Sunday
New Orleans
Neither one of us slept well. Both of us use two pillows at night and we only had 2 in the room. We tried to get more but the hotel was out of extras. The bed was hard and we were (or at least I was) several times throughout the night to partiers on the street and in the hotel. Clearly our trip was getting off to a slow start. We had a tour of New Orleans scheduled for 9:30 but we were slow moving and thwarted by a wonderful Southern downpour. We decided to beg off of the tour. We had a room service breakfast (real grits!!) and went on a short walk around the French Quarter (essentially around St. Louis Cathedral). We came back to the room, packed and waited to head to the port. You can arrive by 11:00 but they don’t let people on the ship until noon.
Our cab driver (no shuttles??) to the port was awesome but I think I have turned him against ever coming to Oregon. I was telling him how you can’t really get real grits, sweet tea or fried catfish up here. He kept asking, “What food do you have up there?” and “What do they eat?” The only things that I could think of that were classically Oregon, so to speak, were salmon and hazelnuts. I forgot about wine, cheese and razor clams. I’m sure there are other items I forgot about as well. To me, Oregon is a mix of cuisines. He was a really nice guy and we enjoyed our short, but talkative, cab ride.
We both thought as we were waiting in the cattle line, “we’re surrounded by old, white people.” Once we were on the ship we did see a bit more variety of people, but mostly old, white folk. Check-in was fairly quick and we soon found ourselves wondering what to do.
One thing I would have done differently is checked all of our bags. It was suggested to check our main luggage, of course, and then take our carry-ons with us so we could have a change of clothes, medicine, etc. in case our luggage was not delivered to our stateroom that quickly. It was a pain to lug our carry-ons around the ship. The rooms were going to be ready at 2:00 so we wandered a bit and had lunch. We watched them load the ship with all the food for a week and chatted with an older couple from where I can’t remember. They were nice, though. (Everyone we encountered on the ship was nice – probably because we were all there for the same reason.)
I noticed immediately that service on the ship was really fast (for the most part). We requested a refrigerator for our room and by the time we got back to our cabin, maybe 20 minutes later, it was there and plugged in. My mom got us a honeymoon/anniversary package so we also had chocolate covered strawberries and sparkling wine waiting for us. That night we went to a “fun-duction” which we thought would be an overall introduction to things to do on the ship and on shore. It was really just a sales pitch.
The sunset, as we sailed down the Mississippi River, was very beautiful. I took a few pictures of it and we settled in for the rest of the night. It took several hours to sail down the river and get to the Gulf of Mexico. Sure as those on cruise message boards said, sometime in the wee hours of the morning the ship entered the Gulf with a bang. It wasn’t a huge bang, but you could definitely tell that we had left the calm water of the river. Then the fun began…
-M
