Today we have officially been gone for one week!

We slept in again today, and headed downtown at 10:00am. Our RV park had a shuttle that took us right to the French Quarter. LOVE those balconies. The girls loved seeing all of the buildings too, but the smell!!!!! Worst smelling place we’ve ever been! The key is to keep walking. Stopping in one place for too long, and it’ll get you. We wandered down many streets just taking it all in. We looked at all of the artists and the guy playing bagpipes in Jackson Square. We went into St. Louis Cathedral. SOOOO beautiful! It was also fun to just see the random bands set up and start playing music down random streets.

We happened upon an authentic voodoo shop (something the girls really wanted to see). It was a very eerie entrance, but then we were greeted by a woman who told us the real history of voodoo and showed us some old voodoo altars from long ago. It was the perfect place for us to happen upon. Sydney really wanted to buy a voodoo doll, and this was the place to do it. She didn’t want some commercialized version that was mass made and had tags. The person doing bone readings in this shop was supposedly 5th generation of the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau. Very cool place!

By lunchtime, we were hungry and stopped at Central Grocery & Deli and had their famous Muffuletta sandwich. Very good! Then, we took the St. Charles streetcar uptown through the garden district and past Audubon Park. The mansions in the garden direct were amazing, and the tree lined streets were beautiful. It wasn’t until the return trip that we noticed beads hanging from every tree on the street! It was funny to us to see these gorgeous mansions with beads in the trees in front of their homes.

Today was HOT and HUMID. We pretty much just sat in our sweat all day long. We passed a Smoothie King and just had to go in. We all decided that Smoothie King beats Jamba Juice. All of our smoothies were delicious! Then, we just wandered through the garden district for a little while we waited for our dinner reservation.

We ate at Atchafalaya Restaurant. This was a creole restaurant as Stacy wanted some authentic LA food. The girls were a little worried when they saw the menu, but with Stacy’s guidance, they ordered correctly. First was an order of fired green tomatoes with crab and a remoulade sauce. These were not the best Stacy has ever had, but they were still good. Madison and Scott had the special filets that were rubbed with creole seasoning with asparagus, cauliflower, chanterelle mushrooms (which they didn’t like), and a pork reduction sauce. Sydney had truffled fried chicken with caramelized onions, mashed potatoes and green beans. Stacy had a dish with drum fish, crab, shrimp, clam, oysters, okra and brothy tomato sauce. True creole! We hadn’t finished our wine with dinner, and the waiter said we could take to go cups, so we said, “OK!” We had forgotten that you can walk around with alcohol in LA.

After dinner, we took an Uber to Café Du Monde. We had waited all day to go there, and had decided getting them for dessert would be a good idea. When we got there, we found a table right away and ordered our beignets, and Stacy had a café au lait. Oh my gosh was it good!!! We were really happy we decided to go after dinner as the lines to get into that place where down the block in the morning and afternoon hours.

We were tired of sweating long ago, so we got an Uber back to our RV park. We couldn’t wait to shower! On the way, we witnessed something new to all of us. These guys were driving weird, and then we saw an abandoned car with all of the doors open. We didn’t know what we were coming up on, but it didn’t look good. Our Uber driver said, “Those kids stole that car.” She thought they either got scared or it ran out of gas, so they left it there. Guess if we had taken pictures, we could have turned them in, but we just wanted to get out of there.

We arrived safely to our park, took those long awaited showers, and went to bed about 10:30pm.