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We're baa-ack... :)

Well, we got back yesterday morning, really... but I haven't gotten around to updating until now...

The recap is long... you have been warned... :)

Wednesday night
No, nothing much of interest on Wednesday night, really... we decided that we were gonna stay awake, and just sleep once we got on the train... so Gabe played a lot of PS2, and I played a lot of Civ and cross stitched...

Thursday
So around 1 a.m., we headed over to the train station... it was DAMN cold out, but we were sorta expecting that... sat in the train station for a bit, as the train was running late. We were on the train by 2 a.m., and our sleeper car was already turned into beds for us...

Now let me explain this sleeper car phenomenon... it's TINY. It's tall enough for people to stand up in, but it's basically just a bunk bed, with a door. So we gauged the bunks, and decided that the top one was a tiny bit smaller, so up I went! Of course, though, it was almost impossible to go to sleep. Trains are very bouncy / jerky... there's a whole lot of movement. Most of being on a train involves learning how to shift your weight with the movement of the train so that you can stay upright. In the case of sleeping, it's mostly about trying not to roll off of the bed when the train lurches!

So we got a bit of sleep, though not nearly enough, and woke up around when the train got to Memphis, and they started announcing breakfast... so we got our first real adventure of walking through 4 or so moving cars in order to get to the dining car. And we managed to not fall on anyone, or anything! :)

Breakfast was pretty good, actually. We got introduced to the concept of "community seating," which is basically that each booth seats four people... and there being two of us, we would be seated with another couple, so that the booth was at its maximum capacity. We lucked out, and got to sit with another couple of college aged people, from Memphis, who were also on their way to New Orleans. We made small talk with them while we ate, and had a generally good time, notwithstanding the close proximity of The Laughing Couples (who will come into play later) and The Obnoxious Drunk Talking Man.

So then it was back to our little bunk bed, where we tried to get comfy without going back to bed... eventually we got the sleeper car attendant to come make our beds back into seats, and got to figure out how to arrange ourselves in those to be comfy. Wasn't easy, but it worked out okay. They ended up showing X2 as the 2nd movie (the first was Agent Cody Banks), so we went to watch that before lunch...

Lunch wasn't the most tasty meal, but we lived through it. Again, we got to sit with some people close to our ages, this time from L.A. They had taken one train from L.A. to Chicago, and now they were going to New Orleans for a few days. Luckily for them, they were flying back to L.A., rather than taking another 2 day train trip back! :)

After lunch was more sitting around in the sleeper car, and then Gabe being amazed by the sheer size of Lake Pontchartrain... I told him it was big! We pulled into New Orleans a little after 3:30 or so, and headed out... into 70+ degree weather... sweet... :)

Got to the bed and breakfast, got into our relatively tiny room, arranged our stuff, and then headed out. We stayed on Esplanade, which is the eastern border of the French Quarter. Near enough to walk right to where all the action was, but far enough away that we weren't gonna be kept awake at night by partying people... :)

So we headed out for dinner, stopping in a couple of shops along the way... I found a really neat blue shot glass with an ankh glued to the side, so that became the first of the souvenirs. Dinner was red beans and rice for Gabe, and a muffuletta (also spelled muffaletta, depending on where we went) for me... both quite good.

After dinner was some more shopping around, and then we got to go on the Vampire tour... :) As we were waiting for the group to assemble, we were noticing that we were the only non "norms" there, aside from the tour guides... but hey, who cares... :) As it went, the tour guide ended up teasing us for pretty much the entire tour (Gabe mostly, but me a little bit)... but it was all in good fun! We also got to talk to a girl who was in training to be a tour guide, and she told us all about cool places to check out for clothes and such. After the tour, we ended up buying the book that the tour guide had written, and she signed it for us... as we were walking back towards the hotel, stopping to take a few pictures of the places we had seen on the tour, I looked at the book, and realized that the author (our tour guide) was someone I had used as an NPC in my old New Orleans table top game... so that was quite fun... :)

Back to the bed & breakfast, where we hit the hot tub... aside from the small children trying to get me to swim with them, it was fun... :)

Friday
Friday we tried to eat breakfast at the bed & breakfast (as only seemed appropriate), but we discovered that they didn't have any butter or margerine or anything like that... makes eating toast and croissants kinda odd... so we ate a little, and then ended up going to Krispy Kreme for more food... :)

Then it was off to the French Market to do some shopping. I wanted a big black straw hat to keep the sun off of my face, and was successful in finding a cute one. We also looked for any ankh jewelry we could find. The last time I was in New Orleans, I had managed to find one cute ankh bracelet. This time, I could have had just about any ankh-y stuff I wanted. Even bling-bling ankhs... :) As it was, I got a neat ring... it's got some hieroglyphs on the sides, so I need to get Jim to read them for me sometime... :)

After that, we headed to Gargoyles... Gargoyles is a goth-y clothing store, I think specific to New Orleans. I had seen it in passing the last time I was there, but didn't go in. We walked past it on Thursday evening, and tried not to drool all over the glass... so we headed in on Friday, and were quite pleased. Gabe ended up getting two dressy shirts, and I got a T-shirt and a velvet skirt. Yeah, we spent a lot there, but at least we have some non-Hot Topic clothes now! :)

Went to a little Italian deli for lunch, and it was sooooo good! More shopping after that, followed by a nice rest in the bed & breakfast before dinner. Dinner that night was also good, salads for both of us.

After that, we were debating going on the witchcraft / voodoo tour, because we had heard that Kalila, our tour guide from the previous night, often ran that tour. We ended up deciding to go, even though she wasn't running it, and we were quite happy. This time our tour guide was Rudy, and he explained to us that he was a Greek pagan (he used a different word for it, which I can't recall)... so yeah, he's all interested in Greek stuff, and Gabe was thrilled... :) We ended up chatting with him throughout the tour, and afterwards as well. He offered to put us on his guest list for the cemetery tour the next day, and said we could hang out afterwards... :)

Saturday
Up early again (cuz we're losers), and off to Krispy Kreme for breakfast... we shopped for a little while, and then met up with Rudy and his fiancee, Tracy, for the cemetery tour (of St. Louis No. 1). I had been on a cemetery tour before, of this same cemetery, but it was still a lot of fun. We talked to Rudy more during the tour, and then afterwards, we were gonna go get gyros for lunch... but the gyro place was closed, and no amount of pouty faces would get the woman inside to open it, so we had to go next door for pizza. We chatted some more, and then headed out shopping again when Rudy had to go back to run another cemetery tour (those tour guides do a TON of walking!)...

Went back to the French Market to get Gabe the flask that he wanted (it has a coffin stuck to it... go figure!)... :) We also went to Esoterica so I could get a mehndi design on my hand... well, the original plan was it was a good way to get to sit down, but that didn't happen... I stood there while the guy drew on my hand, and Gabe wandered around looking at books. Any rate, it doesn't quite look like the stuff you see on the mehndi boxes, but it's not too bad... though it's fading at an alarming rate (to the point where it looks like I drew on myself with brown marker today)...

Back to the bed & breakfast for a bit more rest, where I discovered that cleavage sunburns easily... I only got a little bit pink though, not too bad! :) After that, we walked around a lot, trying to find somewhere to eat dinner, and ended up just going back to where we ate the first night, and getting burgers... can't eat New Orleans food all of the time! :) We walked around a bit more after that, as we didn't have a tour to go on that night (we could have done the ghost tour, but didn't really feel like it), and then went back to the bed & breakfast to hit the hot tub again... no annoying children this time... :)

Sunday
Woke up early on Sunday, off to Krispy Kreme for breakfast, and then one more time through the French Market to finish up souvenir shopping. Back to the Italian deli for lunch, and then a bit more wandering before getting a cab back to the train station.

We got on the train, and who was in the sleeper across from us and one down from us but The Laughing Couples... oh joy... we ended up swapping sleepers with one of them, so that they could have the two across from each other... confused the hell out of the poor train employees, but it all worked out... slept a little before dinner, then headed up to eat.

Dinner was really good, though far too big! This time, we ate with a couple of women from St. Paul, an older lady and her daughter. They were nice, and we had a nice chat with them. After that, we had the sleeper car attendent make our beds really early, and tried to get some sleep. Did better this time than the previous time, but still wasn't a good nights sleep. So we got off the train around 3 a.m., and crashed again when we got into the apartment...

And then I slept most of the day, while Gabe is at work and school. He'll be home shortly, and then we'll get some stuff done... :)

Oh, can't forget the best part, though... I would swear that the locals of New Orleans had never seen goths before... cuz we dressed up pretty much the whole time we were there, and got a lot of odd looks... not from the other tourists, but from the people who lived there.

Final count: one street performer who yelled "Happy Halloween" at us as we walked past... two of the Jackson Square "bums" who asked us for cigarettes (cuz we "looked cool")... a group of three teenagers who snickered about Gabe being a "Marilyn Manson wanna-be"... and four or five different people who told Gabe how much he looked like a young Ozzy Osbourne... riiiight... :)

:: Dawn 2:49 PM [+] ::
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