I know what it means to miss New Orleans.

In April 1997 I was able to put my obsession with movies to good use and won a movie trivia contest for a weekend in Hollywood. I will forego the details of the whole sordid fiasco that followed but the end result was a 5 day all-expenses paid trip to New Orleans. The prize was for two people, so I asked my friend Judy, who had several years prior taken me on a trip to Europe that she had won. Finally, I got to reciprocate.


A good friend of mine drove us down to Bangor, Maine, where we got the plane to Cincinnatii and then on to New Orleans . . . the Big Easy . . . a place I had only read of or seen in movies, never dreaming that I would ever be there. We arrived at about 10:00 pm Saturday and, even though we were pretty pooped, we checked into the hotel (as close to the French Quarter, without being in the French Quarter as one could be), did a quick freshening up and off we went to Bourbon Street. We ran into a girl we had met on the shuttle bus from the airport and she hung out with us. We "did" Bourbon Street . . . without question, the height of debauchery! We saw everything imaginable and some pretty unimaginable things as well. It was great!! :o)

Sunday found us at the Fairgrounds for Jazz Fest. Wow! I spent the day, along with 84,999 other people, enjoying the music of The Neville Brothers, George Clinton, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Snooks Eaglin, Wanda Rouzan, Willis Prudhomme & Zydeco Express, Waylon Thibodeaux and many, many others. Our mouths had a party of their own with jambalaya, gumbo, oyster and tasso pasta, fried green tomatoes, muffulettas, catfish, topped off with pralines, pecan pie, sweet potato pone, bread pudding, lemon crepes and so on, until our stomachs were about to burst with joy.

More New Orleans

Vienna, Austria

Budapest, Hungary

Boston & Salem, Massachusetts

New York City, New York

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