Saturday 8 November 2003

To get an affordable flight to New Orleans I needed to include a Saturday night stopover, so I had a free day today. After a couple of hours' sleep, I took the bus to the French Quarter for shopping and hanging out, buying presents for my family, watching the Mississippi Riverboat, listening to music on the street, that sort of thing. Bourbon St looks much less appealing by day, and the music was better up on Frenchmen St too! I had eyelids like lead all day, and rounded off my tourist experience with gumbo in a friendly corner cafe. Made it back to the hotel just in time to watch the spectacular lunar eclipse in a clear sky from the side of the hotel pool. Now to start catching up on a lot of lost sleep.