New Orleans, LA

One of my most favorite places to visit in the US. We were able to enjoy this city for a week about 5 years ago and we were excited to get back to continue the party. The area has so much food, music and fun that we ended up running out of time and talking about what we plan to do when we return next year. We started off the week with a day spent wandering around the French Quarter. We went to dinner at a local oyster hot spot and ended the day on a ghost tour that was not so much ghost, but a lot of great history that had a stop for a hurricane towards the end!!! The second day was spent at the Mardi Gras float museum and we ended up on Frenchmen street listening to great music and drinking far too many cocktails. We even cut up the rug a bit at one of the clubs. The next day was a marginal food tour around the quarter that was once again great for history, but didn't have very good food. The following day was shopping and a cemetery tour that was very interesting. In New Orleans, they put the body in a sealed tomb for a year and a day, because the voodoo religion believes that the soul hangs out around the body for that full time. Then when the year and a day is up, they open the tomb, scoop up your bones (the rest has melted away in a full summer of New Orleans heat) and dump it down the chute at the back of the tomb. They have tombs where up to 1000 people have had their bones dumped down the chute. Interesting. Our final day was spent at the WWII museum. Wow, just wow. If you do one tourist thing in NO, go to this museum and plan for most of a day. The sub experience was cool, but might not be worth the time, but the show narrated by Tom Hanks was an hour long and phenomenal. They have a ton of construction going on right now adding building and content and they tell us the experience will be very different in just another couple of year. I wish we had spent more time at the museum, but we got hungry and our favorite lunch spot was waiting. We hustled over to the Canal St. edge of the quarter for the best po-boy and muffuletta in NO at Mike Serio's Po-Boys. We had our lunch and spent an hour talking with Mike at our table until the doors were locked because they were closed. A great lunch with a legend and character of NO for the last 40 years. When you go to NO, stop in for lunch here. You won't be disappointed.