Category Archives: new orleans

Group Trip 2012!

It’s that time again! No, it’s not time to butter the cats, it’s time to talk about travel. In past years we’ve made some amazing trips: Napa Valley, Pacific Northwest, Montreal, and Alaska. For 2012, we’re planning an awesome extended weekend and we would like to invite our friends to join us. We’re going to NEW ORLEANS!

Plans are still being worked out, but the idea right now is that the trip would be from March 1, 2012 through March 6, 2012. We would fly into New Orleans on the evening of Thursday, March 1, and fly out the afternoon/evening of Tuesday, March 6. We will be staying in a hotel in downtown New Orleans. We’re going to try to incorporate some of the things that everyone loved about cruising into this trip. This means that while we’re all staying in the same place, meals and activities will be on an a la carte basis – if you want to join the group, great! If you want to go off an do your own thing, that’s great too.

Plans for the trip are still rather vague right now, but will be nailed down as time goes on. You can be certain that we’re going to be eating a lot of really good food and enjoying some tasty booze. We will probably have a couple of native guides (including Genet’s brother, an officer with New Orleans Police Department), and will have the opportunity to see parts of the city and its surroundings that your average tourist doesn’t get to see.

The nice thing about the a la carte approach is that you can RSVP as long as airfare and hotel rooms are available – we’re keeping things flexible! We will need to know who’s going with us, though, so we can possibly negotiate for group discounts and such.

So now it’s your turn: Are you interested in joining us? Leave a comment here or contact us by other means and we’ll add you to the list of interested folks!

For a Friday, this sure seems like a Monday

First, let’s get the whinging out of the way: I need a new pillow, I think. I woke up this morning at around 2:30 AM with a headache (neck strain, most likely) and slept fitfully the rest of the night because of it, never waking up quite enough to get up and take some ibuprofen for it. When I did get up at 5, I had to make the coffee twice, because I hear the coffee tastes better when you remember to actually add the coffee grounds to the coffee maker. And just when I thought the day might pass uneventfully, I heard from takaza that there has been a fiber cut to his employer’s building, so they’re without phone or connectivity and he’s left to twiddle his thumbs until they work it out (just got an e-mail from him – they’re back up. Good).

All of this, of course, is completely meaningless and insignificant compared to what is going on down on the Gulf Coast. There’s plenty of discussion and finger-pointing and speculation going on so I don’t see much need to add fuel to the fire except to say let’s tend to the living and bury the dead first, folks. It’s a question of priorities. It’s worthy of note that, according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the city worked to get everyone who couldn’t get out into central locations and then…the system failed. No one appeared to ship them out to safe locations, and so there many of them have stayed. Make no mistake, I believe there should be some serious analysis of what happened, just…not now. Not yet.

Down in the Delta

Something that some folks may not know about me: after high school (so long ago, in 1986), I didn’t want to just move on to Clemson University. At that time, it just seemed that all of the people I knew from my high school in Anderson, SC (15 miles south of Clemson) were going there, so I was afraid it would just be high school writ large. No, I wanted broader horizons. I received a nice package of grants and loans from Tulane University in New Orleans, and that is where I went for my first year and a half of college. I have a lot of fond memories from there:
– The horrid freshman dorm. Fourth floor, Sharp Hall.
– Marginal improvement the next year, second floor, Butler Hall
– Sunday morning brunch in Bruff Commons (not good food, but pleasant at the time)
– Broadcasting the Global Folk Show on Sunday mornings on WTUL-FM
– Video production with TUVAC, producing a weekly issues discussion show for public access TV
– The massive toy-gun shootout that ranged the length and breadth of McAlister Auditorium
– Seeing Andreas Vollenweider, Bruce Hornsby, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hunter S. Thompson (the latter completely drunk out of his mind) at McAlister Auditorium
– Plum Street Snowball stand. That wasn’t a sno-cone, that was heaven.
– Audubon Park Zoo, right across St. Charles from Tulane
– Mardi Gras. Good gods, Mardi Gras.
– All the great music at the clubs: Beausoleil, File’ Cajun Band, The Godfathers…
– Fridays afternoons on the Quad. The Song Dogs, Harry Connick, Jr., Winter Hours, The Radiators…
– Working as a dispatcher/student marshal for Tulane Police. I saw every inch of that campus, and then some, and met some great people.
– Cafe du Monde, Dixie Beer, barbecued crawfish (suck the head and pinch the tail, y’all!), muffalettas, and po’boys

And now? Most, if not all of that is under water. Officially, Tulane University has said they won’t start classes until September 21, but I saw one blog that had a tip from a Tulane employee speculating that it may be next year before they can start classes again.

They’ll rebuild. There is no doubt in my mind. It won’t be the same, but that’s OK. Everything changes, and I’m sure very little was still the same from the last time I set foot in the city seventeen years ago. But I do believe they will come back, in time.

That’s in the future. For the present, there are millions of people that need help. They need your help. Stop what you’re doing and think: what if you had to leave, right now? What would you take? What would you leave behind? Where would you go? What if what you thought you could come back to was gone, obliterated?

Think about that. Then click on one of these links. Even if it’s just a few dollars, every little bit will help. The American Red Cross donation page (site is very slow). Americares donation page (small but very effective charity). Humane Society of the United States donation page (mounting a rescue effort for pets and caregivers). Or select some other charity that you prefer, but seriously: do something.