New Orleans/Orange Beach Trip Report Day 5

Day 5: Wednesday April 29, 2015

Moving day. We woke up knowing without a doubt that our trip was more than half over. We managed to get up a bit earlier this morning, although, I’m really not sure how. We did breakfast downstairs again and finished packing.

Once the packing was done, I called down to valet to get the car brought to the entrance. As someone who stays at mid-level (and in Disney, value) hotels, this just seemed so different to me. But valet seems to be the only way to park at a hotel in New Orleans.

We grabbed our pile of luggage (HOW did it grow so much in 4 days?!) and headed downstairs. The receipt had been emailed to me about 2 am, so all I had to do to check out was hand over the keys. Needless to say, I’m not sure that the wheels on the suitcase even stopped moving before I was moving again, and headed outside. Just as we opened the door to the outside world, our car emerged from the parking garage. Perfect timing.

We packed the car, fired up the phone GPS, and we were on our way to Alabama. The hotel was not far from the highway, so within minutes we had joined the crazies on I-10. Side note, I’ve driven in a few places known for its crazy drivers, Boston and Texas included. I’ve decided that the Masshole population has nothing on New Orleans. Good grief! But we made it out of the city and crossed Lake Pontchartrain, which was a cool drive. I kind of wished I-10 was the highway with the really long causeway over the lake. As it is, I-10 crosses it for a pretty significant length. Nick, the king of sleeping about as soon as he sits down in the passenger seat, slept.

Before I knew it, we had crossed into Mississippi. I have a goal to go to all 50 states before I turn 50, and I do count driving through, so this was another new state crossed off the list. That being said, I did stop at the Welcome Center to do an official “check-in” on facebook, and also to gather tourist manuals just in case we end up back in the area again. It was a very cool rest area in terms of architecture, so a few pictures got taken. Plus we wanted to document that I had crossed another state off the list.

Once the brochure gathering was done, it was back on to I-10. Next stop? Lunch! Nick and I are big fans of the show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. The website (flavortownusa.com) that lists every place Guy has been to is bookmarked, and any time we are traveling, we check it to see if there are any restaurants to go to that he’s been to in that area. Through this website, I had discovered a barbecue place called The Shed. It just happened to have a location in Ocean Springs, MS that was roughly 2 minutes off the highway. We like BBQ, and timing was perfect for lunch. It was a no-brainer.

We knew this was going to be a winner when we pulled into the parking lot.

Once we’d finished admiring(?) the outside, we headed inside to order. I got a pulled pork sandwich. Nick got a combo platter that involved brisket, pulled pork, corn and mac and cheese. We found a place to sit while we waited for our food. The interior of The Shed is a crushed stone floor, and the seating area is long picnic tables. The table set-up was very much like a BBQ place we went to in Texas.

Our food arrived a few minutes later and we dug in. So GOOD! If you’re ever passing through MS on I-10 at a time even remotely close to meal time, you need to go to The Shed. It’s great! 

Once we finished lunch, we walked back to the car, where we realized that we’d been so busy taking in the outside of The Shed that we’d totally missed the bayou along the edge of the parking lot. So pretty. 

Once the picture taking was done, we hopped back in the car, and continued driving. If you factor out stops, it’s supposed to be a 3 hour trip from NOLA to Gulf Shores. Very reasonable, and a very easy and very pretty drive. Nick fell asleep again. We stopped at the first tourist center when we arrived in Alabama, and then continued deeper into the state.

I got a little nervous driving through Mobile. The pictures I’d seen of Orange Beach were gorgeous, but the water in Mobile Bay was anything but. It was very similar to the water in Lake Pontchartrain. Not a pretty color.

When we arrived in Gulf Shores, our first stop was, what else? The welcome center. We got our tourist manuals (and coupons), and then we headed across the street to The Track. Time to really be tourists.

Growing up, I never went go-karting. It just wasn’t something my family did. Nick’s family apparently went go-karting on every vacation. Like it was a requirement that there be a go-kart place at their destination. His family introduced me to go-karts last summer, and it was fun. So when I found The Track advertised online, I knew we had to go there.

Once we had purchased our points, we headed for the first go-kart track. This was our warm up. It was pretty good. But the real reason we came here was around the corner, and we still hadn’t seen it in person yet. I’d seen pictures online, but when I told Nick about it, he decided he didn’t want to see it until he was there in person. And we know everything looks different in person anyway.

So once we finished on the Super Track, we headed around the corner to the Wild Woody, a three story, spiraling, wooden go-kart track. It looked even cooler in person than it had online. 

This is where we realized just how low-crowds this area was. There were a handful of people at The Track, but Nick and I ended up being the only two people racing on both tracks. We had a blast. And that 3-story wooden track was just as fun to go-kart on as it looked. If only they had that in NH.

Once our points were gone, we hopped in the car, and finished the trip to the hotel. Our home for the next few days was the Hampton Inn, Orange Beach. It was ON the beach. It looked kinda beachy too.

Check-in was easier than I had expected, given that this night had been reserved on Hilton Honors points, and the rest of the stay was cash. Pretty soon we were on our way up to our room on the 6th floor. While I was glad to see that they honored my permanently stored preference of “high floor”, I was a little disappointed to see that our room was right across from the elevator. My account also says “away from elevator”. Oh well, can’t win them all.

The room was a typical Hampton Inn room, with a very beachy color scheme. Perfect. And the view was fantastic! My concern as we drove over Mobile Bay wasn’t necessary. This beach was gorgeous.

Once I’d finished admiring the view, it was time to start the nightly challenge of figuring out where to eat. Eventually we decided on Bahama Bob’s, so we hopped in the car and drove over there. Bahama Bob’s is right next to the ocean, and specializes in seafood. Since it was cool (you know...a chilly 75* haha), they had the plastic up around the balcony. We sat out there to eat. Nick had some fried seafood platter (shrimp, oysters and???). I had some fried white fish, and a Bahama Mama to drink. Nick also went the fruity drink route with a Bahama Bob. Dinner was good and so was the service.

Nick and I love ice cream, and it’s kind of our thing to find a local ice cream place wherever we are. So once dinner was finished, it was off to Matt’s Homemade Alabama Ice Cream for dessert. I have no idea what kind of ice cream either one of us got, but it was very good. Not as good as our local place (that, interestingly, was begun as the senior project of one of the teachers I work with), but very good.

After stuffing ourselves, we headed back to the hotel to grab the camera, and go for a walk on the beach. It was beautiful. I took lots of pictures. Nick waited very patiently.

While picture taking, we noticed a fin surfacing periodically a ways out in the water. We never figured out exactly what it was, but we decided to go with “dolphin”. We didn’t want to think of alternatives.

Once the sun had really gone down, we stopped at the beach side tiki bar that was connected to the hotel for a beverage for Nick (some Alabama themed thing that tasted like cough syrup), and headed up to the hotel room, where we parked ourselves on the balcony for awhile to listen to the waves, and then eventually collapsed into bed.

New Orleans/Orange Beach Trip Report: Day 4

Day 4: Tuesday 4/28/15

Those blackout shades worked really well. I woke up just before 9 am. That would be central time. Uh, so much for picking up the rental car at 9? Guess I was tired.

Realizing that breakfast would be ending at 9:30, I quickly got ready and even Nick managed to wake up, and we headed down to breakfast about 9:15. We were pleased to find a still fully stocked buffet. I’ve been at too many hotels that started closing the buffet line half an hour or more before breakfast ends. Clearly these guys anticipate the night owls, because they were refilling items until 9:25.

Once we finished breakfast, we headed down to Canal Street to catch the street car. It was time to attempt to find our way to Enterprise. We did alright in this task. We only ended up one stop past where we needed to be, and were able to walk to where we needed to be. But, it was one of those neighborhoods that I don’t really want to go back to. We made it to Enterprise though. Lesson learned: next time, remember to call a few days ahead and set up the free shuttle to the rental car place.

The rental process was quick, and pretty soon we were navigating back to the hotel in a Chrysler 200. It was a very weird car, complete with a spin knob for shifting. I’ll explain the idiocy of THAT technology in a later chapter.

Thanks to the awesome grid that is New Orleans we were safely back at the hotel just a few minutes later. I held my breath and left the rental car with valet, because there was no other option, and we walked upstairs to get ready for the day. Once ready, we walked down to the river (less than a mile from the hotel). We had discovered the previous day that it was Navy week. Evidently there WAS a reason for a very large number of men and women in uniform wandering around the city. There were 6 or 7 military ships from all divisions, and a couple countries, in port, free for people to get on and explore. That’s right, free. So we shelved our plans of going outside the city to see some old plantation houses until the next trip, even though it was the reason we’d picked up the rental car today instead of departure day, and decided to hop on this opportunity to check out a big ship or two. Highest on our list to see was the USS Wasp.

It took us a little bit of wandering to figure out exactly where to enter to check out the ship. We found it eventually though, and after a quick trip through the metal detectors, we were headed onto the ship. The USS Wasp is a US Navy multipurpose amphibious assault ship. A lot of words for “It’s HUGE”. Having never been on one of our military ships before, I was in awe of the size. I was also really impressed with how genuinely excited the troops were to show off their ship. Pictures were encouraged, so I’ll let those do the rest of the talking.

Exploring the ship was pretty awesome. Even more awesome was the pride of the troops on board. Most awesome? There was a very elderly gentleman that was also touring the ship. He was sporting a “Navy” hat. EVERY single service person he came across saluted him, and a couple of the active guys took him by the elbow and personally guided him through the ship. That level of respect was really cool to see. I’m also not sure who was more excited, him, or them, which was cool to see too.

Once we were done exploring the ship, we decided it was time for lunch. Since the ship was docked essentially at the mall, and the foodcourt of the mall had chains that don’t exist in NH, we decided to just eat there. When Nick and I travel, we try VERY hard to eat only at restaurants we can’t eat at at home. We try mostly for strictly local restaurants, but we’ll also eat at chains, if said chain doesn’t exist in our area. We ended up getting food from Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, because it’s a chain we don’t have at home. We were incredibly impressed by the employee at the counter. She was SO efficient, polite, and helpful. She will go places. Obviously, with a name like that, we ate chicken fingers, and they were really good.  We ate our lunch on the balcony outside the food court, staring at the USS Wasp. It really gave another perspective of how crazy big that ship is.

Once we finished lunch, we hopped on the street car and rode it along the river to the end of the line. We then went into the Old US Mint, because they are also part of that Louisiana State Museum collection and they have a jazz display. Remember, Nick is a huge jazz fan. Turns out the first floor was all about money production (after all, it was an old US Mint). The 2nd floor was where the jazz displays were. There were MANY pictures of different jazz musicians. There was also a display of instruments rescued from various musicians’ homes and restored. Many of these instruments had been severely damaged in Katrina. The pictures of the damage, compared to the restored instrument were amazing.

Once we finished at the Old US Mint, we decided it might be time for a break from touristing. So we hopped on the street car and took it to the stop near Cafe du Monde. We picked up two more orders of beignets to take back to the hotel. We also poked around the gift shop right next to Cafe du Monde where we tried New Orleans’ famous pralines for the first time (Nick liked ‘em. I wasn’t impressed. It was basically chewy peanut brittle.), and bought a few post cards for the eventual photo album. Then we hopped back on the street car and took it back to the mall, so that we only had to walk a few blocks to the hotel. Nick’s feet were tired. Time for me to take him back to Disney, to work those feet out again!

We hiked back to the hotel and changed into swimsuits. Then we went down (our room was on the 9th floor) to the 6th floor to access the rooftop swimming pool. We were confused too. Turns out the Drury recently expanded and added a second “tower”. That tower is shorter than the main tower (where our room was), and they put a rooftop pool and hot tub on it. We were kinda surprised by just how big this hotel was. We also had a surprise with our key cards in the elevator. My experience in both San Antonio and New Orleans is that Drury takes security seriously. We had been told at the check-in desk that to get to our room we would need to tap our key on the keypad in the elevator (Drury, like Disney, uses RFID keys). The elevator wouldn’t allow you to select a floor until you had. We had discovered over the course of our stay that this was only necessary to take the elevator up to our room, not to go down. Well, it turns out that the going down thing only worked if you were going to the lobby. Even going down from a floor with rooms on it, we had to tap our key to be allowed to select a floor with rooms on it (i.e., the 6th floor). Lesson learned.

So we found the pool and promptly explored. I was slightly disappointed that the wall was MUCH higher than the wall at the rooftop pool in San Antonio. I couldn’t see much without standing on a chair. Yes, I did find a chair so that I could check out the view. Shhh...being Italian, in a family full of absurdly tall people (mom’s side) has made me a chair-as-a-stepstool expert. Nick wished that he had found this place prior to all of those thunderstorms. He felt it would have been a perfect vantage point.

Once we’d finished exploring, we settled into the hot tub, and were joined about 2 minutes later by a group of 4 women. Listening to them talk, I couldn’t help but notice that they talked like us, and I was pretty sure I heard them mention a few landmarks that we are familiar with. After a few minutes they started a conversation with us, and as it turns out, they were a bunch of educators from NH. We chatted about what we all had done in New Orleans, and swapped tips. And we laughed about what a small world it is.

Once we were done with the hot tub, we headed back to our room to change and get ready for our last evening in New Orleans. First stop? Downstairs for our last round of complimentary drinks. Once the tequila sunrises and margaritas had been taken care of, we headed for the French Quarter, passing a random group of musicians as we entered the Quarter. 

First stop was The Gumbo Shop, not for food, but for a cookbook to bring home. Yeah, we really liked it. But we had decided to go the drinks and apps route for dinner tonight, rather than a real dinner. Or so we thought.

After our stop at The Gumbo Shop, we headed over to Pat O’Brien’s. After a bit of debate, we decided to try the piano bar there. After we’d been seated and ordered hurricanes, we discovered that the food is only served out in the courtyard. Oh well. We enjoyed our drinks, and found that the piano bar was a LOT of fun. 

We stayed for about an hour and then moved on, stopping to have our glasses boxed before we left. Apparently, if you are in the piano bar, your hurricanes get served in actual glasses, and they’re yours to keep. One of the bartenders was able to provide us with glasses for them, so that they’d travel a little easier.

As we were leaving Pat O’Brien’s, we ran into the NH crew we’d met at the hotel hot tub. After chatting with us, they’d decided to try the hurricanes. We chatted for a couple of minutes, they gave us some drink suggestions, and we headed off in different directions.

By now, Nick had decided that he wanted to try the fried chicken from Brothers. We’d read about it, and we’d walked by the place every day, multiple times a day. Supposedly it was the best in the city. So, we walked to Brothers and got the chicken. Brothers is a convenience store that happens to be open 24 hours a day, and serves fried chicken. Since it’s a convenience store, we took the chicken back to our hotel room to eat.

It really IS excellent fried chicken. Moist chicken, crispy breading, and just a bit of kick to it. We devoured the chicken and then started packing. In the morning it’s time to check out and drive to Alabama.