NOLA

Wowzers! Its been like 3 weeks since I've posted... so sorry!!! I left for NOLA on April 24th and got back last night. My DH and I had a great time :) My parents drove up for 5 days and my cousins in Atlanta drove down for 3 days - so fun!!! We did so many fun things.... the reason we went and the first thing we did was the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on Friday, it was amazing - good food and good music! We listened to a new artist (to us of course) called Teresa Anderson, she is a Swedish, Indie, Pop, Retro R&B artist - so cool!!! Then we heard Robert Plant and Allison Krauss together, awesome!!! Lastly, Sheryl Crow - love her - she sang some of her new songs and they rocked :)

Here are some of the other things we did (if I go day by day like I did for Ireland I would be here again forever and I unfortunatly don't have to the time to do that now). We saw The Hurricane on the Bayou IMAX movie, very good! In the movie was a young girl named Amanda Shaw (great violinist with a LA bayou twist - bought her CD and she is coming to Ybor in a few weeks!) also in the movie was Tab Benoit (saw him later in the week in concert at Preservation Hall). We also visited Pat O'briens a few times of course - hurricanes, lunch and piano bar!!! Had to do a Bayou/Swamp tour so we headed to Honey Island to see the alligators, and boy we sure did :) DH and I did a Plantation tour, just the two of us to Laura Plantation - a Creole plantation run by women, very awesome - this was also the place were the folk tales of Briar rabbit/Tar baby were told and written by one of the slaves... we went to the casino a few times, rode the St. Charles street car almost every day, ate beignets at Cafe Du Monde (a must!), Jackson Square, the French Market, Le Petit Theatre du vieux carre (the oldest community theatre) they had a production of Annie playing but was sold out... but we got to look around - also took the ferry over to Mardi Gras World in downtown Algiers (very cool!), cemetaries, went to the local music store - LA Music Factory, they had live music every hour and we got to see Teresa Anderson again, bought her cd and recorded her on the camera.... U.S Mint, lastly was the concert at Preservation Hall with Tab Benoit, standing room only in this really old building - Awesome!!! I won't bore you too much with the food - all I can say is I probably gained 5 pounds and I am in love with crawfish now!!!! NOLA is great for a long weekend - but we found that 8 days was too long and we spend too much money... o'well, you only live once :)

I took almost 400 pictures - 70 something are posted on my myspace page... check them out, let me know if you need the link... here are a few of my favorites though :)