Day Twenty: New Orleans to Arkansas

Today in the early morning, we arrived at our hotel (the first of several Days Inns over the next several days) in New Orleans. Much of it was gutted and under construction, and it had the shadiest parking garage this blogger has seen in his brief life. Our first room had a minimally functioning toilet, but our request for a change backfired, as the new room smelled of water damage. We gave up on getting another room and instead elected to endure the odor.

After moving our stuff into Room 2, we took off for Bourbon Street, which we reached circuitously since we neglected to bring a map along. The street was blocked off to car traffic, but was filled with human traffic.

We walked around for a little while, but eventually the incredible humidity and heat got to us and we made our way back to our Canal Street hotel. While Bourbon Street showed little signs of Katrina, Canal Street contained mostly boarded-up buildings, as well as many roped off sidewalks.
The next morning, we arose and journeyed back down the French Quarter in an effort to sample a muffaletta from the original muffaletta creators. Unforunately, their establishment is closed on Sunday, and so we had to resort to a tourist-trap cafe's muffaleta. Still pretty darn good, and the live music was passable as well.

After our brief walk to and from Central Grocery (during which we encountered this amusing scenario--be sure to enlarge this photo and read the sign),

we headed off to the airport to deposit Andy, who left us for Johnson and Johnson, those homewreckers.

Then it was off to Arkansas for us.

We drove to a place about two hours outside Little Rock (Dumas, AR), where we stayed in anticipation of our trip to the Clinton Presidential Library the next day. In the process of unpacking, we let into the van about 7,000 mosquitos that would end up plaguing our journey and providing some in-car entertainment (as we attempted to destroy them one by one) over the next two days.