Trapped Inside the Song

We limped into New Orleans on a Sunday afternoon. I parked the bus in a camp site at Bayou Segnette, jumped in the car and we headed into the city. No one used the word “brakes”. It was a perfect day.

Somewhere on the drive in we’d crossed over the little line dividing the Gulf air from the lower edge of the jet stream¹. On the other side of that line is warmth. So, despite being February, New Orleans was the only way it’s ever been in the eight times I’ve been here, as far as I can tell, the only way it ever is, the way it should be, the way it was meant to be: hot, humid, sweltering. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

This time around we hit some of our favorite spots, crepes in the French Market, swings and Storyland out at City Park, but we also spent more time in one of my favorite parts of New Orleans, Faubourg Treme.

I ended up finding a good coffee shop to work at in the heart of Treme. It also served Sno-balls with an absurd amount of syrup on them, which kept the kids on a good sugar high while we wandered the streets.

While I was working Corrinne and the kids went to the Children’s Museum, which they all said was the best they’ve ever been to. Good enough that they went back a couple of times.

I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more kid-friendly city than New Orleans, but then I think our kids may be a bit unusual.

One day at the campground I was working and Corrinne took the kids to the little playground. There ended up being some other kids there and they were all playing together. I wasn’t there but apparently the parents were complaining about how dirty New Orleans was (homeless people! Poop on the street! The horror!) and one of the kids told Lilah she didn’t like New Orleans. Later, when they were walking back to the bus Lilah whispered to Corrinne, I just don’t think I could be friends with someone who doesn’t like New Orleans.

While it would have been nice to ignore the brake situation completely, it did need to be dealt with. I got in touch with a shop that said they could do it and drove it over one morning. They got it apart and for the first time I saw the front shoes, and yep, we need new shoes, badly. Unfortunately the shoes are a bit of an oddity and the shop couldn’t get a shoe that fit. We ended up sleeping in the bus in the driveway of the shop with one tire off that night. Probably our oddest campsite thus far.

In the end though, two different shoes were ordered and neither ended up fitting. The next day we limped back to the campground to wait on a third set that was on order, but wouldn’t get here for five days. That meant an extra few days in New Orleans, but we’ve certainly been stranded in far less interesting places. No one was complaining this time.

We spent more time hanging around the campground this time around. Sometimes it’s good to spend a few days doing nothing. I worked, the kids played, we cooked lots of blackend redfish, ate crawfish boudin, and waited out a rainstorm or two. Once I even tricked the kids into letting me take portraits of them.

At the end of five days of waiting… that shoe didn’t fit either. I eventually tracked down shoes for the front, but it’d be another five days to have them shipped down and that would mean missing out on our reservations at Fort Pickens. We decided that, if we stuck to the interstate and avoided the stop and go traffic, it’d be fine. I also had a list of shops in Pensacola that I was pretty sure could help us out.

After ten days in New Orleans we were ready to move on anyway. It’s a lovely city, it’d still be top of our list to move to if we were interested in living in a city. But we’re not. Right now we’re more interested in discovering what’s around the next corner.