I had seen a breakfast restaurant called Petunias the day before while walking around the French Quarter, so I walked over to it for breakfast, and received an omelet so big that I couldn’t finish it. The weather was looking rather grey and rainy, but it wasn’t raining yet anyway, and I walked back to the hotel to speak at my conference panel. Some label reps wanted to go to lunch with me, and I had intended to take them to Domilise’s Po-Boys, but I also wanted to ride the steamboat on the Mississippi River, and the last departure was at 2:30 PM, so we opted for John’s Po-Boys instead, and they were good, if a little expensive. Then I ran across to the ticket office for the steamboat tour.
The trip offered a unique view of the city from the river, which, at New Orleans is 10 feet above sea level, and nearly 100 feet deep at places, so we were looking down on roofs on the other side of the levees. Vast areas of the 9th Ward had been abandoned since Hurricane Katrina, and there were a number of burnt-out buildings. We headed down past Algiers Point, and then back up to the twin bridges between downtown and the West Bank, and finally back to the landing. It had begun to rain during our journey, and it continued after I got back on land.
I went back to the conference to do some more networking, and there I ran into Rico Brooks, the former road manager for Boys In The Hood from Atlanta, who took me out to dinner at Morton’s of Chicago. Afterwards, the rain had stopped, so we walked down to the Cafe du Monde for coffee and beignets. Once again, to my surprise, there were no brass bands in Jackson Square, or seemingly, anywhere in the Quarter. (August 15, 2008)