Day 22: New Orleans, LA

Outline: touring around New Orleans. No map for you!

 We started the morning with breakfast at home; in retrospect, sort of a pointless idea given what was to come. Our morning destination was the French Quarter of New Orleans, with the first stop being Cafe Du Monde for some cafe au lait and beignets:

9 delicious pieces of fried dough with powdered sugar, and some coffee to keep me awake.

I "only" ate 5 of them, the rest went to my cousin.

After getting our daily allowance of doughnuts, we continued the tour through the French Quarter stopping at the city cathedral:

(My cousin Azim, who ate the other 4 beignets, on the right)

The cathedral has some pretty awesome architecture and artwork inside, but my vote for most impressive goes to the stained-glass windows lining either side wall of the building. I took the opportunity to try taking some HDR photos of the windows. I don't think they turned out especially awesome, but it's a first attempt. I'll have to play with the tonemapping some more later:

 

After the cathedral, we continued through the French Quarter, walking down the infamous Bourbon St towards lunch at the Red Fish Grill. Bourbon is gloriously sketchy even during the day, but I don't have any particularly interesting photos of it. Sorry. After a sweltering walk (it's October, seriously, why so hot?), we arrived at the restaurant for lunch:

BBQ oyster appetizer (delicious!)

Shrimp poboy sandwich with alligator sausage gumbo

I thought the main course sandwich was pretty good, but I was informed that by the standards of the restaurant, it was actually terrible. Guess I'll have to refine my poboy tastebuds next time I'm down there. The combination of three meals in three hours and the hot day served to put everyone to sleep, so we cut the tour short and went back home for a nap. In the evening, we went out to dinner at the Harrah's buffet downtown (good food, but so much...), after which Azim and I watched the Cal-USC game...for about 15 minutes, before becoming completely disgusted with it.

Tomorrow: New Orleans, LA to Austin, TX