Touring New Orleans with Jim and Goody

Our goal when we left Hot Springs was to get back to our original itinerary in time to meet my brother and sister-in-law as planned in New Orleans. We made it. We’re camped less than 10 miles from the city at Bayou Segnette State Park.

They are staying at the Hotel Chateau in the French Quarter. Like most buildings in that oldest part of the city, the hotel sits right on the street.

Behind it is the lovely courtyard it shares with its neighbors.

We started our tour today at Jackson Square. We boarded the Hop On Hop Off bus for a tour of the city. It was so cold that we opted to ride all around the city and got off back at Jackson Square.

I love the huge live oaks, like this one that sits between the square and the Mississippi.

We walked into the French Quarter to the Royal House Oyster Bar for lunch. None of us had oysters, but we did have a good meal.

After lunch we continued our walk to meet our tour of the Saint Louis Number One Cemetery. This Catholic cemetery was founded in 1789, after the great fire of 1788 had filled the existing one.

Our guide explained that the first graves were structures of brick, like this, designed to keep the caskets from floating up out of the swampy ground.

Those quickly evolved into more elaborate structures.

Even though the cemetery is only two acres, it is still in use today. Families own the tombs. The heat, which reaches 300 degrees inside the tombs, along with the high humidity reduces the remains to ashes in a year. After a year and a day the tomb can be opened, the ashes pushed back to a slot and a new body put in. The name is added to the marble slab fixed to the front. Slabs are replaced once they’re full.

The condition of the tomb depends on the family that owns and tends them. If no one is left who cares for them the tombs begin to erode, though there are untended tombs hundreds of years old.

Owning and tending a tomb is expensive, so some people got together in mutual societies to build and tend tombs. This is the largest, and is an Italian burial site.

Our guide showed us some of the famous tombs, including this one for Marie Laveau, the Voodoo queen.

People still come by to leave tokens and ask favors of her. They mark the tomb with three X’s, representing past, present and future.

This is the burial site of Homer Plessy, a black man who got on a whites only railroad car in 1892.

He was arrested and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, ruled against him and established the doctrine of separate but equal treatment of races. That was the law until overturned in 1954 in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education.

This city of the dead makes an interesting contrast to modern downtown, seen in the background.

The cemetery lies just away from the Mississippi on the far side of Basin Street. When it was built this was outside the city limits. In New Orleans everything is named in reference to the Mississippi, either towards or away, or upriver or downriver.

We never did hop back on the bus. From the cemetery we cut back across the French Quarter to Jim and Goody’s hotel.

We continued through this picturesque city to where our truck was parked, back near Jackson Square. It was a fun, if chilly, day but altogether too much walking for Bud.