Side note: It was a bit of an ordeal to book the hotel, because we couldn't choose between the one we knew was in a decent area, or the one that was half the price. We went with the cheaper one..... 


Here was what came up on my phone....

 
A pawn shop and Big Momma's Chicken Waffles......great. We immediately started to get worried. We got into the parking lot and got even more worried. It definitely did not look like a safe place for 4 girls to stay alone. We had less than 2 minutes before the cut off for cancelling rooms, and since we all were too chicken to get out of the car to go in, we called from the parking lot. So it's now ~4pm and we are in NOLA with no place to stay for the night. We start driving (aimlessly) back towards the French Quarter, and 3 of us hurriedly get on our phones to book another room. At this point, we don't really care how much we have to pay--anything was better than that dump! We found a place less than a mile from the French quarter and stuck with it.

The first street band we saw- with tons of people dancing

 After that hectic hour, we decided to make the best of the night and walk to Bourbon Street. We hurriedly got ready at the hotel, had a drink we before we left, and set out for the night. 

We saw some interesting things to say the least!!! Here are a few mild pictures :)

My dad and aunt advised us to go to Pat O'Brien's to try their famous hurricanes, so we did just that! We definitely took in the atmosphere along the way, but felt a sense of safety once we finally found it. There were a lot of sketchy places that we clearly did not belong!

I had to take this swamp picture for my boyfriend. It was so odd to me that 1st of all, there was a place called "The Swamp" (who would want to go there?) and 2nd --by the way I didn't even notice this at first-- that there was a man standing there all night dressed in that swamp stuff. So. Weird.

Anyway, we found Pat O'Brien's and immediately got a drink. It had been a rough day, after all! We all had to go with the famous Hurricanes...they were well worth the $8 or whatever they were! They were HUGE! And very strong. We ended up eating dinner there, which was really good as well. I thought I might as well get something "famous" that I couldn't eat at home, so one of the girls and I split an appetizer- it had gumbo, coconut shrimp (my fave), crawfish etouffee, and jambalaya. You know what they say - "When in Rome..."! I found out I wasn't a big crawfish person, but hey, can't say I didn't try. The rest was amazing, and after dinner we went to the piano bar and spent the rest of the evening there. I'm not sure how we all made the walk back, but thank God we did. :) It was a great night to kick off our trip. I only have one picture of us from the night -