December 2018: A Christmas Weekend in New Orleans: Day 2, Part 2

Day 2, Part 2

After lunch we walked back to Canal Street. Our next destination was the Audubon Insectarium and Butterfly Garden.

Side note, Audubon has 3 attractions in New Orleans. The Aquarium and Insectarium are both in the main tourist area. The zoo is out past the Garden District. In other words, it was really easy to get to the aquarium and insectarium. The zoo takes a bit more effort to get to. Varying ticket combinations are sold, including online. Online it was the same price to buy a ticket to all 3 attractions as it would have been to buy separate tickets to the aquarium and insectarium (while a logical combination, it isn’t one that is offered online). So we did that, to keep our options open.

Once again, I found some palm tree sights to take pictures of on Canal Street as we made our way to the Insectarium. 

The Insectarium is in the old New Orleans Customs Building. This is a federal building. This means we had to go through security. Metal detector for us, x-ray for anything we were carrying (like the bottles of water we were trying to smuggle in...thankfully, the security guy let us keep them, despite the “no outside food or drinks” sign).

Once we had made it through security, our tickets were scanned on my phone, and we were on our way. This place was very interesting too, although not quite as impressive as the aquarium. The aquarium is a place I’d willingly return to. I’m glad I went to the insectarium, but I don’t feel a need to go back. My favorite part was the butterfly garden, as reflected by my pictures. 

We escaped the insectarium without any permanent hitchhikers, and decided since it was a nice day, to work our way over to Jackson Square. It was about a 10 or 15 minute walk from Canal Street.

The last time we were in New Orleans, we had some extreme weather. As in a tornado touched down over by the airport while we were at the World War 2 Museum. Even the days that didn’t have tornadoes brought some rain with them. So Jackson Square was pretty, but quiet.

On the last Saturday before Christmas, on a blue sky day in the mid-60s, Jackson Square was anything but quiet. Just about every section of fence contained artwork for sale, and there were multiple street musicians and other performers. It was AWESOME. We spent quite a bit of time listening to the musicians, checking out the artwork, and simply enjoying the atmosphere. And yes, there’s a band performing in a “church quiet zone”.

While we were in Jackson Square, I got a phone call that our room was ready. So when we had had our fill of sunshine and amazing music, we started the walk back to the hotel, by way of the courtyard bar at Pat O’Brien’s for hurricanes to go. You can walk around New Orleans with open containers after all.

We enjoyed our hurricanes, and made it back to the hotel. The remainder of the check in process was quick, as was retrieval with our bags. The valet guy helped us with the elevator, and we were in our room on the 10th floor pretty quickly.

After relaxing for a couple hours, it was time to go find some dinner. And there was no question where we were going.

On our last trip, we fell in love with the Gumbo Shop. Absolutely delicious food, reasonably priced (and portioned), and good service. The food was so good that we even came home with a cookbook (that we will probably never actually utilize). So that was the natural choice for dinner tonight.

It was about a 15 minute walk from our hotel to the Gumbo Shop. Of course, along the way, we passed an antique gun shop, so we had to pay that a visit. We live in rural NH and Nick was a history major. I’ll let you do the math.

Gun shop visited (and laughed at for their lack of knowledge), we finished the walk to the Gumbo Shop and found...a line. At first I thought that maybe it was the start of the line for Preservation Hall, because I know people line up early for those shows (go there sometimes; it’s amazing), but it wasn’t. It was the line for the Gumbo Shop.

So we people watched and took in the sights for awhile, and eventually made it in to dinner. And it was worth the wait. I had chicken and sausage gumbo, and Nick had catfish st peter (catfish with a crabcake and some creamy sauce on top), followed by bread pudding for dessert. And I’m pretty sure someone sacrificed a po’boy for our dinner bread. We also knew we were in the south with the amount of butter we found at our table. 

After our delicious dinner, we headed for Canal Street, to take the streetcar to City Park. We had to wait a bit for the streetcar, but a couple came along eventually, and we got to watch a lot of action in the process. There was quite the large emergency response to something, complete with fire trucks racing down the neutral ground (where the streetcars travel). It was quite the sight to see. And Canal Street is pretty at night, so I was entertained even before the emergency vehicles showed up. Also pictured is the exterior of Hotel Monteleone. This is on the list of places to see interior Christmas decorations at tomorrow...

The streetcar ride was long. It had us convinced to Uber back to the hotel, until we saw the traffic around City Park. Why were we at City Park? There’s an event at Christmas called Celebration in the Oaks. It’s supposed to be a huge Christmas light display, and quite popular at that.

It was definitely quite popular. I can’t say that we thought it was huge, and it certainly wasn’t the best display we have been to outside of Disney (Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Maine with their Gardens Aglow wins that designation). Quite frankly, we were confused by the whole event, and that was even before we encountered Mr. Bingle, the horrifying snowman. But it was definitely popular. Should you find yourself attending this event, I strongly recommend buying your tickets online in advance. Thankfully we had done that, so we could skip the ridiculous line for ticket sales. If we had had to stand in that line, we would have just turned around and gone back downtown immediately. As it is, we were done wandering through the lights after about 15 minutes.

Once we had finished with the lights, we headed back to the streetcar pick up area, wondering how jellyfish fit with Christmas. A streetcar arrived as we did, so we climbed aboard, along with a large group traveling together.

This group was full of kiddos, and boisterous parents. They were out to have a good time. Within minutes their ringleader was leading a singalong, that included “Grandma got ranned over by a reindeer” and Frosty the Snowman “with a cornrow pipe”, among others. Nick and I were dying hearing the lyric changes, and trying not to show it. We were kinda surprised by how tolerant everyone was that boarded the streetcar at later stops, because in Boston, a singalong on public transit would likely get you murdered, but we were thrilled to see families having good clean, nonelectronic fun. Our ears did ring for hours, however.

We made it downtown much more quickly than we had made it to City Park, and we walked back to the hotel, by way of Brothers Chicken. We didn’t really NEED more food, but the best fried chicken in the city was basically next to our hotel. And Brothers is actually a convenience store, so there was the quest to find alcohol and candy not sold at home too. Fried chicken (tenders because of an unfortunate language barrier that evening) just happened to make it back to the room with us too. And for future reference, stick to the traditional fried chicken there. The tenders are good, but they’ve got nothing on the standard fried chicken.

Back in our room we ate the tenders, some candy, and sampled some alcohol we don’t typically find, then showered and crashed. It had been a long but fantastic day, and we were even more in love with this city than we had been in 2015.