Prologue

We’re taking a chance this vacation. Since our offspring reached adulthood we’ve always enjoyed just our own company on the road; but this time we’ve signed ourselves up for two weeks in New Orleans with Kate and Don. We all enjoy each other’s company at home in Nashua, and we’re pretty sure the good times will roll for us as we share this visit to a city we all love. There’s a practical side as well to the increase in numbers: With multiple drivers available, we can make better time getting there and back.

A Sunday start, instead of our usual Saturday departure, has given us an extra-leisurely getaway; we had all day yesterday to fine-tune the letter we’ve left for the pet sitter and to assemble the more numerous impedimenta that a larger expedition inevitably entails. After the afternoon mass, we chowed on some of Don’s most excellent pizza, and the evening was given over to a live presentation on PBS of The Man Who Came to Dinner, featuring Nathan Lane and Jean Smart.

Sunday, October 8

Kate and Don, in the Dogmobile, collect us a few minutes after five a.m. I’d hoped we could take Lord Peter Wimsey, my new PT Cruiser, but he’s really not sufficiently capacious for a crew of this size together with a fortnight’s worth of gear, so the Grand Voyager will have to serve.

Don takes the first four-hour shift, I settle in to ride shotgun, and we’re off. As the sun rises gently over the Massachusetts and Connecticut countryside, we’re treated to dawn-softened hints of autumnal blush and, in the occasional Berkshire valley, wisps of cottony mist rising over the water and swirling to and fro at the behest of a gentle breeze. With the fullness of daylight, the mists dissipate and the myriad hues of the foliage deepen into the famous palette that draws visitors by the thousands to this little corner of the planet. In a way, it’s too bad that we’ll miss the glory of the high season, but the Big Easy does offer adequate reparation for the loss.

Don hands over the reins somewhere in New York, and I’m in charge until we take a break in Hagerstown, Maryland, for lunch. I take one foliage photo along the way, but I suspect that in the hazy light it may not be an optimal representation. There’s a TGI Friday’s in Hagerstown, but it features the obligatory Friday’s waiting time of nontrivial length, so we bail and hit the nearby Arby’s. Umm, well, actually, Don is at the wheel and misses the curb cut, so it’s Wendy’s. Having no desire to elaborate on the meal itself, I’ll just skip right along.

With Don driving and Barbara riding shotgun, I take the opportunity to plank out on the back bench seat and catch a few winks; I’ve expected to be on deck to finish the run after Don’s shift, but there really isn’t enough leftover time to make it worth the switch, so Don brings us all the way in to Wytheville, Virginia. Barbara and I have stayed here before, in the same Hampton Inn we’re at tonight—in fact, in the same room, the establishment’s only “suite,” with a king bed and actual cooking facilities. Kate and Don are next door.

Our dinner plans, laid well in advance, omitted one essential ingredient. We forgot to check whether the Log House 1776 Restaurant, at which we ate last time we were here, happens to be open on Sundays. Why, no, now that you ask, it doesn’t. A fast shuffle, based on stopping to read the AAA Tour book, discovers two suggested restaurants. One, Scrooge’s, isn’t within sight, so we settle on the other, the Sagebrush Steak House and Saloon. This may, or may not, be a chain—it has a menu that’s printed well enough to suggest as much, but the food and service are rather better than one might normally expect at an establishment of this sort doing business under a rented marque. Jay, our server, is most skilled and complaisant, perfectly content to bring Don a Foster’s oil can while Don’s first round is still unconsumed. (Don didn’t discover that Foster’s was available until after he’d ordered a beerlike substance that were better left unidentified but whose name begins with the letters Mich. He saw my oil can, and it was all over.)

The fact that this is a steak house notwithstanding, Kate is the only one of the four of us who orders a steak; she chooses the “Miss Kitty” filet, medium rare, and it’s more than acceptable. In fact, she opines, it’s quite good. Barbara’s grilled pork chops are excellent; Don’s grilled catfish passes muster, and my rack of baby back ribs, done in a slightly sweet sauce, are a skosh away from falling off the bone. We’re satisfied. Very satisfied. Jay gets a good tip.

And then, with a pause to refuel the Dogmobile, we adjourn to the Hampton Inn, where I set down this account of today’s peregrinations. Then, while Don and I take in the Ravens-Jaguars game on the TV in their room, Kate and Barbara watch Ed in ours. Kate takes time out to compose an email message to be dispatched to Dori, the owner of our pet sitting service, importuning her to institute a search for the Tulane and Saints tickets that we’ve cleverly managed to leave behind in Nashua. At halftime, I work out how to dial into the Lycos free ISP service using a prepaid phone card; the principal complication consists in inserting the requisite number of two-second comma pauses into the mile-long dialing string to delay while the phone card company’s various voice prompts run.

We send the mail message, and Kate follows it up with a phone call to Dori’s voicemail. There are a whole passel of prompts there, too, but Kate is an old hand at navigating voicemail prompts. When we get to New Orleans, she’ll check her own voicemail, whither she has asked Dori to reply.

Did I mention that Don has brought his flask, full of Tanqueray, and sufficient bottled tonic water and RealLime juice to provide us with a couple of gin-and-tonics...?

Monday, October 9

We’re again away by a few minutes after five a.m., back out onto I-81. It sure is dark out here in the wilds of southwestern Virginia. We soon find ourselves traveling through an area with an amazing number of bugs that flash white in our headlights. The aerodynamic draft over the Dogmobile is doing an unusually excellent job of directing the creatures over and around our vehicle. As the cloud of chitinous specks thickens, we come slowly to the realization that they are not in fact insects, but rather snowflakes. We’ve run smack into a flurry. No wonder they weren’t piling up on our windshield!

By six, the snow has developed into an on-again-off-again freezing rain, but it’s pretty well over by the time we get back on the road after a stop at Mickey D’s.

Somewhere west of Knoxville, we pick up I-75 southbound, and I turn over the driving to Don. He puts Tape 1 of Carl Hiaasen’s Native Tongue, the unabridged version, into the cassette player, but it’s been running for only about ten minutes before he kicks it out, saying, “I don’t think I can last through eleven tapes of that.” The reader isn’t at all convincing, and since Don has already read the book, the interest just isn’t there. We swap Hiaasen out for an episode of Car Talk.

Don runs down about 60 miles short of Birmingham, so Kate takes us on into Tuscaloosa, where we’ve set our sights on The Waysider, of which we’ve read in the deservedly famous Road Food, by Jane and Michael Stern. Having only the restaurant’s address, we track it down with the able assistance of DeLorme Street Atlas on the PowerBook. Hey, guess what! It’s Monday! What happens on Monday? Right! Lots of restaurants close. Including The Waysider.

Now what? A hasty consultation, and we’re off to cruise the streets of Beautiful Downtown Tuscaloosa. We pass half a dozen possibilities, but none of them catches our fancy except Mike & Ed’s Bar-B-Q of Tuscaloosa. Seedy, definitely. But we can see lots of patrons inside, so either it’s good or this burg is inhabited entirely by people with no taste. We surmise that the former might well be the case, and commit ourselves. We were right. This place is really good. I mean really good. They concentrate on slow-cooked stuff, with lots and lots of smoke, from their own paired wood-fired ovens, whose fire doors we could see on the outside wall before we came in. Over the kitchen area, which is right behind the counter, hangs a hand-lettered sign:

SORRY WE ARE NOT A FAST FOOD RESTAURANT
PLEASE ALLOW ADEQUATE PREPARATION TIME FOR YOUR ORDER
WE ARE SURE YOU WILL APPRECIATE THE QUALITY

Confident, aren’t they? We step up to the counter and place our orders: I go for a regular rib plate, Barbara settles on a chopped pork plate, Don chooses a half chicken rubbed with salt and just enough black pepper to give it a good tang, and Kate takes a BBQ sandwich. There are sauces at the table, one sweet-tangy tomato and the other a delightfully sharp vinegar-mustard (also available bottled, labeled “Hog Heaven Golden Soppin’ Sauce”). For drinks we have an assortment of soft drinks and iced tea, large or small same price. Mike and Ed’s confidence isn’t misplaced; I have to say that this is a vastly more pleasant meal than Barbara’s and my last one in Tuscaloosa, in ’92. Then, we foolishly tried for our traditional comfort food, Chinese—at a place that served kim chee as an appetizer and, when there were no cashews, served Barbara a “peanut chicken” entrée. Without warning. Dunno whether that joint is still in business, but somehow I don’t think I care all that much.

The afternoon’s run into New Orleans, with me at the wheel, is entirely uneventful. Our B&B is the 1840s Fairchild House, just off St. Charles Avenue at 1518 Prytania. We deposit the Dogmobile, haul our dunnage up to our respective rooms, and collapse for an hour or so. Then it’s time to seek sustenance. Our first choice is Sid-Mar’s, a real homey joint in Bucktown, on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain; but Sid-Mar’s, like the Waysider, is closed today. Not far from Sid-Mar’s, however, is Deanie’s Seafood. Deanie’s is open, so we’re off.

Deanie’s, like Sid-Mar’s, is a homestyle joint, much frequented by vociferously loyal locals although not entirely unknown to strangers such as we. Oh, my goodness, what a treat. Here we are, not even in the French Quarter, and the seafood is tremendous. Don and I each start with a lump crabmeat remoulade; then Barbara and I tuck into crawfish étouffée while Don has a Crawfish Quartet (fried fritterlike balls, étouffée, Newburg, and fried breaded mudbugs) and Kate, not really a seafood lover, discovers that crab isn’t half bad when it’s in ravioli doused with a very good Alfredo sauce. For our beverage, three of us choose soft drinks. I, on the other hand, am the DD (Designated Drunk) for the evening, and so I order a draft Dixie Blackened Voodoo. Draft beer here is like the entrées: Gigantic Economy Size. When all is said and done, none of us finishes an entrée; but Barbara and Kate don’t let that fact stop them from ordering what turns out to be a quite excellent bread pudding topped with a rum sauce and accented with coconut and sliced almonds. We may just have to come back to Deanie’s. Did I mention that the portions are gargantuan?

And with that, having taken until something after nine p.m., we hie ourselves back to the B&B to turn in. Tomorrow promises to be a busy day.

Tuesday, October 10

The Fairchild House serves a pretty decent Continental breakfast, after the consumption of which we head for the streetcar. $1.25, exact fare or RTA pass, please, and don’t call it a trolley despite the fact that it is indeed a trolley-car system. (Most of the cars were built in 1923.) The car takes us to the end of the line, where St. Charles Avenue collides with Canal Street. (Actually, it’s where Carondelet Street collides with Canal, because St. Charles is one-way the other way at this point.) Our plans beyond that point are to break up into two parties, the boys in one and the girls in the other, to rendezvous at the Gumbo Shop on St. Peter Street (formerly known as Rue St. Pierre or Callé de San Pedro, depending on when your “formerly” was) at 5:30, for dinner.

First stop: Meyer the Hatter, whose establishment is about three doors up St. Charles from Canal, just outside the French Quarter. I’ve had my sights set on a good wide-brimmed crushable fedora for some time now, and Meyer is a real hat shop, with everything from cheap straw “Panama” hats to crushable wool or stiff fur felt fedoras, Smokey-the-Bear hats, derbies, and gray wool felt afternoon dress top hats—and real Panamas. I settle on a chocolate brown fedora that looks great with my UPS-brown London Fog jacket (the one I found at the outlet mall in Hagerstown, Maryland, a couple of years ago). It’s just the right hat, and—even better—it costs less than a similar one that Barbara rejected (rightly) a few months ago on a weekend jaunt to Vermont.

Having accomplished this errand, we head for the heart of New Orleans—the French Quarter, or Vieux Carré (“Old Square,” pronounced Voo Carray in the inimitable local patois). This picturesque remnant of the original French settlement is where most tourists spend their time while in the city, cruising Bourbon Street for drinks, Decatur Street for souvenirs, and Royal Street for (very) expensive antiques. We have other plans for our first day in the Quarter, however.

Don and I have decided to spend pretty much our whole day cruising the Quarter’s used-book stores, with maybe a hit on Bookstar, a new-book store on Decatur Street that might have a fountain-pen book or two that we haven’t seen; and Don’s favorite, Faulkner House. That still seems a good plan, so we put it into execution. To our great good fortune, one of our earliest stops, Beckham Books, has copies of a map listing all the used-book stores in the Quarter. We observe that one deals with occult and another with cookbooks, and while we both like to cook, that’s not precisely what either of us has in mind.

Faulkner House, in Pirate’s Alley, is owned and operated by one of the American literary world’s movers and shakers—Don could give you the name in an instant, but I can’t. (Well, actually, it’s probably operated by the gorgeous black Standard Poodle who presents herself for petting.) This little shop, about the size of my living room, is fabulous, jammed floor to ceiling with an unbelievable array of really good stuff. I notice a beautifully illustrated, annotated copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Don registers a double-take when he sees a facsimile, even to the dust jacket, of the 1951 edition of Catcher in the Rye. Don buys a couple of titles and is given a copy of the catalog for the annual short-story competition sponsored by the shop, and I settle on a specialty book that will make a perfect Christmas gift.

Bookstar doesn’t pan out—it’s pretty much a Barnes and Noble clone, and the more esoteric fields of collectors’ guides aren’t its forte. Most of the used-book stores, on the other hand, are fertile ground. Not that we buy something in every one, but they’re a joy to browse, and where we do make purchases we make good ones. I also stumble over a few rows of used CDs in one shop, and a hasty scan through them saves me a future visit to a Virgin Megastore, HMV, or Tower Records; I find a copy of Mariss Jansons’ recording of the Respighi Roman trilogy, which like the fedora has been a target of mine for some time now. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy getting a fix in one of those establishments, but I really deem paying half price to be goodness.

For lunch, we head for Central Grocery, at 923 Decatur Street, to snag a muffuletta sandwich. That’s one sandwich for the two of us, which anyone who’s seen these monsters will understand. Our way takes us through Jackson Square, and whom do we run into there but Kate and Barbara. They too have not yet had lunch, so Don and I hit Central Grocery for a muffuletta and a half, with a half ham and cheese—Kate really detests olives—and soft drinks; we enjoy our lunch on a bench in Jackson Square, watching the tourists take pictures of Andy Jackson and his horse and listening to a couple of guys doing the jazz thing on the Café Du Monde’s corner.

Then the two parties go their separate ways. Don and I hit more shops, with a break at 2:30 for a cuppa at Café Du Monde. From there we stroll through the French Market; I snag a couple of bottles of Peychaud’s Bitters, but pretty much everything else that isn’t food is obnoxiously overpriced junk that you wouldn’t give shelf space to. The “make money selling your own hand-turned wooden pens” business has really struck home here; I see the things in half a dozen shops.

In addition to the book stores, we find time to ask about fountain pens in half a dozen antique shops on Royal Street. There are two Antique Row areas in New Orleans, this one (the high-priced one) and another that runs in fits and starts along Magazine Street (the reasonable one). We’ll see about hitting stores on Magazine another day. After all, there may be some pretty good used-book stores over that way, too. None of the stores we visit on Royal has any fountain pens; the proprietors of one suggest Peacock Antiques, in the 600 block, but Peacock is closed. We know that the Quarter doesn’t really wake up until midafternoon, so we try again later. Peacock is really closed. Maybe they’re like restaurants on Monday.

The Gumbo Shop is a purveyor of traditional New Orleans cooking, without the added attraction (?) of straining it through somebody or other’s expensive school of cooking. We start with draft Abita Amber (Don and I), a Sazerac (Barbara), and a Blue Bayou (Kate). The blue thing is actually rather green, which our server points out is closer to the color of the bayou water anyway.

For entrées it’s Chicken Espagnole for the ladies, seafood okra gumbo for me (who am trying to watch how much I eat, yeah, right, pull the other one!), and a combo platter for Don. Nothing earthshattering, but all very good and just what we’ve been longing for. That’s one of the great things about this grand city: You don’t have to eat like a king to eat very well indeed.

The streetcar brings us home again—for free, because the fare box is broken. Kate and Barbara fall into their respective beds to watch Buffy and Angel while Don and I head for the cribbage board. We’ll have to play the rubber game another night; Don takes the first game and I the second.

Wednesday, October 11

Today is River Road Day. We’re off to see the plantations, or at least some of them. We’ve done some advance winnowing, and we think we’d like to see Destrehan, Nottoway, and Laura.

Because Barbara’s father and his wife have just returned home from a trip to New Orleans, we have directions to the River Road that will get us out there with less hassle than we’d have if we followed the “easy” way straight out the road. We go out I-10 to I-310, then south to the river. We exit onto North River Road, and Destrehan is right there. Destrehan is the oldest, and once the richest, of the plantation houses, having been built in the West Indies Creole style between 1787 and 1790, under the direction of a free man of color named Charles. In 1840 it suffered its only major modernization, when its façade was updated to Greek Revival style because “everyone is doing it.” In the early 1900s, it was sold out of the family; it was bought by Big Oil and served as the site of a refinery. In the 1970s, Amoco decided that Destrehan was no longer a valuable asset, demolished the refinery, and donated the by-then decrepit and much vandalized house (the only building of any sort left standing) to a nonprofit, which has been restoring it ever since. The restoration has been done quite skillfully, and the house is very attractive. There are a few outbuildings, reconstructed or moved from other sites, and the tour is thorough.

I visit the Destrehan gift shop—gift shops being a major weakness of mine—and buy a 19th-century flycatcher. This is not a Venus’ Fly Trap, nor is it a bird. It’s also not flypaper. It’s a vase-shaped glass or ceramic vessel (mine is white china with blue designs) with a bottom roughly in the form of a Bundt cake pan; that is, a circular channel around a central hole. You put sugar water into it, slap on the cork, and place the flycatcher on a table or shelf where the flies are. The idea is that the fly, being hungry, will crawl and fly up inside the catcher to consume the (optionally poisoned) sugar water and then, being stupid, will be unable to find its way out again. Flycatchers like this are actually known from as early as the 16th century; the design’s longevity suggests that the things may actually work.

Farther along the road, we stop to take pictures, but no tours, at San Francisco, Tezcuco, and Houmas House. Tezcuco has a restaurant; but Kate and Don ate there three years ago, and they consider it not worth returning to, so we continue our trek.

Houmas House is perhaps the best known of the restored plantations; you may (or may not) remember it as the location of the Olivia de Havilland-Bette Davis psychothriller Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. One of the great architectural features of Houmas House is a magnificent free-standing elliptical staircase in the great main hall; ironically, that hall was too small to be shot in for the film, and a duplicate, just a tad larger, was constructed on a Hollywood sound stage. When Barbara and I visited Houmas House in 1992, we found ourselves wondering that we knew a great deal more about some aspects of life two centuries ago than did the docent. It’s a great house, anyway, and it’s to be regretted that we really haven’t time to revisit it today.

Time has flown by, as it invariably does, and we come to the realization about now that we’re just not going to make it to Nottoway in any reasonable time. Too bad, because in addition to having a famously good restaurant, Nottoway is also the biggest and by far the most ostentatious of all the mansions along the road. It is, not surprisingly, American, not Creole.

So we turn around, find the nearest bridge over the river, and proceed to Oak Alley, which some visitors recognize as the home of Louis and Lestat in the film Interview with the Vampire. We have no intention to tour the house, but there’s a restaurant at Oak Alley, too, and we’ve decided to take the midday repast there. The restaurant is certainly decent; Kate and Barbara are quite pleased with the chicken fricassee, and Don likes his shrimp and okra gumbo. My red beans and rice are acceptable, but only barely, exhibiting a level of quality far below that of my own product, the recipe for which is adapted from the lagniappe that Alexandra Ripley included in one of her New Orleans novels, and the chunk of sausage that accompanies them bears a frightening resemblance to Hillshire Farms kielbasa.

There’s a gift shop. I ask if there are copies for sale of a wonderful photo that’s framed over the mantel of the room in which we ate, and there are. But only three, and there will never be any more, because the house in the photo, named Waguespack, is now gone and the photographer has said he will make no more prints. Guess I’d better take one now, while I still can. Barbara snags a captivating cookbook, titled Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux? in which the author, Marcelle Bienvenue, intermixes tales of Cajun and Creole life with recipes for the foods she describes. This one is a goodie!

Our last planned stop is Laura Plantation, and here we strike pay dirt. Laura, another of the great old Creole plantations, was owned first by Creoles and then by a German immigrant family. It is now undergoing restoration and has twelve buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. Laura is a “maison de trente,” or “house of thirty.” The term describes a house that has thirty horizontal beams supporting its floor and thirty vertical posts running the length of the centerline. That’s a big house, and it required a highly skilled craftsman to design and direct the building of a house that size. The wooden structural elements are all of cypress, and they’re still, after nearly two centuries, in new condition. There are 72 pyramidal brick pilings supporting the brick pillars of the structure, which rests on the sand and clay that is common in the area. Wet sand and clay, that is—the water table is only four feet down. At the top of each pillar is a flat board, called an evaporation board, that provides a path for water seeping up the pillars to evaporate without ever reaching the cypress floor beams. It’s a Senegalese invention.

Our tour guide, Jenny, is a pistol. She’s quick, unembarrassable, and extremely knowledgeable. She warns the tour group that she’s a toucher, so if you don’t like being touched you’d better just keep away. (She does this in such a way that it’s impossible to take offense.) And she has the entire group laughing in moments with her wit and charm. Among the fascinating information she’s imparted by the end of the tour is how to distinguish, without risk of error, between a Creole plantation house and an American one. Creole houses were invariably built with a gallery that ran all the way around the house, they were raised on pillars so that the residents would remain dry-footed during the annual floods of the Mississippi, and they always faced the water and had big French windows that could be opened to let the cool air off the river circulate through the house. They were also painted colorfully; American plantation houses were always white.

After she’s given the introductory piece on the front lawn and shown us the cellar, with its olive jars and wine racks, in which the owner of Laura warehoused wines commercially for the New Orleans trade, she takes us inside the house. She has just now explained that the Creole owners would have been perfectly polite to American guests, entertaining them and even feeding them under the galleries, but they would never have taken them indoors. Only French-speaking people were permitted into a Creole house. So now, in the first room, she picks up the lecture: “Et maintenant nous allons continuer la tour en français. Ça n’est pas de problème, n’est-ce pas?” Which draws the expected laughter, and a “pas de problème” from one corner of the room.

In one of the rooms is an area of exposed wall that shows two styles of brickwork, one even and smooth, with mortar that is clean, uncracked, and uniformly applied, and the other composed of uneven bricks secured sloppily by mortar that is cracked and flaked. Jenny asks one of the men in the group to guess which half was done by Senegalese slaves in the 1790s and which by white workers a century later. He guesses wrong: The better work is actually the older. (I explain quietly to Kate that the earlier work was done with lime mortar, which is flexible and can contract and expand with the wall of which it is a part, while the later stuff was done with the Portland cement mortar that we use today. Rigid and unyielding, it produces a wall that is vastly cheaper—in both senses of the word.)

Throughout the house are scattered photographs and paintings of the owners through its history, and Jenny ties the people in with the times and the house and the culture, giving us a fascinating look into a bygone world that many of us see only peripherally and understand even less. We’re really impressed by the matter-of-fact way in which she treats class and color in that old society, with not even the vaguest innuendo of apology or accusation toward any side. The “hour-long” tour takes a little more than an hour and a half, and we could easily have enjoyed another hour of this bright star in the firmament of tour docents.

Along the way, we discover that this house and Waguespack, the house in my photo, are related. In 1891 Laura Plantation was sold by its founders, the French Locoul family, to members of the German Waguespack family—probably not those who occupied the house in the photo, but certainly relatives. A little research later on tells us that the large Waguespack family is still quite prominent in the Vacherie area, where Laura stands.

By the way, Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox are actually characters from Senegalese folk tales that were related in Creole North America, in the slave quarters of Laura Plantation, before they made their way to Georgia, there to be anthologized and augmented by Joel Chandler Harris as Tales of Uncle Remus. (Harris’ great contribution is that he recorded the stories in Negro dialect.) And the gift shop just happens to have for sale copies of Compair Lapin and Piti Bonhomme Godron (The Tar Baby) as set down in 1894 by Alcée Fortier. Here Barbara buys another cookbook, this one about plantation slave cabin food (which it asserts is the roots of soul food).

Dinner is at Café Degas, a tiny mid-town establishment that is shoehorned in on the corner of a triangular block along Esplanade Avenue. The food is outstanding; we’re honestly at a loss to understand why Access New Orleans (published two years ago) has given Café Degas only two stars. Many things improve with age, maybe Café Degas is one of them. Barbara, Kate, and Don choose the prix fixe dinner, which is loin of pork with soup (flageolets et canard, aka white beans and duck) or salad, and dessert (sorbet or crême brulée), and I have sautéed salmon. Our server, an older woman, has a very strong French accent, and I’m foolhardy enough to place my order in French. Later, when a question arises as to the disposition of my salmon (she having set it in front of Don), she insists that I continue in French. After the meal, I thank her for her kindness in speaking French with me, and she says in return that it was a pleasure—she sometimes finds it a trial to practice English, which is hard for her.

The rubber game of cribbage turns into a best three out of five, played over oil cans of Foster’s in the breakfast room; Don takes the third game tonight and thereby the tournament. Until next time...

Thursday, October 12

My feet have been doing their usual “Don’t Tread On Me” thing, and that means that I’ll have to fall back on Plan B: Find a Footlocker. While Kate and Don head for an Internet café to adjust their fantasy football rosters and handle a bit of eBay stuff, Barbara and I take the streetcar to Canal Street, where we stumble over a Footlocker in the first block. I transact the necessary business, and we depart with me shod in a new pair of black New Balance 571s with Spenco insoles. I also, with remarkable foresight, purchase another set of Spencos to replace the year-old ones in the shoes I’m removing; this way I’ll be able to hack around in that pair, too, for another year or so. The problem now is that I’ll be shlepping around all day with this pair of semi-castoffs. Looking around, I discover that Footlocker has this city figured out—there’s another of their stores across the street one block riverward.

Everyone else had time for breakfast, but I got hung up responding to the guys who make Starry Night about the possible use of some of my images in the next version of their program, so now we trot off to Café Du Monde for beignets and café au lait.

A short visit to the National Jazz Park yields a delightful two-CD set (one piano, one band) of ragtime, and then we’re off to find a few of those really fancy Mardi Gras beads to leaven the larger quantity of plain ones that decorate our house for a few days every February. In a shop on Decatur Street, I find two pretty good strands and reject several others, including one that’s really pretty except for its pendant, which is a graphic representation, entirely too graphic, of certain portions of the male anatomy. New Orleans does get pretty raunchy around Mardi Gras...

In a doll store on Chartres Street, there’s also an amazing selection of antique (read “gorgeous and priced to match”) buttons. This store is like a corner of the Twilight Zone, operated by a pair of doddering old ladies with blissfully vacant smiles but also with all the necessary financial skills to separate you from your cash with a minimum of pain (theirs, not yours). I glom onto a modern set of brass blazer buttons to replace the pewter-colored ones it currently bears. Neither of us is willing to part with $15 to $20—each—for the old buttons.

We stroll around for a while, I step into the toy-soldier store on Chartres Street to goggle at rank after rank of 64-mm figures representing every period of military history from that of Alexander the Great to the Viet Nam war, and we eventually pull up at another novelty store, this one on St. Peter Street, where I saw some pretty good beads as we were departing the Gumbo Shop on Tuesday. I find two more good strands there; but right then the phone rings, and a moment later the proprietor announces that he has an emergency and has to close the shop. If you have your purchases ready, he can assist you, but otherwise you’ll have to come back. I pay cash.

The buskers are working their usual stand among the painters, sketch artists, and tarot readers around Jackson Square, and we unwind a minute. A dollar in the bucket for a pretty good trombonist and his combo, and we’re off to Napoleon House for lunch with Kate and Don. Napoleon House is the house that the Emperor’s supporters prepared for him in anticipation of his surreptitious enlargement from St. Helena; but he had the ill grace to die of arsenic poisoning before rescue arrived. There’s a pretty good restaurant here now, where the muffuletta comes warmed, on a lightly toasted roll. Napoleon House’s muffuletta is more olive-y and less tangy than the competition from Central Grocery; the two are both good, just different.

For the afternoon, Barbara and Kate go off on a courtyard tour in the Quarter while Don and I take a bus in quest of a shop about 50 blocks out on Magazine Street, called Scriptura, which advertises fountain pens, pen-related products, and fine papers. Scriptura’s product line turns out to lean very heavily toward pen-related products (mostly J. Herbin inks) and fine papers (some seriously fine stuff). Which means that the pen selection, featuring a single Sheaffer Balance II, some S. T. DuPonts, and a few Montegrappas, isn’t precisely calculated to serve the needs of persnickety collectors such as we.

We transfer our attention to a series of antique stores along the street, and when our energy flags we turn up to St. Charles to grab a streetcar back to the Fairchild House. There, we connect to the Web to send and collect mail and to check on Parker Duofolds at David Nishimura’s site and on eBay.

We made reservations this morning for Brigtsen’s, a restaurant operated by a protegé of Paul Prudhomme—but well respected nonetheless. (Joke, son, that’s a joke!) Barbara and Kate are late returning from their tour, however, and we are compelled to release the reservation. We end up at Cucos, a Mexican joint on Carrollton Avenue, just around the corner from St. Charles. They appear to be featuring a three-for-one Margarita deal, and we take it (with Kate opting for a diet Pepsi instead). The Margaritas come in quart-sized plastic glasses; but size is, at least in this instance, inversely proportional to quality.

Kate and Barbara aren’t all that thrilled with Mexican food, and they order the San Antonio special, which happens to include a surprisingly good steak. I can’t speak for Don’s combo platter, but my pollo poblano isn’t bad at all. (When I ordered it, our server took note of my accent—I’m a good mimic—and asked, “¿Hablais español?” My one-word answer, “No,” drew a hearty laugh.) We enjoy our dinner with “background” music provided a singer who accompanies himself with a guitar and a drum machine. His voice microphone appears not to have any high-frequency response at all, but that’s okay because it keeps the volume down. He’s not really very good, and when he asks me if I have any requests, he knows neither “La Favorita” nor the passa doble called “El Relicario.” He puts on a good face and says he’ll think about it over his break. If we’re lucky, we’ll be gone before his break is over.

We learn when the bill is presented how they can offer a three-for-one deal. The price of a single quart-sized Margarita is $13.50.

On the way out, Don and I head for the Chevron station across the street to break a $20. Don buys two 24-ounce Red Dogs, which we will consume over cribbage. Cribbage, again in the Fairchild House breakfast room, lasts until I’ve beaten Don three games out of two, at which point he avers that he’s had enough, and we pack it in for the evening.

Friday, October 13

The football tickets have arrived! Tricia, the person doing the actual pet sitting for Kate and Don (and for us as well), can expect a pretty nice tip, and a gift besides.

Today is our day for rape and pillage in the antique shops along Magazine Street. Well, pillage, anyway. We’ll do this in several stops; we park first along the 2000 block, and Don and I go one way while our spouses go another.

We boys are after fountain pens, of course. We find a shop that has a red Duofold Junior, a dip pen or two, and a pen that the owner says just came in. She doesn’t know what it is, and in fact she isn’t exactly sure where it is at the moment. We look over the Duofold and reject the marked price, and move on. We’re about halfway down the block when she comes charging out, saying she’s found the pen. It turns out to be a Parker 51, not the earliest model, a Vacumatic-filler, but an early aerometric, with a recommendation for Superchrome ink on the filler. Some idiot has scratched out the owner’s initials, but otherwise the pen is sweet—it may have been filled once and then scrupulously cleaned out, but it’s more likely that it was never even used. Since she’s never seen a 51 before, the dealer has no idea of a fair price. We tell her what she should expect to get for it, and, having done that, we move on.

This dealer and another point out a third shop across the street as a good place to buy fountain pens, and they’re right: That dealer has four trays of them. We examine all the pens, and I come a gnat’s hair away from buying a gorgeous red-veined gray humped-clip oversize Sheaffer Balance—but I discover just in time that it has a tiny chip out of the cap lip. If she’d met my price immediately instead of bargaining, I’d have bought it—and gone home to discover that irreparable flaw. Don ends up dickering for, and getting at a good price, a black Duofold Junior and another 51, this one a little newer. Only later do we discover that the 51 has a chip out of the shell where it hoods over the nib. Don is, needless to say, not best pleased with himself for overlooking that defect.

We collect Kate and Barbara and move on up the street; in our new location we’re ready for lunch at Semolina, one in a small chain of remarkably eclectic and very good pasta restaurants. Think Spaghetti Factory without the tacky decor and with food several tiers better. Don orders pad thai, I have a Sicilian cioppino with the best mussels I’ve ever eaten anywhere, Kate does her comfort-food trick with a fettucine Alfredo that she declares of similar quality, and Barbara chooses a monstrous salad with fresh and dried tomatoers, artichoke hearts, and other goodies, topped with marinated shrimp. For dessert the women share a “Mont Blanc,” which is a gooey brownielike cookie thing topped with a huge ball of chocolate gelato and a dollop of marshmallow cream. Don tries to snag a taste but is fended off forcibly with a fork. Two forks. And a knife. I’m more patient. I wait until the women have had all they want before devouring the remains.

Kate and Barbara head out from Semolina, promising to be at the car promptly at two. Don and I zip back to the original stop, where Don offers the proprietor of our first shop a deal she can’t refuse for the red Duofold and the 51. Did I mention that the 51 is in its original box? Don will marry the good barrel from the damaged 51 with the perfect parts from this one, and end up with a seriously sweet pen. (The Parker 51 is among the most popular of vintage fountain pens because it writes so well.) We make it back before two, drop the van, and prowl a couple more shops. Don buys a boxed black Sheaffer Lifetime Touchdown with a two-tone Feathertouch nib and the matching pencil.

You will have noticed that I’ve bought nothing, nada, zero, zilch. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you get rained out. There’s always eBay... (Actually, I lied. I did buy something. In a shop dealing with brass decorating fixtures, I placed an order for two cast brass switchplates with a floral border and a barleycorn center rectangle. I did this because finding switchplates for the pushbutton switches in our house is virtually impossible, and I can’t pass up this opportunity to get something better than plain stamped sheet-brass plates.)

On the way back to the van we stop to help a motorist push his stranded car off Magazine onto Louisiana Avenue, where the van is parked. It would be nice if the two passengers got out and helped, but this is Louisiana, and they’re ladies. So we chalk up a little more good karma. Then it’s back to the Fairchild House. We drop Kate and Barbara at the corner of St. Charles and Melpomene so that Barbara can check out a fabric shop; when they show up at the B&B, the verdict is that the shop has some pretty good shirtings and buttons, so I may have to go back up there.

Don and I play part of a game of euchre, and then it’s time to head for Snug Harbor, where we have reservations for dinner and a show. Featured this evening is Ellis Marsalis, paterfamilias of one of the great jazz families of all time. We elect to take a cab across town instead of trying to find the ever-elusive parking space or walking all the way across the quarter from the streetcar.

Don says to the greeter that we have a reservation, and she responds in an unbelievably smarmy tone, “I think you’d better tell me the name on the reservation.” We all goggle at each other as if to say, “She didn’t really...?” Yes, she did.

Once we’re seated, the food works out just fine, thank you very much. It’s not up to the high standards of Café Degas, or even of Deanie’s, but it’s nonetheless quite edible and thoroughly enjoyable. Barbara’s fried shrimp, considered by themselves, are among the best we’ve had anywhere, and Don is impressed with the hush puppies that come with his breaded fried drum (a New Orleans version of scrod) and Marigny wild rice. My broiled shrimp are good, no argument; but the best thing about them is that there are a surprising number of them. They’re 31-40 count shrimp, and I’m served an even dozen. The pecan pie is decent, but the bread pudding is a little on the boring side.

The music is on another plane entirely. Of all the Marsalis clan, I like Ellis best. Tonight he’s accompanied by Bill Huntington on a standup bass and Leon Anderson on drums. Their second number really makes me sit up and take notice: It’s a jazzed version of the “On the Trail” vignette from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. Wow! About halfway into the set, Ellis announces that they’ll be joined by Mr. Delfeayo Marsalis on trombone. What a sweet evening this has turned out to be. The closest thing to a downer is a rather protracted drum solo in “Caravan.” But let’s not pick nits; good is good, and these guys are good. In anybody’s league.

Saturday, October 14

Today it’s FOOTBALL. Don and I are off to the Tulane game at the Superdome. Game time is 11:00 a.m., a ridiculous hour, most probably because Fox discovered suddenly that they needed an East Coast game. We know it wasn’t planned this way because our tickets still read 2:30 p.m., which was the scheduled time when we bought them.

Today’s game isn’t actually likely to be all that exciting; Tulane isn’t doing particularly well this year, and Southern Miss, the opponent, is hot. Really hot, as in if they win big enough, they could move up into the Top Ten from their current spot at Number 15. And in fact the game turns out to fulfill all our expectations—so much so that despite all our hollering and jumping up and down, Tulane’s Green Wave is so thoroughly in the tank that we depart before the fourth quarter is half over. On the other hand, there’s all that great beer and cheese nachos and Cajun sausage and frozen yogurt. Hey, c’mon, isn’t that why you go to football games, really?

Kate and Barbara spend the day at the Audubon Park and zoo, and they arrive back at the B&B as tired as we are. After a short time to recover, we decide on a low-impact supper. Since we couldn’t go to Sid-Mar’s last Monday, that’s where we head today. We’ve figured out the route pretty well now: It’s a quick run out St. Charles and up Carrollton, left on Canal, left on Robert E. Lee Boulevard, over the 17th Street canal, and take the first right.

For New Englanders, Sid-Mar’s can best be likened to a clean clam shack. You’re not paying for decor, and you don’t get any. Unless you consider the partitioned-off corner with the NO MINORS ALLOWED, GAMING DEVICES INSIDE sign decorative. What you do get is excellent seafood, mostly fried choices but with a couple of broiled entrées and a few boiled things. Don and I want boiled crawfish, but we’re soon disabused of that idea; it turns out that, like oysers, fresh mudbugs have a season, and this ain’t it. So Don settles for the fried fish dinner, and I go for half a pound of boiled shrimp. Barbara has the fried shrimp—really excellent—and Kate goes outside the box and orders spaghetti. It turns out once again that I’m the DD; I have an Abita Amber while everyone else sticks with diet soft drinks or water. At least I’ve limited myself to one Abita...

On the way out, I shoot a picture of Sid-Mar’s in the dark; it looks good on the camera’s LCD, but I won’t really know whether it worked until I upload it to the PowerBook later.

Don and I finish the evening with a little euchre; the score, when we decide to call it a night, stands at 8-5 with Don in the lead.

Sunday, October 15

More FOOTBALL. But not quite yet. First we climb on the streetcar to attend Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, which faces Jackson Square. It’s a wonderful, highly decorated building of relatively simple design: Romanesque structure, simple wooden pews and wall trim, a lovely polychromed altar surround, and gorgeous lifelike paintings of Bible scenes on the ceiling—as well as the huge painting of King Louis announcing the Seventh Crusade that’s placed over the altar. But we’re not here to gawp at the scenery, we’re here to worship. The singing is led by a woman with a marvelous voice, and the celebrant delivers a homily that builds from the Gospel to bring home a strong and meaningful message.

After Mass we walk through Jackson Square to Café Du Monde, but the line for tables there is half a block long; so we reverse our steps and check in at La Madeleine. I’ve described La Madeleine before, when I’ve written of trips to Washington, D.C. Despite being a chain, this is one of our favorite places to catch a quick meal; it’s friendly and efficient, and the food is very good. Barbara has a croissant and her usual Strawberries Romanoff while Kate has a croissant and a potato galette. Don and I choose more solid breakfast/brunch fare, Don the French country breakfast and I a potato galette and a breakfast croissant (like a Burger King Croissan’wich except bigger and several orders of magnitude better, especially the fresh tomato slices).

Back to the Fairchild House, where we change and dump Barbara, who is very much looking forward to the time for relaxing. (We love vacations, but sometimes they can be a little stressful.) Then we three children are off to the SAINTS GAME! They’re playing the Carolina Panthers, and there is hope of an exciting matchup. But even if it’s not the most thrilling game in the world, it’s NFL football, and in New Orleans they really really love their Saints. The Superdome, being an enclosed space, absolutely rocks with the crowd noise as the Saints pound the Panthers, and the LSU Marching Band entertains at halftime. The Saints even pull a late-game fake punt that goes for 30 or 40 yards—that one’ll make the NFL Prime Time highlights! And of course there’s more food and drink to consume. We save my souvenir beer cup and grab two more discarded ones on the way out.

After Don and I watch the end of the Colts-Seahawks game back at the B&B, we step out for dinner. Our destination is the Praline Connection, which isn’t a candy shop. It’s a purveyor of quite notable soul food. It’s also rented out to what looks like a wedding reception, so we hastily retrench and head for the Louisana Pizza Kitchen (a small local chain), which is located on Carrollton just around the corner from St. Charles—not quite as far up Carrollton as Cucos—and whose quality and selection have Domino’s beat six ways to Sunday. Kate has penne pasta with a pesto cream sauce, I have Crawfish Florentine (this is New Orleans, after all), and Don and Barbara each have pizzas. There’s dessert, but I’m watching my weight (ha!) so I just watch the desserts, too.

Cribbage tonight. Again I beat Don three out of two. (If you’re not a cribbage player, it’ll help to know that winning by more than 30 points is called a “skunk” and counts for two games.)

Monday, October 16

Today is another day for wasting time in the Quarter, at least for Barbara and me. We head off to the streetcar while Kate and Don take in a different direction, toward the Garden District Book Shop, which is farther uptown along Prytania Street. The plan is to meet back at the B&B between five and six, in time for supper before we trot off to Snug Harbor again, this time for a show by Charmaine Neville and her combo.

We cruise aimlessly along Royal Street. I’ve decided that I’ll take photos of manhole covers, drain cleanouts, and so on, to make a computer-desktop collage. There is a bewildering variety of such covers, and I ought to get something interesting out of them. So we stroll along, with Barbara looking at stores and building façades while I keep my eye on the ground.At one point, I don’t know what street we’re crossing, we look up and see the Louis Armstrong arch on the other side of North Rampart Street (the lakeside boundary of the Quarter).

Time out. I’ve mentioned directions in terms of uptown and lakeside. Because the Mississippi River meanders so, New Orleanians don’t give directions in terms of north, south, east, and west, the way people do elsewhere. You get directions in terms of uptown, downtown, toward the river, and toward the lake. If you don’t adjust to this way of orienting yourself, you’re going to find yourself lost pretty quickly. The Quarter, as a point of reference, is downtown, on the river.

We walk up to North Rampart Street and along it to the Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe (aka the Mortuary Chapel). This little church is the oldest continuously operating chapel in the city; it was built in 1826 because the people of that time didn’t want to hold funeral services for the yellow-fever victims in the main church, St. Louis Cathedral. So the Chapel is right around the corner from Cimetière St. Louis I (the main cemetery).

By the way, they don’t bury their dead in New Orleans. They used to, but the city is five feet below sea level, and when it rains a lot the water table rises, bringing with it buried objects, such as coffins—which quite literally used to pop from the ground in very wet weather. In yellow-fever season, that made the already-bad epidemics just that much worse. So New Orleans cemeteries are above ground; they build little mausoleums in neat rows that are laid out like streets. In fact, the cemeteries are often referred to as cities of the dead. Unfortunately, they tend to be hangouts for less desirable elements of society, and most of them are placarded with warnings that tourists should not venture alone within. Guided tours are available, however.

The interesting thing about the Mortuary Chapel, besides its restrained beauty, is the presence of St. Expedite. What? You’ve never heard of St. Expedite? Well, you’re not alone. The Catholic Church never heard of him, either. But here he is. Legend has it that he received his name when his otherwise unidentified statue arrived in a shipping crate marked EXPEDITE.

From Our Lady of Guadalupe we saunter back down into the Quarter, to Pirate’s Alley, to find the book by local author Julie Smith, which Don and I thought we spotted at Faulkner House (great bookshop, remember?). We learn from the proprietress of Faulkner House that there is no such book, but one is due out in February. So we walk around the corner to the Cabildo, which houses the State Museum. Guess what. It’s Monday. Restaurants aren’t the only things that close on Mondays. So we continue across Jackson Square to the French Market to buy a couple of inexpensive bags of assorted Mardi Gras beads. These are souvenirs for Barbara and Kate to give to the elderly people they and the greyhounds visit weekly in a nursing home near Nashua.

Lunch time has arrived. Here in the Quarter there is such an embarras de richesse that it’s quite a task to choose only one restaurant. We finally settle on Pere [sic] Antoine, where Barbara orders a muffuletta salad and I a good plate of red beans and rice. Red beans and rice are generally available anytime these days, but 150 years ago this was a Monday dish because it was made from the bone of Sunday’s ham and could be left to cook while the washing was being taken care of.

On our way out of the Quarter we stop to listen for a bit to an old couple doing a remarkably good jazz stand on chairs in the middle of Royal street, he with guitar and trumpet and voice, and she with voice. These two know how to sling a duet together, and they extract another of my dollars. We then move on to Laura’s Candies, the city’s oldest candy shop, to stash away a couple of pralines, some orange peel bark, and some dipped orange peel. Then it’s back to the B&B for a bit.

After a short rest, we venture out briefly to the Promenade Fabric Shop. This is where Kate and Barbara went on Friday. I latch on to a couple of delightful cotton shirting fabrics and sets of buttons for two vests, and then it’s really back to the B&B to rest up for dinner.

Dinner, for all four of us, is at Samuel’s Avenue Beer Pub, a couple of blocks uptown on St. Charles Avenue. The place is pretty decent. Don orders shrimp Monica (pasta and a light Alfredo-like sauce), Barbara has a shrimp po-boy (which she disassembles, leaving the bread behind), Kate goes for a mushroom burger, rare, and I have a crawfish étouffée that is browner and sharper than the one I had last week at Deanie’s, but for all that it’s not quite as good as Deanie’s. I also order a Dixie Purple Haze (draft beer) and discover to my dismay that it’s one of those horrid fruity beers. I should have known better.

Our cab delivers us to Snug Harbor in plenty of time, and we settle in for a good show. But then the portion of the balcony that had been blocked off and marked RESERVED fills up with a loud and obnoxious crowd of well-oiled thirtysomethings having a company party evening of some kind, most of whom don’t appear to give a toss either for the show or for the sensibilities of their fellow patrons or, for that matter, of the performers. When she can stand it no longer, Kate goes over and reminds them that the other people here paid to hear Charmaine and will they please be quiet. No noticeable results. Another little while and it’s worse than ever. Kate asks the manager to see if he can quiet them down. He talks to one group of four, and they quiet down for a while; but, since the rest of the group is still yelling, they soon revert. We try to stick it out—Charmaine really does put on a good show—but they’ve truly and irretrievably ruined the evening. Kate hits up the manager again, he talks to them again, and tells her that if she can’t stand it she can have her money back. Five minutes later, we four troop downstairs and demand our money. Now the manager says forget it, there’s only ten minutes left in the show. (We’re supposed to know how long the show has left to run?) Kate digs in her heels, and he still resists. She finally asks him if he’s in charge of the establishment tonight, and he says yes, he’s in charge of the show. She repeats the question, emphasizing “establishment.” He weasels around but eventually admits, unwillingly, that he’s not. She demands to see his boss. When the boss comes downstairs, he begins talking to me, ignoring Kate. Bad move. “Talk to me, I’m the one with the problem,” she upbraids him. And demands our money back. He says he’s contractually obligated to pay Charmaine and the combo, will we settle for half? At that point, we just want out, so Kate says yes. He gives her $20.00, and we’re outta here.

Tuesday, October 17

Today we’re up and away by 8:30, headed for Baton Rouge. Just to the east of that burg, right off I-10, is the LSU Rural Life Museum. Attached to the university’s test gardens, the museum shows “authentic” settings of what life was like on a plantation except in the Big House, of which there is none here.

After going through the barn, which houses collections of artifacts that include vehicles, guns, textiles, tools, and more, we visit the overseer’s house (four-square brick). In the first room, Kate mistakes a porcelain spittoon for a chamberpot. Later, in the bedroom, I show her the real pot, aka thundermug, aka gazzunder (because it “gazzunder” the bed, you see).

Other buildings include two single-pen and one double-pen slave shacks, a blacksmith’s forge, a commissary, a sugar furnace and a syrup furnace, a crib for corn and potatoes, a schoolhouse, and a sick house (where ill and injured slaves were tended to). There’s a delicious irony here in the fact that the school house was originally built as a sick house and converted as part of the museum, while the sick house was originally built as a schoolhouse and was likewise converted. Huh?

Baton Rouge is vilified, not without reason, as an island of bad food in the sea of luscious cuisine that is Louisiana. The city, despite being a college town, lacks the fine restaurants that one can find not only in New Orleans but also elsewhere all around the state. This means that we’re going to have to take a chance; lunch is not going to be at a Mickey D’s. On Don’s initiative, we pull into the parking lot of Joe’s Crab Shack, which turns out to be a small Louisiana chain restaurant with the general ambiance of a Chili’s or a Ruby Tuesday, adjusted for the ocean. Here they concentrate on seafood, and unlike the seafood-like junk you get at Red Lobster, this seafood is truly good. (Sorry if my opinion of Red Lobster offends you, but I live in New England, where real seafood doesn’t come in the frozen-food case.) Don and I can’t resist the tempting prospect of a fried calamari appetizer; but at $3.98 it’s bound to be pretty small, so we each order one. Umm, slight miscalculation—it’s not small. It is, however, the best fried calamari we’ve ever had, and it all disappears. Our entrées, which rapidly follow the calamari into our maws, include a lump crabmeat salad (mine) with a prodigious amount of very good crab and a remoulade dressing that’s outstanding; a catfish po-boy (Don) that suffers the same fate as Barbara’s po-boy at Samuel’s; coconut fried shrimp (Barbara); and the usual safe pasta dish (Kate). Oh, if only they could export Joe’s Crab Shack to other parts of the country!

Back in New Orleans, we drive through the Garden District to ogle the mansions (including that of Anne Rice, which is painted a pale purple behind its fence and hedge), and then we park across the street from the Garden District Book Shop. This is where Kate and Don came yesterday; they decided a return visit could be profitable, and here we are. Book collectors, take note: One of the great things about little independent book stores in New Orleans is that there are a surprising number of noted authors living in this city. They tend to drop into these stores offhandedly and sign the stacks of their books, so you can often buy a signed first edition for nothing more than the standard cover price. As it happens, Anne Rice is at this very moment signing copies of her latest, Merrick, elsewhere in the neighborhood, which means that this shop is refreshingly empty of customers. (What’s actually going on here is that the Garden District Book Shop, like many really good shops everywhere, simply hasn’t space for such a large event.) Don racks up a handful of esoteric paperbacks, and I stumble across a shelf with nautical books, on which are several titles from the Heart of Oak series (classics, mostly, by authors such as Joseph Conrad) and, of more immediate moment to me, the third edition of A Sea of Words and—my goodness—also of Harbors and High Seas. These two books, by Dean King (who edits the Heart of Oak series), are respectively a glossary and gazetteer and a map-based “travelogue.” They are companion pieces for Patrick O’Brian’s remarkable series of novels about British naval captain Jack Aubrey and his ship’s physician Stephen Maturin (who is also an intelligence agent). Now that O’Brian has died, King says the third editions of these two books, covering all twenty of the novels, are the final ones.

Dinner tonight is at Tujague’s on Decatur Street, a New Orleans tradition since 1856. We pause to rest a couple of hours, giving our lunch time to digest, and then it’s into the Quarter. Tujague’s serves only a prix fixe dinner, a five-course extravaganza that will leave light eaters breathless. The choice of entrées varies from night to night; sometimes there’s only one and other times there might be several. Tonight there happen to be four.

But first, drinks. One of the many reasons Barbara and I love New Orleans is that it’s the home of the Sazerac cocktail, which is virtually unobtainable elsewhere. One of its components, Peychaud’s Bitters, we’ve found nowhere else; that’s why I bought two bottles at the French Market. (But you can order it by phone or mail from the Sazerac Company.) Tujague’s Sazerac is very much like the ones I make, and it’s great. Kate orders a vodka tonic, and Don orders a “giblet.” He means a gimlet, of course, but he’s so used to playing with words that it comes out wrong. We all laugh, including our server, who is an Hispanic gentleman of warm and friendly temperament and impeccable service skills. I’ve often lauded the wonderful Cuban server we had when we were here in 1992, and this guy—though utterly different in personality—is every bit as good a server.

(By the way, you can find out how to manufacture a Sazerac cocktail by visiting http://www.webtender.com/ and looking up my recipe. There’s also another Sazerac recipe there, but we don’t like that one as well.)

Okay, let’s deal with food. Course 1 is a shrimp remoulade on leaf lettuce. Course 2 is a heavenly corn and crab bisque that I will have to learn how to make. Course 3 is boiled beef remoulade, with an even more piquantly horseradish-y remoulade sauce than that on the shrimp. Course 4, the entrée, is shrimp over pasta, crawfish in a Creole sauce, chicken Mariane, or filet mignon; we test three of the choices, omitting only the crawfish. My filet is excellent, and I hear similar reports from the other quarters of the table. For dessert, the bread pudding, a rich, moist, and slightly soft variety, is quite sublime. Do I need to mention that Tujague’s coffee is up to the standard of everything else we’ve been served?

Wednesday, October 18

After breakfast we all pile into the Dogmobile and head lakeward, out to City Park. We could get there by going straight out Esplanade, but that’s boring and the traffic is sometimes iffy, so we go around the longer way, out St. Charles and back up Carrollton.

Our destinations are two: the New Orleans Museum of Art and the botanical gardens, in which Barbara has discovered a reputedly excellent Art Deco rose garden. The art museum’s galleries are diverse and extraordinarily interesting; of especial note for us, and in fact one of our targets, is the Fabergé room, containing cigarette cases; “necessary” boxes (for small toilet articles), flowers carved of semiprecious stones and adorned with stamens, pistils, etc., of gold and precious stones, and set in rock crystal “pots”; and three or four of the famous Fabergé Easter eggs. This stuff is stupendously beautiful, and the collection is big enough to provide adequate variety without being so large that the visitor becomes jaded. Another of our targets is a collection titled “Lost New Orleans,” containing several dozen wonderful albumen-print photographs of New Orleans and environs, made in 1867 for Napoleon III’s Paris exposition. Several of these are mounted next to modern color photos of the same locations, and I must say that I prefer the characterful old buildings and gardens to the Modern Bland skyscrapers that have ousted many of them. Some of the mansions, however, are still standing, and the comparisons of these are vastly entertaining and enlightening.

The museum also has a good collection of decorative arts, featuring glassware and porcelain from the past several centuries; I’m drawn to a cabinet displaying glassware from the Art Nouveau period through Art Deco. There’s a deliciously concise little history of fashion in this case. On the other side of the room are French porcelain pieces that I could take home in the blink of an eye, if only the museum wouldn’t miss them...

From the museum we drive farther into the park to the botanical gardens; here, Barbara and Don go in while Kate and I content ourselves with prowling the gift shop. The cast aluminum hose guides I buy aren’t going to be as memorable as the roses and live oaks that the others saw, but they’ll serve a practical purpose while they remind us of this visit. And Don has taken my camera inside; the pictures he shows me on its LCD screen promise good things.

Lunch, a very late one, is at another Semolina restaurant, this one on City Park Avenue a few blocks from the park. Food here is as good, and portions as monstrous, as at the Magazine Street Semolina; I can feel quite safe in recommending this chain to anyone who likes pasta of any kind.

After lunch Kate returns to rest in the Dogmobile while we others step across the street to the Lake Lawn Metairie cemetery, the only one of the sixteen in the city to be declared officially safe for tourists. We stroll around a little, taking pictures and musing on the different kinds of architectural forms, all the way from Renaissance and Gothic Revival to Art Deco, that these tombs take. There are several large structures containing multiple vaults in arrays four or five high and ten or fifteen long, like the drawers of a shoe cabinet; these are called oven tombs and are mostly owned by associations of people unable to afford the grander but much more costly private family tombs.

On the way back to the Fairchild House we stop at a Winn-Dixie to nail down our supplies of coffee with chicory, Cajun seasoning, Crystal hot sauce, beignet mix, and bottled water and nibbles for the homeward drive beginning tomorrow. The coffee we choose is Community; past experience has shown us that it’s actually at least as good as the more famous Café Du Monde brand and a lot cheaper besides.

Hot-sauce types, seeing that all we’ve bought in that vein is the pedestrian Crystal, may sneer; but we don’t feel the need for any of the trendy cutesy-name hot sauces, such as—honest—Red Rectum or Ass Kicker, that are sold for ungodly prices to tourists all over the Quarter. If you can cook, you can season things without relying on the genius who concocted last week’s “hotter than anybody else’s, at least until somebody makes a hotter one” sauce to do your flavoring for you. Crystal, by the way, is the invariable choice of New Orleans natives, making appearances on restaurant tables all over town.

We had lunch at Semolina. Who needs supper? Neither I nor any of the others, as it turns out. Not being entirely unblessed with foresight, we anticipated this predicament, and one of the things we bought at Winn-Dixie was four poppers of Jiffy-Pop. (There’s a stove in Barbara’s and my room.) We pop them up just as West Wing gets going, and settle back for a leisurely hour in front of the tube. The antenna isn’t the best, and it’s only a 13” set, but West Wing still comes through loud and clear.

Thursday, October 19

Today we commence our three-day drive home. There’s something to be said for a sunrise over the expanse of wet country east of New Orleans, and I hope the pictures I’m taking will say it.

You can tell you’re in Alabama by the fact that every other vehicle on the road is a pickup or an SUV. For miles and miles, there simply aren’t any cars. I don’t see gun racks in more than half of the trucks, however, so I’m sure we haven’t detoured by mistake into Texas. Lunch is at a Subway that lies adjacent to the gas station where we stop to fill the Dogmobile. More than adjacent, actually, it’s in the same building and shares the same unappealing rest rooms.

Our destination today is Rex, Georgia, where John Hauck (Barbara’s dad) and his wife Gracie live. They’ve graciously offered to put us up for the night, and that offer naturally includes an excellent home-cooked dinner—Lord be praised!—of good steaks, corn, and homestyle mashed potatoes. Preceded, of course, by John’s famous old-fashioned hospitality. He’s one of the dying breed who entertain warmly and have good stocks of liquor. Barbara has a Sazerac and I allow myself to be indulged with two fingers of Tullamore Dew. I don’t see what Don takes, but Kate has a soft drink.

There’s pro football on tonight (Detroit and Jacksonville) because Sunday evening will be taken up by the second game of the World Series; Don is more than a little compulsive when it comes to football, so he’s taken care of for the evening. The others settle down for conversation while I lose myself in a book of Superman comics from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Friday, October 20

Today we drive through the Carolinas into the autumn foliage of western Virginia. I’m reminded that we’re still in the South by the fact that there are dirty, stinking ashtrays screwed to the walls of rest-room stalls. (The ones on the restaurant tables are at least clean. Usually.) At about six p.m., having made a judgment call as we passed Hagerstown, Maryland, we pull into Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We’ve come a little farther than might have been entirely wise; after we check in at our motel, we find all of the most interesting restaurants to be full with waiting lines. So we head eastward along U. S. 11 North, to the next town. Along the way we pass a high-school football field with literally miles of traffic backed up waiting to get in for the Homecoming game. (Full restaurants, Homecoming, there may be a connection here...) Fortunately, the backup is in the other direction. We end up at a mall-front Chinese restaurant called Great Wall, whose food turns out to be surprisingly good. We’re not talking Lilac Blossom or Chen Yang Li here, but we ain’t talkin’ Chun King, either. On the way back to the motel, the highway is exceedingly empty. Wonder where everybody is... As we pass the field, we see that the home team is leading at the end of the first quarter. Go team!

In addition to causing us a little difficulty finding dinner, our having arrived in Carlisle late also lost us the opportunity to study more closely the spectacular array of small mid- to late-nineteenth century houses along the town’s main drag. What I could see in the remaining twilight looked fascinating. Barbara and I may have to drift back this way some weekend. Don points out that Carlisle is the home of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, attended by football Hall-of-Famer and Olympic great Jim Thorpe.

Saturday, October 21

Through Pennsylvania (foliage and road construction), New York (road construction), Connecticut (nothing of interest), and Massachusetts (don’t ask), and we arrive home at about one p.m. We unload our stuff from the Dogmobile and send Kate and Don home to unpack and then fetch the greyhounds from the kennel while we clean several cats’ worth of hair from our library love seat, sweep the leaves and kitty bitties from the kitchen and utility room floor, and re-spread the carpets we lifted to keep Desi from desecrating them while were away.

You know, even this dumb stuff feels pretty good. Being back in your own space is nice.