It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness....Dickens' words are a fitting description of our past two days in New Orleans. Skyler and I both had mixed feelings about the city.  It's a place with incredible history, arts and music; but the city's excessive glorification of debauchery--as Skyler put it-- drowns out much of what the city has to offer.

Nonetheless, we found some gems amongst the duds. We began our first full day on Friday with a breakfast of champions: two Po' Boy (Poor Boy) sandwiches at the legendary Parkway Bakery. Po' Boys are a product of the Great Depression, during which the New Orleans Street Car workers were striking for higher wages. During this 1929 strike, two restaurant owners prepared the cheapest possible sandwiches they could create and distributed them to the workers for free, in an act of solidarity. Typically, they'd pour left over roast beef gravy, with very little actual meat, over two thin slices of French bread. The owners also didn't shy away from referring to the workers as exactly what they were: poor boys...or in a thick Cajun accent: po' boy (just think James Carville or Bobby Boucher). Hence the sandwich name.

Great story, great sandwich, not the best breakfast food. But we survived the heart-attack-in-a-sandwich and had a great time at the restaurant. Here's us, hats and all, looking as touristy as ever at Parkway:

We embraced our tourist status for a few more hours, exploring the French Quarter, Jackson Square and the Mississippi River Waterfront. Just as we were hitting rock bottom AKA Bourbon Street, (where Lucifer himself plans to open up a bar in time for next year's Mardi Gras) we found a way out. An old friend of mine from Lower Merion goes to Tulane and is living around campus this summer. He was remarkably hospitable to us, despite the fact that I've fallen completely out of touch with him. We had a good time exploring the campus and getting a sense of the social life on campus.

Tulane is beautiful as is its surrounding area. The school's biggest downfall is probably its isolation. It sits in uptown New Orleans, the most affluent area of the city which is home to the beautiful, borderline over-the-top, antebellum-style homes of the Garden District. The neighborhood and Tulane's campus are gorgeous, but I don't get the sense from my friend that students really take advantage of the city very often (except to party). Although that's a pretty sweeping judgment, so don't quote me on that.

By the end of the first night, Skyler and I were feeling both exhausted and a little unsatisfied. We made a goal to win our last day in the city as best we could and--thanks to Skyler--we did. He woke up early the next morning (much earlier than me) and booked a relatively cheap, but fantastic tour of the city and its surrounding areas. We spent three to four hours with a very good guide, who covered everything from the city's early colonial history to Katrina. It was definitely money and time well spent.

Skyler and I both agreed that the best part of the experience was the thorough history lesson that we received on Katrina. The tragedy occurred too early in our lives for us to fully grasp the magnitude of the storm and its effects. We spent a large portion of the tour in the city's Ninth Ward, the hardest hit area of the storm where scenes like these unfolded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWMfZA3sY8Y

The experience rehashed a lot of my own memories of the disaster and it poked some big holes in the neatly packaged narrative of New Orleans' recovery. The poorest, most underserved areas of the city (like the Ninth Ward) were the hardest hit and they are far from recovery. Despite philanthropic efforts and federal subsidies, New Orleans still has one of the worst housing blight problems in the country. Most families who lost their homes in the Ninth Ward won't come back to the area because they can't. In the years leading up to Katrina, they were told by city officials that they DID NOT live in a floodplain. Since they were told that their homes were not at risk for flooding, very few of the families in the Ninth Ward had flood insurance.

This is all old news for anyone who was an adult at the time of the storm, but for us much of these details were quite fresh. Recalling the preparation, the response (Bush/FEMA) and the city's blatant negligence towards its low-income residents left us pretty much stunned. Meteorologically speaking, it was inevitable that this hurricane would be a "perfect storm". But the irresponsible cluster f@#k that was our federal government's response was far from inevitable. It was a national disgrace precisely because, from the second Katrina hit landfall, the fate of many of these families was in our government's hands and our leaders failed to protect them.

We shared our somber reflections with each other following the tour, and then tried our best to enjoy our last night in the city. After a much-needed nap, we enjoyed some (dirt cheap) Cajun Dirty Rice at our hostel for dinner. Then we hit took the Street Car down Canal Street (it's the city's main public transit system that we ended up using a lot during the weekend) and went deep into the French Quarter to Frenchmen Street--the epicenter of New Orleans' live music.

Fortunately, Frenchmen attracts a much more tame, but still exciting crowd  than Bourbon Street. The majority of the people at Frenchmen are looking for good music and dancing, not utterly base binge drinking. And for the most part, the venues and bars on Frenchmen know their audience and serve them well. After searching around and listening in at some of these spots, Skyler and I decided to give Blue Nile a try. As soon as we walked in we knew we'd found the right place. Stooges, a local New Orleans brass band, had just started a three hour set filled with interpretive covers of oldies classics as well as impressive, original music. Here's a small taste:

As Skyler put it, we danced the night away:

It was a very fun way to end a visit that was decidedly mixed. Not to mention, I got to see Skyler "Bust a Move" Mueller break out some remarkable skill on the dance floor. I was impressed and embarrassed, all at once.

We finally succumbed to the natural flow of the Big Easy this morning--we woke up two hours later than we'd planned, but I've been told that two hours is a good conversion rate for NOLA-Time. We took a stab at the National Jazz Historical Park downtown but it was closed. So we hit the road for Austin.

Like I said, our weekend in New Orleans was the best of times and the worst of times--and the drive to Austin was no different. We suffered through recurring flash thunderstorms for a few hours until we finally got some distance from the tropical climate of the Louisiana coast. Then we hit Houston. Oh lord, not Houston. Just thinking about that urban sprawl makes me break out in a cold sweat. That city felt like it went on forever with excessive monotony. Granted, I was only able to drive through the town on a highway, but even that experience will be enough to give me land-use themed nightmares tonight (you might be able to tell by now that I love to make drastically sweeping judgments about things).

Luckily, once we got out of Houston and deeper into Texas, the drive became unbeatable. I haven't experienced anything quite like the feeling that I had today while driving towards the sunset on Route 71--a scenic two-lane highway that cuts west through the heart of rural Texas. I was suddenly hit with the realization that I couldn't find a better use of my time even if I tried. For the first time so far during the trip, I felt completely at ease with this endeavor. 

Who knows how long that calming sense of peace and confidence will last (we might already be facing car difficulties which is pretty much a guaranteed spike in blood pressure); but fortunately, the feeling of that blazing sun washing over my face has been seared into my brain and I plan to return to that memory throughout the trip when necessary. Skyler's simple description was both apt and beautiful: it was the biggest sun he'd ever seen.

I don't know whether we'll be getting more of those infuriating rainstorms or jaw-dropping sunsets in the future, but I do know that I've been enjoying the unpredictable bumps in the road so far. We're in Austin now and we're ready to seize our only full day here tomorrow. We're starting with a jog through the University of Texas campus, then a stop at the auto shop (fingers crossed), followed by a visit to the LBJ Presidential Library and Texas State Museum, topped off with a concert at a local music venue on Austin's historic 6th Street. 

But you know what they say about the best laid plains...