What Day Is It?

Okay. So I never got around to typing up our last day in New Orleans. I had intended to do it on Sunday, the day after we got back to Columbus, but our mail had a nasty surprise from the IRS that drove pretty much everything else out of my mind. Turns out that their demand for $10k in back taxes, interest, and penalties was mostly due to an error on the part of one of my clients, but it still was unsettling. It was only several days later that I remembered about the missing post, and then several more days before I could get to it. (Fortunately, work seems to be picking back up after a couple lean years.)

So what did we do. Truth is, it was a pretty light day, but a good one nonetheless. The group split up again with Mark and I taking a street-car ride to New Orleans City Park. It’s an enormous place—I mean truly gigantic—and I’d love to go back and see more of it. In two hours, though, Mark and I were only able to see the sculpture garden. (Look in the center bottom of this map to see how small of an area that is in the context of the larger park.) I say “only,” but it was well worth the visit. It was a wonderful sculpture garden, of which Mark and I photographed only a small sampling.

After the sculpture park, we really just went back to the hotel and started packing up for our Saturday flight home and hung out with the boys. We had dinner reservations at The Italian Barrel. We sat outside, and other than the noise of the occasional suped-up car, it was a really nice evening. The meal I had—pumpkin ravioli—was probably the best of the trip. (It was much better than it looks in the photo on their website, where it looks like the sauce started to congeal and, oddly, bleed butter at the same time.) And the desserts! Here are what James and I had to cap off our meals.

So that pretty much wraps it up. My overall impression is that I’d go back to New Orleans to see other things that we didn’t have time to do on this visit, but I never need to see Bourbon Street again, and I don’t think I’d stay in the central business district again until the city fixes its sidewalks.

Now to plan our next trip!