Schlabitz News

After the Swamp came the River Road that runs along the Mississippi and used to connect the plantations.  As those are laid out as thin strips of land one after the next, we were able to see several mansions already.  Looked just like the movies and I almost expected to see Scarlett O’Hara waving to us from a balcony. You can find the plantation we visited on the linked map (west bank, under the “M”).  Back then it was still called Duparc & Locoul plantation, after the French immigrants who founded it.

We visited a plantation on our last visit, and on the way the tour bus drove through the Mississippi Delta of course.  Tried to get a better picture of the Spanish Moss, but it didn’t work quite right through the bus window.

Here you can see that event hough there are miles and miles of swamp, there is an infrastructure, in this case a train line.

Also visible are Bald Cypress or Swamp Cypress, the state tree of Louisiana. Their wood is popular because it is water-resistant.

I was lagging behind, because the truck was going way to fast and everybody was running.  It’s not a race through town! It’s a parade.  We ran out of candy very quickly because at the beginning everybody was crying: “throw me some! throw me some!”  So everybody threw like whole bags of candy and we had to keep getting refills.

It was very exhausting and halfway through I had to sit in the truck.  And we had oranges for snacks and they were very delicious, but the seeds got stuck inside the middle of the orange and you had to spit them out.

The parade went from my school to Kai’s school and then I forgot my backpack in the truck and we had to chase the truck the girl scouts were in and then we ended up at our house.

Afterwards my brother didn’t have very much candy, ’cause he wasn’t a very good collector, even though he promised to get a whole sack of candy and he barely got the bottom full. I was in the parade so I couldn’t collect any candy!

And school is sort of getting weird, because you have to learn how to type with the home row to graduate and I think that is very weird because not many people use home row anyway and you make mistakes both ways if you are looking or not.

Here are the Girl Scouts in the parade, but where is Kirin?

Our homecoming parade was postponed this year because it literally rained on our parade, ha!  The next day the weather was marvelous and me an Kai were watching from the side lines, while Amy and Kirin were marching with the Girl Scouts.

Above is the Harrisburg High school band.  Since we live only a block from the High School, I get to hear them practice in the morning through my open office window.  Sometimes they march past our house, which I find pretty neat.

Here we’re riding the historical St. Charles tram line through the Garden District looking at old houses.  The beads must be left over from earlier Mardi Gras parades.

New Orleans has many beautiful women, but they usually run away when I approach, except for this one.  Although, she acted kind of cold toward me, she let me take a picture with her.

One of the reasons it’s so cheap to get rooms this time of year, is because of hurricane season.  I don’t think that’s a problem at all. Even though we planned to walk in the Garden District this morning, we “decided” to gallery hop on Royal St. instead because it seemed to fit the sudden tropical storm (look out the windows) better.  The  antique shops were nice, too, and we found a voodoo doll that Kai wished for  in Jamie Hayes’ gallery.  It’s similar to the one in the link, but they all look different.  Not sure who he wants to torture with it, though.

We arrived in New Orleans at dusk.  We did not manage to get a courtyard room this time, only a regular interior room instead.  Not too big a deal, because we’re mostly gone, but the quiet courtyard was much nicer.