We had an outstanding experience at Le Richelieu Hotel on Chartres a couple of years ago. It was a cab ride from the train station, but the cost was worth it. It was a quiet part of the quarter but only a very quick walk to the not-quiet parts! :giggle: We're threatening to go back this summer for a few days, but going in on the Crescent this time instead of the CONO. (Why again is it that can't Nashville have passenger rail?)
Just in case anybody is interested in an off-topic rant, I'd like to share my personal New Orleans story
I did New Orleans with a friend in 2009.
You may think this is unbelievable, but visiting from Europe I really honestly didn't know what New Orleans was like. I'd heard about the jazz and the food and I thought that's it. It's a city where people go to eat and listen to jazz music.
I'm not really much of a jazz person myself and to be honest I'm not too adventurous food wise so I thought here's just one of those cities you've got to have been to increase your life culture and be able to brag about in intellectual circles.
Anyway, the real reason we were there was we were travelling from Atlanta to Dallas an you know the Sunset Limited doesn't run every day so we had two days to kill in New Orleans.
Anyway, I couldn't have been more wrong.
The strange thing is, almost all Americans we talked to before the trip said, you'll love New Orleans because it's a bit like Europe. That was one reason not to go. We're not going to the USA to see places that are like back home. Probably what they meant is that everything is a bit quaint and nothing is really properly organised or fixed or genuinely reliable (which is what our initial impression was) and maybe that's what Americans think Europe is like. On the other hand it was maybe some post Katharina thing and New Orleans isn't really like that at all otherwise.
But anyway, all our expectations turned out to be wrong. It wasn't really anything like Europe. Okay, the architecture in the French Quarter is a delightful colonialist time warp with a lot of things that are vaguely familar but not really. Maybe because I'd seen them in old movies or something? My friend was too tired so he went to bed early so I ventured around by myself on the first night and just randomly went to places and looked at things and felt I was really beginning to understand the amazing vibrant essence of the place. As I said I don't go for jazz much but here I heard some music that was absolutely fabulous and that so blended in and seemed such a natural part of the place. Walking along the street is like tuning radio stations. You can hear different bits of tune coming out of different bars and you just walk after the one you like best, and when you've had enough, pass on to the next.
In one bar, I asked the barman what the name of the band was that was playing - and this band was so absolutely fabulous that I was sure they had to be famous somehow. He replied, do they really a name? It struck me he was right. Why come here and seek to comprehend things by categorising things and adding labels to them. The band was just part of the bigger picture, accept it and enjoy it. It's not called Big Easy for nothing.
I kept going for a very long time but at some point in the not so early hours, even New Orleans goes to sleep, and fewer and fewer bars were open and those that still were weren't too inviting or my style, so I finally decided to go back to the hotel. At that hour even Bourbon Street falls silent and is just a mass of boarded up and shuttered venues where a fresh wind blows out the remains of the day and makes way for the new. And then I realised that that wind was not only fresh but actually smelt of something more unexpected - the sea. It was the only time in my two days there that I distinctly smelt the sea but it was a wonderful feeling. Further along I a side street and there was an old African American gentlemen sitting there all by himself with a can of beer in his hands and he was singing to himself, and it struck me that although I'd heard some pretty good jazz that night, the stuff this guy was singing was some of the most moving and heartfelt and true jazz I'd heard yet - beacuse he was doing it for himself and not for some tourists.
I'm definietly coming back.
(and that despite the fact my camera was stolen and with it I lost all my pictures of Atlanta and from the Crescent, and all the camera shops on Canal Street I tried to buy a replacement from were doing their utmost best to cheat me)
