Small and hard in the Big Easy

When I finished yesterday’s post, I was wending my way through heavy traffic in Baton Rouge on my way to New Orleans. Since nearly every reference I’ve made thus far about my GPS has been negative let me praise it for getting me to the Hotel Mazarin in the French Quarter with no “unverified areas” or requests for U-turns and for keeping me on digitized roads throughout. The hotel is relatively small but quite charming with excellent service. The interior hallways echo a bit too noisily but the location – a few yards from the corner of Bienville and Bourbon Streets – couldn’t be a better launching point for exploring the Quarter.

By the time I’d checked in and showered away the heat of the day, I began thinking about dinner. Since I’d dined at the Great Waters Brewing Company in St. Paul early in my Mississippi meanderings, I decided that another brewery dinner would provide an appropriate bookend to the Mississippi segment of the trip. The Crescent City Brewhouse on Decatur Street was about a five-block walk and if that proved too crowded, the Jackson Brewery was less than a block farther on.

Crescent City was a good choice. They seated me promptly close to a jazz trio whose playing volume suited the relatively sedate atmosphere. I asked my server about the Red Fish Ponchartrain and he told me that it was one dish on the menu he never ate because he frequently caught his own red fish and ate it at home. Since I’d had walleye at Great Waters and my mindset was one of bookending the trip, I went ahead and ordered it without his recommendation. It was a meal worthy of New Orleans – grilled fish accompanied by a tiny fried soft-shell crab with a red pepper and crab aioli and fresh asparagus. My beer choice was, of course, the Weiss – an unfiltered wheat beer that had a pleasant spicy finish.

After dinner, I walked back toward the hotel, spent a bit of time walking along Bourbon Street (which you can see is considerably narrower than Beale Street), and watching the crowd build as the night grew later. Perhaps because it was still relatively early or perhaps it was due to a heavier police presence than I’d remembered from past visits, I noticed less public intoxication and rowdiness than I’d expected through the lens of a possibly conflated memory. Of course, given the recent shootings in the Quarter the heavy police presence shouldn’t have surprised me. Unlike many of my other stops along the Mississippi, New Orleans is flat and walking about is easy. Still after an hour or so, my throbbing knee, seemingly of its own volition, propelled me back to the hotel.

My plan for Wednesday, comprised of a very small to do list. was fairly simple. I’d eat a late breakfast, drive to the end of the Great River Road in Venice, stop at some of the cemeteries when I returned to New Orleans for some photo ops, visit the Garden District (more for the people who read this blog than for me) for some additional photo ops (linked in the next post), and return to the hotel to prepare for a fancy dinner.

One fact people may not know about New Orleans is because the city is at, near, or in some places below sea level, and was built on a swamp, people here are entombed above ground. Some of these crypts have become quite elaborate and, as a result, New Orleans cemeteries are often referred to as “Cities of the Dead.” It’s a unique feature of the city and, together with my attraction to cemeteries, one I thought would prove particularly interesting.

Similarly, people who come to New Orleans often confine themselves to the French Quarter. Understandably so. The restaurants, clubs, music, and just the characters wandering about create a certain magnetism that makes the Quarter difficult to break away from so I thought some photos of another of the city’s famous neighborhoods might also be of interest. Unfortunately, the day didn’t materialize quite as I’d planned.

Like so many hotels now, the Mazarin offers a complimentary breakfast. Unlike many hotels, the Mazarin is in New Orleans. Recognizing the Crescent City’s lifestyle, they serve breakfast until 11:00 thus buttressing my decision to have a late morning meal. Despite the torrential downpour engulfing southern Louisiana that morning, I had the late breakfast as I’d planned so things appeared to be getting off to an orderly start.

But then, as I drove south, the day went a bit south, too. One of the supplemental guides I’d been using through my travels was a hard copy of the turn-by-turn directions for the Great River Road available on the Federal Highway Administration’s website. Although I’d had a few moments when I’d questioned their efficacy, I’d planned my day, in part, based on this section:

New Orleans to the End of the East Side of the Great River Road (48 miles)

• Continue on Chartres St.
• Turn north (left) on Elysian Fields Avenue.
• Turn east (right) on St. Claude Avenue/LA 46.
• Follow LA 46 to Poydras.
• In Poydras, turn southwest (right) on LA 39.
• Follow LA 39 west through Braithwaite to the junction with LA 3137.
• Bear north (right) onto LA 3137 and follow until it merges again with LA 39.
• Take the Belle Chasse Ferry for the tenth river crossing.
• Otherwise, continue on LA 39 south to Pointe a La Hache.
• Turn southwest (right) on Adema Ln.
• Turn southeast (left) on LA 15 to the end of the byway at the Pointe a La Hache ferry crossing.
• Take the ferry across the river for the eleventh river crossing and turn south on LA 23 to go to the end of the Great River Road in Venice.

The key element here is not the directions per se but the header allowed me to misinterpret the lack of connection between Venice and the end of the east side of the GRR. The former is 48 miles from New Orleans but the latter is 78 miles. Thanks a lot, DOT! I caught one lucky break reaching the Pointe a La Heche ferry crossing (my only ferry crossing of the trip) just five minutes prior to the ferry’s departure.

The route leaving New Orleans took me through St. Bernard Parrish and the town of Violet. The names of both these places rang quite familiar. Though it has been nearly nine years, the images of St. Bernard Parrish and the town of Violet engulfed by the flood waters of hurricane Katrina flashed vividly into my memory. Poverty and some lack of rebuilding are still evident without leaving St. Claude Avenue the main road out of town along this part of the route.

One of the directional bullet points above sends you from Louisiana 39 onto Louisiana 3137 and back onto Louisiana 39. As had often been the case, when I followed this arc, it seemed to be an unnecessary loop. Highway 3137 indeed parallels and runs closer to the river than Highway 39. However, it’s also inside the levee. Now, perhaps if you travel in an AT-AT you’ll sit high enough to actually see the river over the levee. In a Honda Civic hybrid, you have no chance.

In retrospect, I realize that the ferry crossing at Pointe a La Heche came at the 48-mile mark thus marking the end of the east side of the GRR but not necessarily the end of the GRR. Reading the final bullet point directing me south on LA 23 to “the end of the Great River Road in Venice” (I hope understandably) created my confusion. Venice is the end of the west side of the Great River Road and as far as one can drive along the river. When you drive off the ferry, you take a short access road to Highway 23 and turn left toward Venice. It is, frankly, not the most beautiful part of the drive. I won’t describe the scene or the smells at the end of Highway 23 beyond saying that the between the oil refinery storage tanks and the brackish water it’s neither appealing nor pleasant. And when I reached this spot, it seemed the Great River Road

ends with a whimper.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.