26/04/10

Well... we spent a night in a car park in New Orleans, we were a bit worried to start off with as the travel guide suggested keeping within the tourist areas as since hurricane Katrina crime is a real issue. We actually saw a very shifty looking guy wandering around at the back of the car park looking into cars, so we parked near the police car at the entrance to the Wal-Mart. We were fine, and actually got a pretty good nights sleep :).

The state of the city post Katrina is very interesting. When we drove into the city last night looking for a Wal-Mart, we found that it has been destroyed, all that is left of a huge area of shops are some overgrown car parks. We ended up driving through one of the poorer neighbourhoods and the destruction of Katrina is very evident. All of the inhabited houses are brand new, and these are interspersed by dilapidated houses just left there after the hurricane. When driving through the city it was obvious how such devastation could happen; it is amazingly flat, surrounded by water and much of the land is only inches above the water level.

We went over to the French Corner this morning to have a look round the historic New Orleans. Bizarrly enough I got pulled over by the police when trying to find some parking as I didn’t come to a full stop at a box junction despite there being no one around. Really not having much luck with driving atm. Fortunately he was really nice and gave us some parking advice and sent us on our way. Still, I was pretty shaken by the experience and we parked up pretty quickly. The French Corner is an are high enough above sea level to have survived Katrina and is full of fantastic old buildings lining cool little roads. As with Savannah, the quaint old buildings are a hotspot for tourism, so most shell tshirts and other trinkets. Unlike Savannah, New Orleans has an underlying culture of voodoo and Jazz, so there are lots of voodoo paraphernalia and Jazz bars. On our way out we passed the Superdome, home of the New Orleans Saints. It’s pretty big. If you didn’t know, the Saints won the Superbowl this year, which seems to be a big thing for the city as a whole.

We are now back on the road, heading up through Louisiana towards northern Texas. The countryside in Louisiana is pretty impressive, huge expanses of wilderness; swamps, plains, forests. Very green and flat but very hot. We have been listening to a bit of the radio and there are quite a few god squad stations with preachers and sermons etc. Welcome to bible belt America. We stopped for a late lunch/dinnery thingy at Taco Bell today. My impressions were mixed, leaning towards bad. See the Burrito Supreme review :) Now we are just going to see how far we can make to tonight as our place to visit is over 1000 miles from New Orleans.

27/04/10 – 4:00pm

Just a quick update. We got into Texas last night :) We just kept going until Dallas where we stopped at a truck stop for the night. A fairly noisy night, also pretty cold after being used to the crazy humidity of Florida, but they had nice cheap petrol, so it’s ok.

Cube out