New Orleans Day 2

After sleeping in until 8:30 (!!!)...

Can we take a minute to just talk about sleeping in until 8:30? I was so excited to get to sleep this long. No one woke me up once! I think the food and sleeping in (and my company of course) were the best parts of vacation!

After sleeping in until 8:30, we got ready and headed out for breakfast at Cafe Beignet. Alton Brown put it on the Food Network as his "Must Eat New Orleans," so we knew we had to try it out. When we got there around 9:30 it was packed. They have a long, narrow little store and people were saving all the tables before they even had their whole party there so there wasn't anywhere to sit. Somehow when we got there the line wasn't long at all and we walked right up to the front to order. We each got an order of beignets and split an andouille sausage omelette, grits (yuck) and some bread.

When we went to find a seat there was one table that finally opened up so I went for it, and a lady that was saving two tables ALREADY (and hadn't ordered yet) made her husband go grab it before me. I just looked at her and she offered the other, smaller table to us. I was just happy to have a place to sit (and that I didn't have to throw down)! It was SO good! Our beignets weren't super hot (or fresh I'm assuming), but they still tasted amazing. Cody said we should've shared an order of beignets since they come with 3 and we got an omelette as well, but I told him I was so glad we got our own because I had no problem eating all three of mine!

After breakfast we walked around Jackson square some more and took more pictures. At 1:30 we had to meet our tour. We had a free walking tour around the Garden District. We took a streetcar to our meeting spot. It was about a half an hour ride and it was nice to have a minute to sit down! 

We had already been walking so much that my feet were literally DYING. The day before my right food started hurting, and by Friday, they both hurt so much. It honestly they both had to have small breaks and every step the bones were breaking more. It was so awful. Of course I didn't want to say anything to Cody about it because I knew he'd say lets just go back to the hotel and that's BORING and not what vacation was for, so for the most part I just tried to ignore it. We got to the meeting spot for the tour and besides feeling like I needed a wheelchair the whole time, it was awesome! 

We started in the Lafayette cemetery and our tour guide was really great, telling us about the different tombs and why different things were important to the people there and what things meant. She explained that when someone is buried in their tomb, it gets SO hot that it literally becomes a personal crematorium. After 1 year and 1 day, if another family member passes away, they open the tomb, pull out the old casket and literally all that remains are ashes. They put the ashes in an urn, push it to the back, get rid of the coffin, use a new coffin for the other family member, seal up the tomb and the process starts all over again. I always wondered how one small tomb could have an entire family of 10-15 names on it, but it all makes sense now!

Ferns growing out of the cemetery wall

Cody took some really amazing pictures of the cemetery and the homes on the tour, but they haven't been edited yet, so I'll add more in later! 

Our tour took us all over the garden district. We saw the Commander's Palace Restaurant (which is super famous - Mark Twain has been here, Jefferson Davis, Emeril Lagasse used to be a chef here), Sandra Bullock's home, the home they used in Benjamin Button as well as Django (haven't seen either of those but it was still cool!), John Goodman's house, and more! Right by John Goodman's fence there was a little tennis ball - our tour guide lives near the Garden District and said she has seen him out walking his dogs a lot. I told Cody I bet he hasn't been able to find that tennis ball and maybe I should take it and throw it back over the fence for them, which would alert his dogs, which would alert John, so he'd come out, stop me, thank me for throwing the ball, invite us in for lemonade (or hot chocolate since it was freezing), we'd talk for hours and laugh about Roseanne and we would all become best friends… By the time I had finished telling Cody about my plan we were like a block and a half away from his house and the tennis ball (and our chances at friendship and being written into his will) were long gone.

After our tour we went to Still Perkin' for some hot chocolate since we were frozen and it had started to rain. It was the best hot chocolate I've ever had and I had to take a picture of it since they had given me some heart foam :) 

When we got back to the French Quarter we were starting to get hungry since it was about 4:30 and we hadn't eaten since our beignets that morning. We wanted to try a muffuletta so we headed to Central Market to grab one. We had heard and read great things about Central Market but it's basically just a grocery store that also sells these sandwiches. A muffuletta is this huge sandwich (that picture is 1/4 of it) on super yummy bread, with meat and "olive salad." It's basically olives, celery, cauliflower, carrot in a bottle of giardiniera and it's amazing. So, so, so yummy. 

We were going to eat at Central Market but they had just closed down their "seating section" so we took our food back to the hotel and just watched tv and hung out for awhile to warm up. Around 8 we decided we needed to go get some dessert, so we went to the Red Fish Grill for dessert. Cody got the banana fosters cake and I got the double chocolate bread pudding. Unfortunately I felt awful, so I hardly ate any, but Cody really liked his and I took my leftovers back to the hotel and went to bed. Cody wanted to keep walking around, so he walked down Royal Street trying to find some street musicians before going back to the hotel.