We spent some of our second day in New Orleans by visiting one of the Levees that breached in 2005. There is an abandoned house that has been left as a “museum” where you can see how high the water got on the walls. Frankly, standing by the house with the Levee towering over it at the end of the garden, it must have been absolutely terrifying when that breached 😨. Walking the district we were in, which was not the poorest one that got flooded by any means, you can see empty plots, abandoned houses rotting away, and rebuilt housing. We walked for some way and it remained the same indicating how far the water went. Contra to the headlines we read, the Levees breached in 50 places, not 2 or 3, and the land underneath them is flat 😔. We then went on a walking tour in the garden district where multi-million pound houses remain untouched. Never was there a greater contrast between the haves and the have nots than when that hurricane arrived!

We ended our time with more great music and a boat tour in the bayou. This time we saw Alligators and Turtles, obvs, but also Racoons and Wild Boar. Our conclusion about New Orleans……Bourbon Street is ok but in large part is proper tourist trash, the rest of the city has a lot of culture.

We moved on, travelled through Louisiana into Mississippi. As is Gem’s want, we sort out odd things. We found a 9ft statue of Ronald Reagan in a small town that has nothing to do with him, and a memorial to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Turns out there was a plane crash on that spot in the Mississippi countryside in the seventies that killed some of the band 😔….who knew! Also turns out that they were indeed named after someone called Leonard Skinner, so a zillion mispronunciations of the band name later it turns out people weren’t far out!

We stayed over night in a B&B, our first of the trip 🙂, in a town called Vicksburg. A very important location in the US civil war with a massive park that is the area of the battles and the siege lines during said civil war. It has been brilliantly laid out showing not just the siege lines (miles of) and canon emplacements (lots of), but what regiments, what companies, who the officers were, exactly when and where said companies fought during the battle and siege, and the casualties, for both sides. We also met yet more Americans at the B&B who told us where we should go where they live 😄.

As we type we are now in Memphis and are a bit knackered. The clothes are in the wash (we are getting quite good at sorting that 😄) and we are sitting in the bar. Sun records and Beale street can wait for tomorrow!