From Nawlins to Austin

Not knowing New Orleans, we booked a few nights in a KOA campground about 12 miles out of the centre. The site provides a free shuttle bus into town and is just across the road from the Mississippi levee and the cycle path along it that runs from the centre of the city many miles out into the Louisiana countryside. The site is not far from the portion of the levee where the final scene of Easy Rider is shot, thankfully the locals have changed somewhat. As it turned out we needn’t have bothered with a paid-for site in New Orleans. A lot of people told us that the city can be dangerous, and that we shouldn’t stray far from the French Quarter, but our experience was the opposite.

We spent a few days walking as far as we could be bothered in most directions from the French Quarter, and found nothing but interesting neighbourhoods, great food, great art, and fantastic music. At no point did we feel threatened, and all neighbourhoods, rich and poor, felt welcoming. After our reservation at the KOA site was over, we moved to the east side of the Lower Garden District on Camp Street. Where we parked, we had a park on our doorstep, were a pleasant 2.5 mile walk to the French Quarter, had a choice of free wifi, and were in an area interesting in its own right for the antiques shops, cafes, and restaurants. It’s not always as easy as this to free park in a sizable city, but I’d recommend that anyone travelling as we are, drive around the garden district a little before paying $40 a night to park a $30 taxi fare from the town centre.

New Orleans is an easy city to enjoy; the central areas (The Warehouse District, The French Quarter, and Maringny) are all walking distance from each other, and all retain enough of their historic buildings to make them interesting and different. The French Quarter looks very much as it has since being rebuilt after a fire by the Spanish colonialists in the 19th century. The buildings are a mixture of grand brick two and three storey unit’s with ornate iron railings, balconies and verandas, and classic timber shotgun shacks, in various states of decoration.

We saw some great Art in New Orleans (in the Contemporary Art Centre, and in the small galleries on Royal Street), and ate some good food, but as you would expect, what make the city fantastic is the music. It is difficult to understand how much live music characterizes the city until you visit. There are wide areas, where every bar and restaurant has a live band, but what really surprised me was the awesome quality of the music, and the huge variation in musical styles. I had expected to hear (and did) washboard jazz, trad jazz, and swing, but hadn’t expected to hear bluegrass, rock’n’roll, thrash metal and even karaoke. The city lives and breathes music and makes me feel ashamed of London, where live music requires a license, venues invariably charge patrons for the experience, and musicians find it impossible to make a decent living from their skill. It’s impossible to spend an evening in New Orleans and not hear good music, but my recommendations would be for The Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street, for the traditional local jazz which takes precedence over everything else in the bar, and also for Siberia on St Claude, for the great Russian/American food (Kapusta in a burger!), and the massively varied music programme (we saw a good hardcore band).

After taking our fill of New Orleans, we headed East out of the city, looking to enjoy the famous River Road, leading all the way north to Natchez, Mississippi and beyond. There are a fair number of well-preserved plantation houses on the section of the road leading up the Baton Rouge, and if the rest are anything like the San Francisco house that we visited, they will be magnificent. Unfortunately the image of these grand colonial houses, nestled amongst acres of fertile crop fields couldn’t be further from the truth. The entire area is filled with petrochemical plants, taking advantage of the proximity to the oil fields, and the use of the river for transport. San Francisco house is dwarfed by the silos and stacks around it, and is a sorry site viewed from the road; sadly you can’t have one without the other, as the house would have remained a derelict ruin without investment from a Louisiana based oil company in the 80s and 90s.

 

 I am willing to believe that the River Road improves north of Baton Rouge, but by that point I had seen enough of the levee on side (blocking the view of the river) and the chemical plants on the other side, that we left the road, and headed west towards Texas. We spent a day in Lafayette, and another walking in the Sam Houston Jones state park, before crossing the state line, and entering Texas. 

Our welcome to Texas was not of scorching sun and eternal draught, but of sub-zero temperatures, snow, and freezing rain. This was the first real test of cold weather camping in Jim and thankfully, we spent our first night below freezing, warm and comfortable, with a hot shower to wake up to. The rear flap that opens the whole wall of the bedroom is not well sealed and with a strong wind, you can feel a cold wind passing over the bed. Thankfully, the blow air heater, and central heating system are able to overcome the poor insulation, and leaky doors, and so it is still possible to maintain a decent internal temperature, albeit with the heating running almost continuously.

Thankfully our first major stop was in Austin, which is possibly the easiest city in the world to find a great bar to warm up in. There are more bars and live music venues than any city of Austin's size deserves, there can't be a an easier place to get out of the cold and be entertained. I suspect that Austin is not characteristic of Texas as a whole (nor should it be, Texas is bigger than France), but nevertheless I was surprised at how different it was from what I expected a Texan city to be like. I knew that we would find great live music in Austin, but Austin's love of music is almost secondary to their love of good food; something which is not reserved for expensive restaurants, but can be found everywhere. In particular, Austin is unique for the hundreds of catering vans and trailers located in singles and in groups all over the city, from downtown to the suburbs. The food is also more varied than you'd expect, sure there a lot of Steak restaurants and Mexican food stalls, but Austin is also home to the Wholefoods supermarket chain, and has probably the best supermarket on the planet, making Waitrose look more like Iceland.

Learning from our mistake in New Orleans we decided to check the city out before paying for a campsite. We were rewarded with an awesome fee parking space, half a mile from the city centre, on a hill with a great view of downtown, and next to a legal graffiti wall, with the pieces changing daily as Austin's artists come by to add their mark to the wall.

For a few days we ate like kings, heard some great bands, drank lots of local beer, abused the local Starbucks' wifi and toilet, and spent lots of time walking along the miles of parks and walkways along the Colorado River which cuts Austin in two. Austin was great, but once again it was time to hit the road, this time to explore the Texas Hill Country, and all the state parks, scenic roads, German towns and wineries that this beautiful part of the state has to offer. Fist stop, Perdnales falls...