Ed and I just got back from a long weekend in New Orleans, and although we have been there multiple times before, this time was different. I was going to write about the trip itself first, and save anything hurricane-related until the end, but that turned out to be impossible to do. Three years after Katrina, most local newspaper articles contain phrases like “since Katrina”, and “before Katrina”. Meanwhile, local residents, who unlike journalists can make assumptions about what their audience already knows, say “since The Storm”, and “before The Storm”. And they understandably say it a lot. It is hard to tell any story here without a reference to Katrina.

I was very interested to see how the city compared to the last time I saw it, a year before The Storm. We took side streets from the airport to our hotel in the Garden District, and I was surprised that there were many homes just north of the Garden District that were still boarded up with the infamous spray paint markings indicating the date that the houses had been inspected for bodies, or “TFW” for toxic flood water, or “Food Drop”, or information about a lost pet on the front. Once we got into the Garden District, though, and everywhere we went during the weekend proper, the city looked better than ever. For most tourists, even those who had been to New Orleans before, it would be hard to tell visually that anything had happened. There were a lot of visitors, the city was vibrant, everyone was smiling, and the houses and buildings for the most part sported fresh paint. There may have been more businesses in the French Quarter for sale than previously, but I’m not sure. It was hard to imagine as we crossed Canal Street into the Quarter the looting we saw there on the news. Hard to imagine the feelings of people who stayed to guard their homes and business in the French Quarter and the Garden District with no electricity, no water, and thugs on the prowl. New Orleans really is (still) a beautiful city.

We made this trip to attend a wedding, which took place in St. Louis Cathedral, the big cathedral right on Jackson Square by the French Quarter. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the cathedral, so it was a treat to sit through a service there, gaze at the ceiling murals and stained glass windows, and listen to the Holtkamp pipe organ, damaged in Katrina but rebuilt and returned to the church just two months ago. We had an extra half hour of organ music, in fact, as the groom (Ed’s friend) was trapped in his hotel elevator by a lightning-induced power blip and had to be rescued by the fire department. Ed and I had seen the fire trucks at that hotel on our way to the wedding, but didn’t realize they were rescuing Luis! Fortunately, the wedding photographer was in the elevator as well, so eventually we will see photos of Luis climbing out the escape hatch to make the dash to the church.

The reception was at the House of Broel, a big Victorian mansion on St. Charles Street in the Garden District. The owner gave tours of the home and her large collection of dollhouses that she had made herself. She was a piece of work, a New Orleans grand dame who shushed people and talked about her Russian count ancestry and her father who came to New Orleans to make his fortune in … frog canning.

An offhand comment I made to Ed on Thursday before we left Dallas about my biking streak (then at 58 days in a row) coming to an end prompted him to suggest renting bikes in New Orleans. While the streak was not really important to me, I’ve always liked exploring on bike. You see much more than is possible in a vehicle, and much more than is possible on foot, particularly in the South in the summer. So we rented city bikes for three days, and will probably make that a habit when we travel from now on. Despite some rain showers, we were able to bike from the French Quarter out to City Park, and visit the sculpture garden there. We “strolled” around the Tulane and Loyola campuses, Audubon Park, saw more of the Garden District than we ever had in a car, noticed large flocks of what were probably Quaker parrots, and even took the ferry over to Algiers and rambled around that old neighborhood. We also rode down the St. Charles streetcar tracks and up on the Mississippi levee for a few miles. We had bike locks, so we stopped for breakfast, lunch, coffee and the occasional beer without having to look for or pay for parking. We could also weave around the traffic in the French Quarter, much more pleasant than driving.

At night we locked the bikes to the porch of our hotel, which was a 150-year-old former duplex in the Garden District, and they weren’t bothered, despite the neighbors who were rather scruffy and held a suspicious “garage sale” on Sunday morning. We actually loved the house, porch-sitters that we are, and the neighbors reminded us of our neighbors in Houston, particularly David.

New Orleans food fans will be pleased to hear that New Orleans food is still (again) wonderful. The world “best breakfast” record was set there on Friday at the Blue Plate Cafe (pain perdu stuffed with brie and covered with a wild blueberry sauce), just a few blocks from our hotel on Prytania Street, only to be broken Sunday at eat (shrimp and grits) in the French Quarter. That shrimp and grits may in fact hold the record for best meal I’ve ever eaten. For dinner, we went to Ralph’s on the Park (Ralph is a Brennan) on Friday, Ye Olde College Inn (check out the link, we sat next to Cartwright Eustis IV at the bar while we watched Michael Phelps and Dara Torres swim) on Saturday for po-boys, and embarrassingly, Houston’s on Thursday. Hey, but we could walk there from our hotel!

After three days spent exploring the “face” of New Orleans, which has sprung back to life in amazing fashion, I did recognize that what we were seeing was somewhat false. I met a few residents over the weekend, both new and old, who acknowledged that while the areas that most people saw were back in full swing, a detour just outside the main areas was a different matter entirely. I knew this from the quick glance we got driving to our hotel, so close to the mansions of the Garden District, but I really wanted to see the worst of it. So, despite Ed’s reservations (more than reservations, he deliberately tried to avoid this by procrastinating and “forgetting” I wanted to do it), on Sunday we drove through the Lower Ninth Ward.

It is hard to describe this part of the trip, and yet I am so glad we did this. It makes me wish I had visited New Orleans proper sooner, while what is now grand and glorious again was still harsh and tenuous. When I look in Google Earth today, the satellite photos of New Orleans are from the spring of 2006, and I see how many blue tarps stand in for roofs in the Garden District and other places that look untouched now. When I look in Google Earth today, the spring 2006 photos of the Lower Ninth Ward look like someone drove over a Monopoly game, the hotels and houses askew and crushed. When we drove through the Lower Ninth Ward yesterday, it looked like a southern ghost town that the highway passed by in 1940, a few empty houses, gutted with no windows or doors, and the rest of it gone-back-to-wild shoulder high weeds, with a house-less doorstep or driveway visible every so often. No people. Quiet. Gone.