Day Fifteen: Drive through Tuscaloosa, AL & to New Orleans

I find driving to be quite theraputic and so I was happy to take the wheel Monday morning.
Our destination was New Orleans but I wanted to make about a half hour detour to Tuscaloosa, AL.
I have a good friend who lives there and that's where the tornadoes hit strongest a few weeks ago.

I had no idea if my friend was actually in the city or not but programmed T-town into my GPS anyways.
It turned out that he wasn't in town but i'm glad we stopped regardless.
We had lunch on the University of Alabama campus and got a pretty good look at the devestation.

pretty amazing right?

I've never seen destruction like that before.

This was all on 15th street, just one block away from where my friend lives.

Then we headed to New Orleans

We watched the outside temperature gauge in the car go up and up over 100 degrees.

I think it got up to 102, but from what i've heard from my mom, it's no less cooler in WI right now!

We drove through a small thunderstorm and it cooled down after that.

We made it close to the city and needed to figure out where we were going to try to stay.
We had picked up another hotel discount booklet at the welcome center in Louisiana... well actually, three different booklets.

We found one place we liked that was 5 miles away from downtown.
We programmed it into our GPS and this is what we got.

pictures maybe don't do it justice, but this place was the ghetto.

graffiti everywhere. just run down. fenced up. took a picture of the limo because it was so obviously out of place.

So we sat in the parking lot looking through other options.

Does this place have a microwave/refrigerator?

A pool?
Parking?

Breakfast?

Wi-fi?

is it close to downtown?

I made so many calls.

And as soon as I got off the phone I would forget what place I had just called, and so I think we may have done a double call once or twice.

There was one place that sounded good but we put it on hold because it was a bit of a drive away.

But finally we were despearate enough and were going to stay there... but i couldn't remember what hotel it was and i couldn't match the phone number with my call log.

So i had Francesca call and ask what hotel it was but the concierge barely spoke english and she couldn't understand him so she hung up.

We had crossed off some of the downtown places because it was going to cost us $15-17 a day for parking but finally we just decided to head downtown and check it out. 

We found the Comfort Inn &Suites and just decided to stay there so we wouldn't have to deal with street parking.

We had a coupon for a rate of 67 a night... my mom later told me the cheapest room they have regularly is $120 so i'd say we did pretty well.

We got ready a little and headed downtown.
We basically just followed the music to bourbon street.

The first thing I noticed about Bourbon street was the atmosphere. It's so... alive.
The music, the people- for a Monday night, I was impressed!

The second thing I noticed was the strip clubs.
Holy crap.
So many strip clubs.
One after another, with girls just standing 98% naked in the doorway.

Of course, me being the social worker that i am, just think "damn. how sad for those girls... how in the world did they end up here?"

Bah.
Anyways...we wanted to find some New Orleans style food to try and we had the most difficult time wading through the street without being yanked into a bar by a bouncer, finding a place with the right type of food and then the right price of food.

so we're wandering and wandering and all of a sudden Francesca goes "I have a feeling. Have a feeling going to find somewhere great in just a minute"

And we walk past this bar called Touche which had a few customers in it, and some people were eating food.

So we walked in and sat down and asked if we could look at a food menu. It was 9:30 at this point and the bartender said he had to go see if the kitchen was still open. He came back and said it was, so we got a crab cake and seafood gumbo.

We got to talking to the bartender who was super, super nice. (and pretty good looking too :) )

He gave us a lot of tips as to where we should go and how we should get there.

He made me an awesome fruity drink and then shots too. (which we convinced him to take too, even though he said he wasn't supposed to!)

He took a picture of the two of us at the bar

We roamed around a bit more and then headed back to our hotel for the night!