Friends In Town

We got a visit from some of our oldest friends this week. We known them since our kids were itty-bitty, and they lived nearby us for many years. Eventually, they moved back to Sacramento and a few years after that we moved to Houston. So, for several years, our friendship has been a long distance one.

We were pretty excited to show them all of our favorite places in Texas (and even some in Louisiana).  First we took them for a walk on our greenbelt trails. Then, we took them to downtown Houston, which turned out to be very unpleasant because it rained on us the whole time. My friend is an artist, so I thought he would dig Smither Park.

I think he liked it a lot. 

We hurried home after that so that we could eat the big brisket that Shantell had been cooking all day. It was our first of many barbecue dinners while they were in town.

The next morning, we left as early as we could for New Orleans. It's about a five-hour drive from Houston, and it's one of those places that everyone wants to visit. We went there back in 2018 with the family, and now we were headed back to show our friends all of our favorite stuff.

We took them to the French Quarter right after we arrived.

We walked over to Jackson Square and took pictures there.

We looked at the statue of Andrew Jackson.

We stopped in at the St. Louis Cathedral, and even went inside to see the ornate decorations.

I think my friend, as an art teacher and practitioner, particularly appreciated the artistry of all of the paintings, carvings, and stained glass.

Out front of the cathedral is the prime spot for live music. All of the buskers play there because you can draw the largest crowd and get the biggest tips. When we came last time, there were several bands that played, but most were playing styles of music that New Orleans isn't known for. Today, though, we didn't have that problem. We had a great jazz band out front of the cathedral pounding out some fun stuff.

Interestingly, right next to the cathedral there was a big crowd, and we couldn't figure out what it was for at first. We were thinking that it might be some sort of a crime scene. My friends went over to investigate and discovered that in a way it was a crime scene, just not a real one. The crowd was there to watch as the crew of the television show NCIS: New Orleans was shooting stuff for their upcoming season. They even got pictures of some actor that I've never heard of to prove it to me.

The internet tells me that the actor in that video they shot is named Rob Kerkovich, and he plays a character in the show named Sebastian Lund. I've never seen an episode of NCIS, so I can't confirm that personally, but I trust the internet. When has it ever led anyone astray?

I had ignored the film set. I was more interested in the jazz. After we had finished with all that was going on at Jackson Square, we made our way over to one of the other big attractions there: Café du Monde...or Café Mon Dieux as several of us said many times, transposing the French words to create a completely different meaning. Café du Monde is famous for its beignets. We stood in line and got our beignets, then found a table to sit and eat them.

Because of Covid, they serve them to you differently. You wait in a line that ends at the front door, where you make your order and it is brought to you and handed out to you like some kind of a food truck. Then you can go find yourself a table on their patio to eat at. The beignets come in orders of three, and they get stuffed in a bag along with what seems like a pound of powdered sugar. It was almost impossible to eat the beignets without covering our clothes in sugar. 

Also, my son used one of the straws they gave us to drink his first gulp of hot chocolate with, and totally burned his tongue. He squealed, and spit hot chocolate all over the place...including his own shorts, which we had to quickly mop up before he got further burns.

My friend wandered off and no one knew where he'd gone. He told his wife, but she couldn't hear him well in the noisy environment, so when we finished our beignets, we had to sit around and wait for what felt like an eternity, because we couldn't disappear before he came back. So, we wandered just a little bit up the street where the Washington Artillery Park is.

It's probably the best place to take pictures of yourself with Jackson Square in the background, so I grabbed a shot of that:

Then we went down the stairs to the banks of the Mississippi River where we sat and waited for my friend to reappear. My son spent his time throwing rocks into the river, and I had to join him. If it had been some other river that wasn't as well known and didn't play such a pivotal role in the development of the country, I might have skipped it, but to have the chance to throw rocks into the Mississippi...I just couldn't pass that up.

Eventually, my friend reappeared. He had gone to the Sports Apparel store that was right across the street from Café du Monde. We got up and headed down the Moonwalk (that's the name of the riverfront park and sidewalk that goes along the Mississippi right there, and has nothing to do with Michael Jackson or the way we made our way down the sidewalk) until we reached the French Market a few blocks down.

Sadly, by the time we made it to the French Market, it was already getting pretty late. Most of the booths had already cleared out or were in the process of clearing out...or maybe they never opened at all, this Covid crap has killed one heck of a lot of livelihoods over the year that we've endured it. There was less choice, but many of us still managed to find souvenirs to bring home.

Now that it was getting late, we were ready to abandon the French Quarter and get some dinner.  We walked back to our hotel to change...along the way I had to stop and get more video of the jazz band by the cathedral. They were playing the song. No song represents New Orleans more than "When the Saints Go Marching In," and this was my first chance to hear it played in its hometown.

We wanted to take the Cudneys over to the restaurant where we experienced our first (and so far best) experience with Cajun food. It's called Mother's Restaurant, and we managed to get there ahead of the rush. Last time we had to wait in a long line just to get in, but this time around, we asked for a table and only waited about five minutes before they seated us.

They specialize in traditional Cajun and Southern food like jambalaya, etouffé, red beans and rice, grits, and gumbo.

My personal favorite is jambalaya, particularly the jambalaya from Mother's Restaurant. I've had it a few other places and it just isn't quite as good as it is here. Shantell's favorite is the bread pudding that they brought us for dessert. She made certain to order it this time around as well.

I got the feeling that the our friends weren't big fans of the Cajun food, however. They didn't hate it or anything, but I don't think it was a grand slam for them like it was for us. Maybe, living all the way over in California, they've never heard much about Cajun food, so they had built up no mythos around it like I think we have.

At one point, after they'd asked a bunch of questions like, "What are grits?" and "What is jambalaya," the waitress stopped and asked, "Where are y'all from?" She realized that they certainly weren't from nearby. She seemed to understand the situation a little better once they confessed that they came from California.

We went back to the hotel to wind down for the night, but then I got a text from the my friends saying that they wanted to go out and see what Bourbon Street was like at night. My wife wasn't interested, so she stayed in the hotel with my son (she kind of had to, he's too young to be left alone).

Interestingly, the second we hit Bourbon Street we encountered that same jazz band we'd been listening to all day.

They had moved over from Jackson Square to Bourbon Street, because once darkness fall, that's where the action is. They wouldn't get any tips out there playing to themselves, but even in Covid decimated times like these Bourbon Street still gets a lot of action. I walked with my camera on for a while to get a good shot of what it was like.

I have to say that I love the vibrant energy of the place. Anywhere that so many people are walking out and about like this, especially at night, seems like a great place. Probably a good half of the businesses on the street were shuttered and boarded over with plywood too. Imagine what it would be like in normal times...then again, I'd probably find that to be too much.

The plan was for the three of us to go to the Hard Rock Café. My friend's wife has a collection of glasses from the Hard Rock Cafés in the cities that she has visited. 

So we were going to go hang out there for a while, and pick up the glass for New Orleans while we were there. Unfortunately, it turns out that the place closed by 9:00 PM. 

I think, when you close by 9:00, you can't call yourself the Hard Rock anymore. I don't think Quiet Riot, Nine Inch Nails, or System of a Down would feel comfortable in a place like that. You've got a decidedly more Carpenters, Chicago, Fleetwood Mac kind of a vibe. Somebody needs to change their sign to say Soft Rock Café.

We wandered around looking for somewhere else to hang out instead. We sat in a place that had a live band doing nearly unrecognizable covers of '70s funk songs like "Superstitious" by Stevie Wonder, but we just weren't feeling it. Eventually, we gave up and went back home for the night.

Oh, while we're here, I have to mention this spot at the elevators in our hotel room. There was a tiled floor in front of the elevator doors, and to either side, as you walked toward your room, there was a subtle ramp from the tile to the carpet.

I don't know if you can see what I'm talking about in the picture or not, but it was maddening to walk across, because it was disguised. There was no step or anything that you would notice, just a floor that changed under your feet from one step to another and caused you to trip... every time. It didn't matter whether I was going to or coming from the elevators, meaning it didn't matter if the floor ramped down away from my foot or ramped up into it, either way, I always tripped.

That's all. It was annoying.

Anyway, the next day, we decided to take a look at one of the weird cemeteries that they have in New Orleans. They have to "bury" everyone above ground in New Orleans. The majority of the city is below sea level. When people first settled there, they had real issues digging graves for their dead. Only a few feet down and the grave would start filling with water. A casket, which is filled with mostly air, would actually pop back out of the ground after a rainstorm. So, they came up with this solution instead:

All people are buried in above-ground mausoleums, which makes a New Orleans cemetery a very interesting place. We went to St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, and walked through the graves to look at the "city of the dead".

We didn't stay long though. We had an appointment with a swamp boat tour. So, we jumped back into the car and headed over to take our boat out onto the bayou.

We took the exact same boat tour the last time we came to New Orleans (this was the boat where my GoPro camera fell into the water and disappeared forever), and we were very excited to share it with our friends. Just like last time, we saw tons of alligators.

We also saw some cool waterfowl, but less than last time, I think. The weather wasn't cooperating...just like it had while we were in downtown Houston. It was an overcast day, and I think that kept a lot of the wildlife hunkering down, instead of being out and about.

We saw several turtles too, though, again, less than last time, I think.

I think our friends really enjoyed the swamp tour. When it came to an end, we drove about a mile over to the Jean Lafitte National Wildlife Preserve. This was my favorite place in Louisiana.

I just find the whole place to be utterly gorgeous. While we were there, we got a very close-up look at a gator. This picture was taken with my phone without any zoom lens whatsoever.

It was sitting just off the side of the path, within arm's reach.

None of us reached our arms, however. We saw lizards, frogs, and snakes in that swamp as well.

There was a really pretty iris that I got a picture of for your viewing pleasure.

After Jean Lafitte, we got on the road back home. Since we had to drive back through the city, we figured we might as well swing past Bourbon Street one more time to see if we couldn't get that glass for my friend's wife that she didn't get the night before.

I dropped him off at the Hard (soft) Rock Café, and then started circling the block while he ran inside to grab the glass. I circled and circled and circled, apparently, he ran in and got the glass, but didn't want to leave without getting a couple of other souvenirs, so he also ran into another store, got a Mardi Gras mask and a T-shirt, and then met me as I looped around for...I don't know, maybe the eighth time.

We wished Louisiana goodbye, and headed back to Houston.

After such an eventful few days, we decided to just sit back and relax on Wednesday. We spent the whole day in the living room watching movies and hanging out. We didn't attempt anything else until Thursday afternoon, when we went down to Galveston.

Once again, the weather wasn't cooperating. It was a nice sunny day, but there was a pretty stiff breeze that kept everyone chilly. You can tell just how stiff the breeze was by looking at my hair in this selfie.

I didn't style my hair to sit straight up like that on my head, that's for sure. Personally, I found the weather to be nice, but I was the only one. Everyone else was shivering, and hiding under the towels we brought like they were blankets. We left for the car with our friends never even dipping their foot in the Gulf of Mexico.

Instead, we went to lunch at The Spot, our favorite restaurant on the Galveston Seawall Boulevard. Then we went to old town to do some shopping at the stores there, as well as watching the saltwater taffy pulling and cutting machine and eating some of the samples they throw to the crowd at LaKing's Confectionery.

The next morning, we planned to head out to San Antonio, and spend the day at the Alamo and the River Walk, then the next day go tubing at nearby New Braunfels...but weather wasn't cooperating again. We decided that it would be better to flip-flop the days, and go tubing first.

We've been tubing more than once on the Comal River before. This time around, we went to Wal-mart and bought our own tubes so that we could float without paying the higher prices of the various tubing companies charged. It took a lot longer to find parking than we expected and everyone was hot and grumpy by the time we got everything situated, but we eventually all got on the river.

I have to say that I wasn't a big fan of our tubes we'd bought. They seemed to work for most everybody else just fine, but they were just too little for me. I was barely able to sit up in mine, and when we went down the various chutes that they have on the river, I was invariably dumped off my tube into the river.

Worse, it was nearly impossibly to get back on them once you fell off. I spent spent a strange minute floating almost upside down on my tube at one point, my legs up high in the air and my head just out of the water, completely unable to right myself before finally falling back in the water.

It was a lot of fun, but a little cold. The weather was nice, but overcast, so we never got quite as warm as we wanted to be, and since we were all wet, every little breeze chilled us a little more. Those of us who don't have an excess of body fat to keep us warm were shivering and chattering their teeth by the time we finally reached the last exit, and we got out of the water.

We went back to the hotel and changed our clothes, then went out to our favorite Texas barbecue joint, Coopers Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que.

The next morning, we went on to San Antonio. Our first stop was Mission San Jose, a place we visited two Christmases ago and loved. It was just as pretty and interesting as ever.

We wandered the grounds and took some pictures, making sure to take in all the sights.

After the mission, we got in the car to head to...a mission. This time it was the mission known as the Alamo.

We couldn't go in right away, however. Their Covid 19 protocol was to require an appointment to enter the mission...it was free to enter, but you could only come at the time of your appointment. Ours was for 2:30, and it was only 1:00, so, while we waited, we went down the stairs to the River Walk.

It's possibly my favorite place in Texas. It's so pretty and exotic. I feel like I've just jumped through some kind of portal and emerged in Europe whenever I visit. We walked over to the Hard Rock Café for lunch (and of course to get my friend's wife the glass for San Antonio to add to her collection), but when we tried to get a table, they told us their wait time was an hour. Looked like eating there was out, because there was no way we'd be out in time for our appointment at the Alamo. 

So, we continued on down the walk until we found a Tex-Mex restaurant called the Iron Cactus. They were able to get us in much quicker, so we had a seat and ate some Texas-style Mexican food. One of the coolest things that they did was when the waiter came to our table with a tray full of guacamole ingredients. She actually cut up and prepared a bowl of guacamole for us right there at our table, using only the spices that we wanted to be included (our friend's kid is an onion-phobe, so the guacamole was kind of substandard because of that, but it was still cool to have it made for us right at the table).

Once we finished, we had to hurry over to the Alamo. We got in line, and they let us inside the 300 year old church. It's pretty small, and it wasn't long before we were out in the courtyard, and moving from one exhibit to another. There were many people dressed in period garb and providing education to the visitors about the story of the Alamo.

We watched the movie presentation about the history of the Alamo to help us understand the context of the place, and the Californians got good look at a live oak. They were impressed.

The next day was Easter (I know, what a busy week, right?), So, once we got home and got the kids to bed, I started setting up their Easter baskets for the morning. We spent most of Easter relaxing and watching TV. my wife and my friend's wife watched and cooked at the same time, and put together this amazing Easter dinner for us.

There was a great big ham, homemade rolls, and cheesy potatoes. We all sat down and ate some wonderful home cooking. It was our last meal with the our friends before they headed back to California again in the morning.

We had such a great time with them while they were here. We were hoping they might consider moving out here, but it looks like that plan isn't in the cards anymore. Either way, it was great to have them in town while they were here. We don't get a lot of visitors waaaaaaay out here in east Texas, so we revel in any that do make their way to us.