I’m not a road warrior. My butt has far too little padding to do a fool thing like sit on it for ten hours at a stretch. But somehow my darling sister, Hannah, talked me into a road trip to New Orleans after I casually mentioned wanting to use my vacation time on an actual vacation. Stay-cations don’t count (because, you know…covid). But we didn’t just make a beeline for New Orleans like all the other saps out there. No. If we were going to road-trip at all, we were going to see America. Or, at least the southeastern part of America. Our plan involved a museum in Memphis, dropping through Jackson, Mississippi to figure out what the heck Johnny Cash and June Carter were singing about (wrong Jackson, as we found out), eating some tasty food in New Orleans, then buzzing over to the Redneck Riviera and sitting on a beach in Alabama. Of course, nothing went according to plan, but if it did this would be just another boring travel blog about perfect people taking perfect vacations doing every thing perfectly. And do you really want to read about that? I didn’t think so.
My darling sister behind the wheel on our sibling road trip. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Portra 400.
But first, I had to mow my grass.
Yes, this is relevant. You see, I live in a community with an HOA, and if your grass gets too high in an HOA, they mail you a letter. I don’t like letters from my HOA. So I mowed my grass, which was already flirting with “abandoned lot” territory, before heading out on our week-long trip. And I did it without a dust mask...in the month of May. Yes, this is also relevant. You see, I’ve been allergic to everything but dogs and water ever since my mama popped me out. That includes grass.
We set off that Sunday for West Tennessee from Nashville with my nose in a non-functioning condition, on our way to surprise my uncle (who lives in Humboldt, Tennessee) at church on our way to Memphis. I-40 through West Tennessee is about as interesting to drive as reading a statistics textbook, so we were glad to take a break for a while with my uncle and his family. We went to church, ate some sketchy Mexican food, and were on the road again.
Stax records in Memphis. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Portra 400.
Our first stop in Memphis was Stax Records.
People like to say I was born in the wrong decade. Some say the wrong century. While most of my schoolmates grew up listening to Maroon 5, Kenny Chesney, and Britney Spears, I was listening to the oldies. At an early age, another one of my uncles introduced me to an oldies station that played a lot of ‘60s and ‘70s music, and I was hooked. As such, I listened to a lot of Motown, and while Stax and Motown were two different recording studios, their sounds were similar, though what came out of Memphis was more bluesy and raw than the polished stuff from Detroit. Hannah and I wandered through the exhibits and learned about the influence Black gospel music and the blues had on almost every other genre, and all the famous people who recorded at Stax (Albert King, the Staple Singers, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the M.G.s, etc.). I definitely recommend it if Soul and Blues is your thing.
After Stax, we took our stuff to our little Airbnd apartment off Main Street and then wandered around until we hit Beale Street, just to say we’d been there. It was a bit too much like Broadway in “Nash Vegas” in my opinion. Too many people. Too much wild’n’crazy. But this is coming from the guy referred to as a ninety-five year-old man by his contemporaries. So maybe you would love Beale Street.
A neat old hardware store on Main Street in Memphis. Reluctantly taken on iPhone 11.
Back at the Airbnb, we topped off our evening by watching the Little Mermaid on Disney Plus, then caught some Zs. After some coffee and breakfast the next morning, we were ready to hit the road and take on the world.
Or Hannah was. Memphis was when my face decided it would trade places with Old Faithful and start spewing fluids to cope with the Tennessee Spring air, and punish me for not wearing a dust mask when I mowed my jungle before we left. Also, the camera battery died in my 35mm Canon AE-1 film camera right after Stax, so it was definitely Hannah who was ready to take on the world. Not me.
Meanwhile, somewhere in an overseas corporate office, a negligence was brewing that would cast a black cloud over a portion of our trip. The place we had booked in New Orleans was a cross between an Airbnb and a hotel. No one at the check-in desk. You sign a lease to stay there for a couple nights. Very weird set-up. Hannah had booked the room in her name, but used my card, which made everything massively complicated. As we set off Saturday morning, panicked that they didn’t have all the paperwork they thought they needed, they sent me a form to fill out that I had already filled out. I generously complied, and assumed everything was now sunshine and lollipops.
The Antoine Restaurant, seen from Royal Street. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
Cute little courtyards are nestled between lots of the buildings in New Orleans. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
The trek from Memphis to New Orleans was somewhat uneventful, marked only by the slap of the windshield wipers and the number of classic country songs we listened to. Barbecue was eaten. Jackson, Mississippi was driven through. The Lynyrd Skynyrd crash site was visited. Lake Ponchartrain was crossed.
But sitting outside our supposed resting place for the next two nights was not uneventful. There we were, just having driven five hundred miles, and weren’t able to get into the building. A vacant reception desk was visible through the locked front door. We sat parked on the street in the Warehouse District on the phone with the company that owned the building for two hours. Every minute that passed left us angrier and angrier. We had filled out their paperwork. Many times, in fact. But they were saying we didn’t complete it correctly.
As the sun got lower in the New Orleans sky, I decided I’d had enough. I got out of the car so Hannah could stay on the phone with the company while I called a Hampton Inn a few blocks away, by the Convention Center. I gave them my card number. We got a room. It was painless. When I got back in, I asked to speak with the supervisor of the company we originally booked, furious at this point. As we drove to the Hampton Inn, we canceled our booking and demanded our money back, which they wouldn’t give because we were “canceling with less than 24-hours notice.” That meant we were out $350 dollars, just like that (after three months, I got my money back after filing a dispute through my credit card company).
Like I said…black cloud.
The famous old neon Walgreens on Canal Street. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
Café Beignet as seen from the front of the long line. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
After the adrenaline of fighting with corporate drones wore off, our weariness got the better of us and we finally passed out. The next morning we started fresh, after sleeping in, of course. Hannah had done the legitimately difficult job of planning our New Orleans itinerary. “Difficult” because every single person we talked to about our trip had different ideas about what we should do and where we should eat. Some recommendations assumed we would be willing to sell our kidneys to pay for a meal (we were not). Some assumed we would be willing to enter indentured servitude to shop in bougie stores that we couldn’t even afford back home (wrong).
Café Beignet was the first place Hannah picked that morning. It was definitely worth the long line to get in, and definitely worth squeezing into their ancient, broom-closet-sized restroom (always use the restroom whenever you eat at a restaurant in New Orleans, because public toilets are impossible to find).
Beignets are like square donuts, only they’re as light and fluffy as air, covered with powdered sugar. In other words, they’re the refined, elegant pastry that donuts want to be when they grow up. But the rest of the breakfast was delicious, too. The scrambled eggs were buttery and rich. The bacon was crisp and savory.
A pair of fluffy, powdery beignets. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
After breakfast we went exploring.
If you didn’t know this, Bourbon Street in New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz. I am a jazz aficionado. But it’s been a long time since the doctor first slapped baby jazz in the birthing room, and people no longer go to Bourbon Street to listen to jazz. They go there to party hard and watch peep shows. However, if you’d like the French Quarter experience without Bourbon Street’s spin on it, I recommend Royal Street (pronounced “Royale”, because…French). Royal Street was really quite pleasant. The buildings are so neat to look at with their Spanish iron work and brick, weathered by the years. There were so many places to shop and purchase artwork. I even got to see an original Norman Rockwell painting from only a few inches away in what seemed like a museum where the priceless artifacts were for sale. I didn’t touch anything.
If I had two eating places to recommend to someone planning a trip to New Orleans, one would be Café Beignet, of course, but the other would be Central Grocery. Central Grocery claims to have invented the original muffuletta, a delicious sandwich with salami, ham, and olive salad created by Italian immigrants back in the day. Whether or not they actually made the first one, Central Grocery’s muffulettas were definitely a tasty punch in the mouth. And the building is legitimately an old grocery store. You can even buy cans of soup there. It authentically has the kind of atmosphere that some businesses try to create artificially.
Central Grocery. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
Flowers hang beautifully over a balcony of Spanish iron. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
Idealesque Spanish iron in the French Quarter. Taken on Canon AE-1 with Kodak Portra 400.
By now, the goo in my head had congealed like a bottle of Elmer’s Glue left open, so went from a prolonged allergic reaction to a full-on sinus infection in the middle of our New Orleans trip. The next couple of nights were spent breathing noisily through my gaping mouth, coughing, and blowing my nose into too-thin tissues which were thrown on the hotel room floor throughout the night, to be collected when I could see in in the morning. Hannah was a trooper for putting up with it.
After a brief trip to the Walgreens on Canal Street, I armed myself with decongestant and tissue packets (like the kind your grandmother keeps in her purse) and prepared to trudge on.
The second day was partially spent exploring outside the French Quarter.
I’m a simple man, really. I’ll take a Chic-Fil-A number one combo over a fancy, white tablecloth meal any day. So it might not surprise you that one of my favorite things to do in New Orleans was to simply ride the street cars. Hannah got us two-day passes to ride as much as we wanted, and while slow, the street cars are a real form of transportation around the city. Plus, they transport you back in time. The streets are wide enough for two lanes in either direction, plus two sets of rails in a sandy median where the street cars clatter back and forth, trying not to hit runners in yoga pants. We sat on the hard wooden benches and watched the lovely Garden District pass by through the open, school-bus like windows.
A street car navigates the roundabout. Taken on Kodak 835RF with Kodak Portra 400.
A street car stopped on Canal Street. Taken on Kodak 835 RF with Kodak Portra 400.
A street musician plays the sax. Taken on Kodak 835RF with Kodak Portra 400.
All good things must come to an end, and so after two days of listening to jazz on Jackson Square, shopping, and eating muffulettas, it was time to move along.
Next stop, the beach.
The hotel in Orange Beach, Alabama was three hours away. We left a city where every street was dripping with history and character, and entered a place that existed solely for tourists. I suppose each place has its purpose. New Orleans broadens your horizons with its story and blending of cultures. Orange Beach allows you to kick back on the sand and do absolutely nothing all day. And that was our plan.
Being May, however, meant a very windy Gulf of Mexico. It was so windy, in fact, that we could only see a mile or so up the beach before things began to look like the Dust Bowl. We sat in our lawn chairs by the surf for about twenty minutes, the left sides of our faces being nicely exfoliated by all the wind-blown sand, before we gave it up and went back to the hotel. The rest of the day was spent watching cartoons in the hotel room like a couple of grade school kids (only without hiding the remote from each other), and sitting by the pool where there was no risk of sand blowing up your swim trunks.
A slightly out of focus selfie on a film camera. Taken on Kodak 835RF with Kodak Portra 400.
With our PTO running out, it was time to drive north and complete our Great Tour of the Mississippi Delta. We didn’t stop on this leg of the trip, save for a quick lunch at Firehouse Subs in Montgomery, Alabama. Both of us were over it and ready to be home. One of us was tired of sleeping in the same room with a snot-nosed, coughing, invalid. I’ll let you venture a guess as to who that was. In any case, we were home in no time, and grateful for it.
Being a sibling road trip, we counted it a great success that we didn’t kill each other, especially with trials like unreliable hotel-wannabes and sinus infections to overcome. As always, we were glad to be back at the end, but it was a journey to remember.
Hannah sits on a bench by the beach before leaving for home. Taken on Kodak 835RF with Kodak Portra 400.
And remember, kids, never mow your grass in May before a road trip…at least not without a mask.
