NOLA Part 3

On our second day in The Big Easy we did a walking history/voodoo tour. Here I am at St. Louis Street and Bourbon Street. It was pretty amazing how different Bourbon St. was just hours after our arrival! It was super crowded the night before, but as you can see, it's dead in the daylight!

The French Quarter definitely operates on its own clock. Most things didn't open to the public till after 10 a.m. Not quite what I'm used to but it was nice having the street pretty much to ourselves while we made our way to The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum.




We were told that Gerry, our tour guide would be late, but he was 20-25 minutes late for our 10:30 a.m. start time. Well, he made up for it later...what was supposed to be a 2 1/2 to 3 hour tour went well past 4 hours.

My only regret of the trip is that we didn't snap a photo of Gerry. He was quite the character: entertaining, told really bad jokes which he always ended with "that was a joke", and he was very knowledgeable. He said his family had been in the area for 300+ years.

We walked from his museum through the French Quarter to this very old cemetery. It's at the corner of Conti St. and Basin St. The graves inside dated back to the 1800's.

We'd never seen anything like this before. In Colorado, everyone is buried underground and all you see is tombstones, not actual tombs. It was pretty interesting.

We were luck that it only sprinkled a little bit while we were in the cemetery, but doesn't that cloud look ominous?!

This tomb is the main reason why I think Gerry took us to this cemetery. It's supposed to be where the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau is buried. Gerry explained that the xxx's on the tomb are people's markings. He said that when Marie was alive a good majority of people were illiterate and they would make their marking as a way signing their names. Gerry said people still do this today to let her know who has visited.

While I didn't my mark, I did leave an offering. Why not, it can't hurt...right?!?!

Gerry did tell us that this is Nicolas Cage's vaulted tomb. Who knows...

After the 4 hour walking tour, I was starving so we had a late lunch, walked around the city more, took a ride on the street car.

As soon as we stepped foot on the streetcar it started to rain and it really came down. I was definitel happy that we were not walking around it! After our ride, the downpour was just a sprinkle so we walked back to our hotel and made it just in time for my favorite part of the day, cocktail hour!