I’ve never been to New Orleans before and Teryn has only been there once before, but it was for a work event and she didn’t get to experience it the way she wished she would have and this time we decided that we wanted the full experience of everything that New Orleans had to offer and so we set off to do just that.

It all started when we were still bartending in Cape Cod this past summer when Teryn asked me if I wanted to go to the Voodoo music festival? “Voodoo music festival, isn’t that in New Orleans?” I asked. She responded, “yeah and it’s the weekend before Halloween” “Halloween in New Orleans?!?” “YES, SIGN US UP!” I shouted back.

Our time in Cape Cod was ending and long story short we dropped off my car in Asheville, North Carolina and we rented a car and made the drive down to New Orleans. ( More on why Asheville for a later blog post.)  Teryn being the expert Airbnb finder, found us one hell of an Airbnb to rent that was perfect for us and two of our friends that were gonna join us for Halloween. What really put the bow tie on, the cherry on top to end our Halloween week was the fact that we came across a hostel that worked perfect for our budget and just so happens to be a known haunted location.

St. Vincent’s guest house, but before being a guest house it was known at St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum. The asylum was built in 1861 and was home to many orphans, during this time many children fell ill to yellow fever as it ran rampant through New Orleans. It is said that many of the children still roam the halls and rooms of this place and has been investigated by a few different paranormal investigators, even as we were leaving there was a crew setting up on our floor to film for the following night!

All of the food in New Orleans is amazing and delicious and there is always new places popping up and the old places that have been written about time and time again. Trust me, you can’t go wrong here. You have to have a Beignet, you need to try some Boudin, Jambalaya, and gumbo. Scroll down to the bottom of the post to get my top recommendations!

We really wanted to get some brunch, because well brunch is the best meal of the day. Café Fleur de Lis is by far one of the most popular places in the French Quarter and is rated one of the top 5 places for shrimp & grits. You’ll want to give plenty of time to be able to grab a seat for this as this place fills up pretty fast. We simply put our name on the list and they texted us when our table was ready, so while we were waiting we found a coffee shop down the street called French Truck. I do enjoy a good coffee and if you do too, then I suggest grabbing some coffee from this place you won’t regret it.

One place that I highly recommend for a ton of bbq for that day that you are super hungover and you are just straight ravenous, treat yourself to Voodoo BBQ you’ll thank me later. 

New Orleans is pretty popular for their ghost tours, french quarter city tours, cemetery tours, vampire tours and outside of the city you can go on the swamp tours, plantation tours and there are probably a million more tours that I probably don’t know about. So depending on what you are you going for, I’d pick out a few and just go!

The Voodoo music festival was insane, it’s basically like every other big music festival with all of the big name artists, but everyone and I mean everyone is dressed up to celebrate Halloween week. They had an area on the festival grounds that had a haunted house complete with zombie actors to scare the crap out of you if you weren’t paying attention.

For 3 days the line up included Kendrick Lamar, Foo Fighters, The Killers and along with those guys, Post Malone, Cold war kids, RL Grime, Kflay were all there as well plus a 100 or so more bands. I’m already stoked to go back again this year.

Voodoo Music Festival

Just a voodoo priest and his priestess

They say if you go to New Orleans, you have to check out Bourbon Street, well that might be fine and all but when we were there Bourbon street was completely torn up from the floor up, meaning that the street was basically gone. I believe they are trying to reconstruct the drainage sewer system and just basically repairing the entire street. You can still go to all of the bars on the street, but it’s kinda difficult to walk down the narrow sidewalks with all of the construction barricades, fences, and plastic walls. Besides, it’s much of the same thing, with a bunch of trashy bars full of super drunk tourists that only know about Bourbon street.

Don’t get me wrong we had a few drinks on the streets of New Orleans, but we at least ventured off Bourbon street and found different parts of the city to go exploring instead.

The entire time we were there, I kept asking locals where the best spot to go for Halloween was and 9 out of 10 times, they said, “go to Frenchmen street. Frenchmen Street is what Bourbon Street used to be.” Complete with jazz bands playing in every other bar or restaurant and with New Orleans being the birthplace of Jazz, you can’t leave here without catching some live music. Don’t want to catch a show in bigger clubs, no worries there is always an amazing up and coming jazz band right down the street that is playing for tips.

We hung out on Frenchmen street for most of the night of Halloween and at one point there was a jazz band playing in the middle of the street and in minutes the entire street was packed full of people making it impossible for cars to get by. Some unlucky motorists were trapped for quite some time.

Protip* Don’t try to drive on Frenchmen street especially on Halloween* get yourself an uber and call it good.

Side note*  It is safe to say that the nicest uber drivers that we’ve ever encountered were every single uber we used there.

2005 is the year that America witnessed one of the deadliest storms and we saw what happens when we’re not prepared for mother nature. Hurricane Katrina completely destroyed lives, homes, businesses and just basically annihilated everything in its path. While we were driving around New Orleans, you can clearly see the differences between the neighborhoods and see which neighborhoods could afford to rebuild versus the ones that couldn’t and are still boarded up and vacant. When we were talking to one of our uber drivers he told us that he was from New Orleans, but just recently moved back. When Katrina hit, he told us how he had lost everything to include his home and he moved to Alabama and lived there, but he knew that New Orleans was his true home and decided to move back and is now finally back on his feet and buying a home. He told us that there are still families that are only now receiving their insurance payouts and that even though it has been 13 years since the storm there is still a struggle to get New Orleans back to where it once was.

it’s easy to think about when we were in Thailand on the same beach that experienced the 2004 tsunami that killed thousands and destroyed 14 countries and how many of those areas are still rebuilding, but for America, you tend to think that “oh, we’re number one, we’ll take care of it and we will bounce back” but the fact is that is that we failed in how our government handled the entire disaster and there is still a lot of familes that are still figuring out how to survive and trying to get back on their feet again.

 

Pennywise came to Frenchmen street looking for Georgie.

When I think of New Orleans this is what comes to mind: cemeteries, ghost tours, swamps with gators, plantations, voodoo, culture melting pot, Katrina, Mardi gras. What do you think of when you think of New Orleans?