Day 1 Saturday

Hello everyone and welcome to Stewart and Katie’s New Orleans 2010 blog.

Today we packed up and set off at about noon to drive to Burlington, Vermont where we would be catching a plane for New Orleans via Washington. It was interesting seeing the different types of land as we passed the St. Lawrence. Quebec was looking quite a bit like southern Ontario. As we crossed the border, we made the transition from old run-down buildings, roads, and houses (Quebec) to super nice looking buildings, and much better roads (Vermont). Also the scenery changed to be nice rolling hills and lots of evergreens.

When we hit Burlington, we grabbed a bite to eat at what looked like a local diner, called “Al's French Frys” or something like that. They were speedy and had extremely tasty fries and chilidogs.

After that we parked the car and started the unnecessarily long waiting process that is needed for air travel. We had elected to get there fairly early because we weren't sure how long the border crossing would take and we ended up waiting about 5 hours. Through security, Katie was searched due to the ridiculous amount of coins in her purse. Apparently there were so many, that they figured she could hide a gun or toenail clipper or something like that in there. After flying through Washington Dulles, we headed on a new plane to New Orleans.

When we landed the flight attendant welcomed us to the “who dat nation” having something to do with the Saints winning the Superbowl. We got there about 1 am, and waited and waited for our suitcase, but they never loaded it on the carousel. There had to be at least 15 people waiting in the lost luggage line with us, and there was only one guy to deal with each person, one at a time, in about 15 minute increments. We kept joking about the agents “secret stash” of luggage that he had in the room behind him. After waiting about an hour with grumpy people, we went to see the guy, and voila! He somehow had our bag with his super secret luggage stash. We were lucky, and had no clue why it was there.

Finally, we got out of that airport, and asked the taxi driver some questions along the way. He explained to us that “who dat” is part of the Saint’s cheer “Who dat say we gonna beat those Saints. Who dat! Who dat!” and that everyone is still celebrating after the Superbowl.

We rolled downtown to the Astor Crowne Plaza, on the corner of Canal and Bourbon St. Navigating the streets was tough though because Canal St. was a major parade route, and they had just finished a parade that night. We waded through piles of beads and the crazy leftover people, made it to the hotel and conked out in our cool skylight suite.