The Big Easy

There is certainly a lot to see and do in New Orleans.  It is divided into districts, of course, the French Quarter is probably the most visited.  Today, it smelled a lot like garbage, mainly because I think today was garbage day.  It is cramped and there a lots of photo opportunities not to mention oyster shacks, hot sauce shops, candy shops and tee shirts and bead shops.  The street artists are excellent.

We started with a trip into the Quarter and a visit to the Cafe du Monde for morning coffee with chicory and beignets.  Turns out we went to a different place but from all accounts, Honey would not have been able to sit with us at the Cafe du Monde.  We were able to sit with her and enjoy these treats at New Orleans Famous Beignets and Coffee.  These folks were great.  Invited Honey to sit with us and even brought her a dog dish with ice water in it.  We got three powder sugar covered beignets and I had the Chicory coffee that my son Jeff had envisioned me enjoying.

This deep fried piece of pastry was wonderful.  The chicory coffee was pretty damned good considering that chicory is the root of the endive plant.  Created by the French during their civil war when coffee was scarce.  The endive plant is basically lettuce.  Apparently, the root is roasted and ground and added to dark roast coffee to soften the bitter edge.  Add a little warm cream and it is damned tasty.

We strolled through the Quarter and I took a lot of pictures.

Mia and Honey with "the Butcher"

Okay, negative note.  After resting for a bit, I left Mia at the hotel and took off to find the Garden District.  That didn't work out so well.  I ended up on the a trolley heading the wrong direction and by the time I figured it out, the weather was changing.  I ended up getting off the trolley and waiting for a return one in the rain.  It started to rain really hard, but the trolley showed up before I got caught in the down pour. The only picture I have is a video and it doesn't want to load to this site.  I did post it to Facebook for those who are friends.  I made it back to the hotel after getting wet and then drying out. Interesting error on my part.  Never made it to the Garden District.

Hope all is well and thanks for dropping by.

So Far So Good

We have been choosing to use the Choice Hotel group for our trip.  Thus far, we have been pretty lucky to find pet friendly hotels within this chain.  We gain points for stays so at some point we can begin to get free nights as we head from New Orleans, into Texas and home via Arizona.

So far, we have stayed at Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn, Quality Inn and EconoLodge.  We spent one night in a Sleep Inn in Kansas City and the room was very reasonable considering there were two rooms with two beds.  It was the only place, so far, that I could get up and work on the computer without turning on a lamp in the same room Mia is sleeping in.

For the most part, we have been very lucky with this group of hotels.  All are comfortable and clean.  They all have amenities that travelers need like free wifi and breakfast.  Don't expect much for breakfast.  Some do a really good job with lots of goodies but others just provide some very basic things for you dining pleasure.  Most charge an additional fee for Fido.  Apparently it is harder to clean up a room after Fido has been a resident.  Not sure I get that one but I pay for the pleasure of having Honey along and giving her an opportunity to explore great places with us.

Now for the bad.  The only EconoLodge we stayed in was not good.  There was dust on the headboard and the room wasn't clean.  It is almost as if they didn't do anything but add towels, make the bed and resupply.  Since I doubt anyone will go where this place was located, I'll not throw them under the bus.  All I can say is pictures on a website can be very decieving.

We are in New Orleans and I was  unable to find a pet friendly place close to the French Quarter in the Choice group so I opted for La Quinta.  This is a very nice hotel just two blocks from Canal Street and once you cross it, you are in the French Quarter.  We are about to go out and explore.  This hotel has all the amenities we need but breakfast is again lacking.  I suspect most people don't partake of eating in the hotel.   They have valet parking across the street in a lot where they double stack cars.  We are on the eighth floor and so far Honey hasn't had any problems using the elevator.  We found Layfette park down the street and she loves it.  Unfortunately, it will be closed a good portion of the day as NCIS New Orleans is filming an episode from two o'clock to nearly midnight.

Lebanon to Little Rock

As we packed the car to leave Lebanon this morning, I felt a few drops of liquid from the sky.  Earlier in the morning, I had gotten a picture of the sunrise against the grey sky but as the morning progress towards time to leave, things got a little darker.  I decided that I wanted a cup of Starbucks, so we drove to the local outlet as the skies were turning darker.  I got my coffee and we turned to get on Highway 44 South towards Springfield.  According to Google, there is no fast way to go from Lebanon to Little Rock.  Without stops, it was at roughly four and a half hours.

While the speed limit on I44 is 70 mph, only an idiot would drive at that speed with the amount of water that decided to drop on us just a few miles south of Lebanon.  I've seen rain like this before in Arizona but I have never seen lightening bolts the size of the ones coming from the sky.  I was beginning to think that someone upstairs wasn't happy with our Easter celebration.  We turned onto Highway 65 to head in a more southern direction.  It continued to rain in buckets and we found ourselves on a two lane highway with a bunch of people who didn't want to follow us at the posted speed limit.

In Harrison, Arkansas I was tired of driving and we were both hungry.  We stopped at a local, non franchise dinner to see what they had to offer.  While we could have chosen the buffet for $8.99, we both ordered from the menu.  I had a breakfast burrito with hash browns and Mia had a veg omelet with hash browns and rye toast.  OMG, the food was to die for.  Small diner, was packed with locals and we could see why.

We left the cafe to more rain.  Thunder, lightening and rain blew over us as we made our way down the highway until we got about 30 miles north of Little Rock and things, while overcast, dried up.  We haven't seen any rain since arriving in Little Rock.

A little travel side note.  Don't forget to enter the address in Google maps that is your final destination.  If you enter the city and state all bets are off.  That is what I did and we ended up at the state capitol grounds just outside of downtown Little Rock.  Needless to say, we were several miles from our final destination.  In fact, we had passed our final destination on the way into town.

We are on to New Orleans tomorrow morning and it promises to be a fun, if not long day of driving.  Hoping the weather is much better so we can trade off driving duties.  Mia wasn't too willing to drive in the torrential down pour today so I took the whole trip behind the wheel.

As promise we did a couple of other things while in Lebanon.  On the way to my cousins house we decided to visit some of the small neighborhood villages.  One place we stopped was another Quilt shop.  They weren't open and it appeared it was in some one's garage.

We moved on down the road visiting Falcon, Lynchburg, and Competition.  Then we went to Nebo and found this:

Earlier in the day I visited the Route 66 Museum in the Lebanon Library.  Small but packed with history.  Apparently Missouri didn't even want Route 66, they want Route 60.  They got Route 66, a short section still exists within the city limits.  Walk down an earlier time with me....

There you have it.  I am looking forward to our next adventures.  Hope all is well and thanks for dropping by.

Happy Easter

The sunrise in Lebanon, Missouri comes with the appearance of ugly black clouds from the southwest.  Happy Easter.

We spent an absolutely wonderful afternoon with my cousin and her family at their homestead near Falcon, Missouri on Saturday.  She fixed us a wonderful chicken dinner and we had a great time catching up as well as digging a little deeper into our ancestry.  She had some original documents that belong to my great grandfather as well as some from his daughter Fern.  Wonderful stuff to ponder and look at.  The homestead is a beautiful place with a wonderful yard and garden apparently on the board of the Mark Twain National Forest in the Ozarks.

We got to see and do some stuff here in Lebanon but Mia is packing up to got so I need to put the computer away and get ready to drive to Little Rock, Arkansas.  Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter and thanks for dropping by.

Kansas City

We are spending the night in Kansas City after having a wonderful mid afternoon meal at a really good BBQ.  Smokebox BBQ Cafe doesn't look like much but it is just a mile from the hotel so we stopped on the way in.  They were serving lunch and if dinner is any bigger you won't be able to walk when you are done.  You get your choice of meat and two sides.  I had brisket with beans and potato salad while Mia had pulled pork and beans with slaw.  Best damned BBQ we have every had.

We left Omaha this morning and changed states what seemed like ten times.  Omaha is partly in Nebraska and Iowa and we seemed to change states every few minutes.  It was kind of fun jumping back and forth between states near the airport and again just south of the city.  Since we had some extra time, I thought it was time for Mia to visit some Quilt shops, so I looked some up and we proceeded to go looking for them.  The first, Debbie's, turned out to be a house in a quiet neighborhood in Bellevue, Nebraska.  As it turned out, we figure it was a quilter with a long arm that was doing piece work since there was no indication of a Quilt store.

Next we went back into Iowa and traveled south on I29 to Nebraska City.  Yep, we crossed the state line four times on that trip.  We found out that Nebraska City is the home of Arbor Day.  J Sterling Morton arrived from Detroit to the Nebraska Territory with many other pioneers.  While the countryside was perfect for homesteads, the land had no trees and the pioneers missed them as they make excellent wind breaks in a place where the wind blows most of the time.  They help to keep the top soil from blowing away.

He grew in predominance and became Secretary of the territory.  On January 4, 1872, Morton proposed a tree planting holiday to be called Arbor Day to the state Agricultural Board.  It was to be
April 10, 1872 and it is estimated that more than a million trees were planted in Nebraska that day.
Interesting facts along the highways and byways.

In Nebraska City there are two Quilt shops but, sadly, only one was open.  Just want you all to know that I am doing what I can to give Mia her quilt fix as we travel south.  Honey and I sit in the car and let her go explore.  Sometimes Honey gets impatient and I have to move my hat up on my head and take her for a walk.

Even captured the sign over my left shoulder

Back to Iowa for a short trip to Missouri.  Once in Missouri, we traveled down I29 to Savannah, Missouri and went looking for another Quilt shop.  We didn't get to town because the GPS told us to turn down a county road and suddenly it was like we were back in Dunn Center, North Dakota.  The county road is a dirt, section divider that travels about three miles off the main road to a house with farmland all around it.  I didn't take a picture of the building because it was a non-descript manufactured home.

We are off to Lebanon, Missouri tomorrow morning.  There is laundry to do, museum's to visit and another Quilt shop.

Hope all is well.

Along the Byways

While traveling through Montana and the short distance to Dickinson, North Dakota we had mass suicides on the front portion of our car.  Sadly, I didn't take a picture but I can tell you that we stopped at least three times for fuel and every time I found myself scrubbing the hell out of the windshield to get the bugs off.  After collecting more bugs and lots of dust and dirt from the roads around Dunn Center and Manning North Dakota, I was expecting to have to wash the car when we arrived in Watertown, South Dakota.

As we drove from Dunn Center to Watertown, we encountered some pretty heavy rains that, much to my surprise, washed the vast majority of the bugs and their left over carcasses off the front of my car. The bumper, grille and lights seemed to have magically cleaned themselves.  Yes, there are some remnants but the vast majority just disappeared.  It occurs to me that my using a Griot's carnauba based paste wax before we left may have made a significant difference.  Add a strong rain and presto.

We were in the middle of what looked like no where earlier today and found a place for lunch a little off the beaten path.  At first I thought it was not a chain but after doing some research I find that Penny's Dinners are attached to the hotel chain, Oak Tree Inn.  But I really didn't care.  It was a fun place to visit and the food in this one was great.  Located off Highway 29 and Missouri Valley.  Great service, atmosphere and food.

As we have driven across the Midwest we have discovered another issue that kind of has us wondering.  There are bill boards advertising Adult Superstores.  Usually with Kandi, Annabelle or Olivia as the lead name these buildings are very non-descript and usually out in the middle of no where, on an exit that doesn't seem to have any other reason to exist.  Kind of makes you wonder what really goes on at here in the heartland.

We are spending the evening in Omaha and heading for Kansas City tomorrow.