New Orleans!

Drowning trees on the edge of the Mississippi

Tuesday May 24^th

Set out on the road to New Orleans with a little trepidation as we’d been hearing lots of scare stories about the floods from the Mississippi. However the weather service at http://water.weather.gov/ahps/ reported that while there was some flooding at Baton Rouge, there was very little at New Orleans.

The road ran across swamps for a lot of miles and was built up on concrete posts like a low bridge.  The carriageways were separated and for a lot of the time you could see water between them.

Floods seen from the road
Stopped off in Baton Rouge for a coffee in a dilapidated but very popular French café and had a good look at the Mississippi over the levees.  It certainly moved fast and was very wide and made me think of Tom Sawyer and his adventures on the raft.  It was pretty warm at 32oC so we didn’t stay out in the heat for long, got back in the car and travelled to Sorrento to have a look at a Cajun village, which again was dilapidated. 

We stopped for coffee and lunch in the village and got chatting to a local called Michael Johnson who was very interesting.  One of four brothers, his family were very poor as they’d spent all their money on healthcare for another son who had eventually died.  As a result they lived in a trailer with all the poor folk who were all black and when they started de-segregation in the late 60’s he was one of the few white folk who felt perfectly at ease with blacks which was a big asset.  Also, the black folk were at ease with him. So he ended up running things at school that involved both groups of kids. Without any qualifications, he started work as a policeman and then joined Total petroleum and spent a lot of his life in Africa, South America, China and even Aberdeen at one point.  Then he got fed up with travelling and now works for Verizon maintaining their networks.  Like a lot of folk he’s fed up with Obama who has just poured billions of investment into the oil industry in South America while letting the oil Industry in Louisiana run down.  He says it’s because Louisiana didn’t support Obama in the last election.  American politics seem in as bad a state as UK politics. 

The reason for staying away from the drains!
We went to a very interesting cafe in the evening called Mantino's in Canal Street for authentic local food.  We had to wait ages for a table as there were no reservations and it was very popular but the food was great.  Hope to see more of New Orleans tomorrow before we head for Mobile, Alabama.