A Little Trip To The Big Easy

It was down right cool when I went out to get the paper today - it felt wonderful. Now that we’re home after yesterdays 9 1/2 hour uneventful drive, I’ll post about our week long trip to New Orleans.

Bev and I have a time share that we bought for trading to go other places, with the problem that after we bank it, we don’t get around to using it. We had a week that expired last February and we extended it until the end of August and after searching, Bev found a place in the Garden District in New Orleans were we could go. We waited until the last minute, checking in on August 27. This is the first of eight posts about our trip and I'll try to throw in some new stuff to break the monotony.

We decided to take two leisurely days to drive down rather than a tiring single day to cover the 650 miles. We took our little Honda Hybrid and got 50 MPG out on the interstate. It was nice to fill up at the end of day one and only need 7 gallons. I wanted to drive for two reasons. First was that I like to go exploring and knew a couple of days doing the in-town things via public transportation would be plenty for me (I wanted to also see some of southern La.). The second reason is that air travel is almost always aggravating. Seems as though we hardly have a flight where the planes and luggage do what I’ve paid for them to do. Maybe I just feel more in control when I’m driving and not at the mercy of the increasingly unreliable airlines.

Steph, over at Plain Chicken, had sent us a list of possible eating places in the Birmingham area, but we ended up going through there at between meal times. Thanks for the effort Steph and I’ll save the list for next time. We ended up staying in Greenville, Al, because we’d seen a restaurant sign advertising great smoked turkey. So we checked in at a motel 200 yards away and the desk clerk confirmed it was good, so off we went. On arrival we were surprised to find one car in the lot and soon discovered why – closed.

We went back to the motel clerk and he advised they had all of the chain places but the only other local place he knew of was a BBQ joint just around the corner. I’m spoiled by my own BBQ and rarely eat it out unless I have heard from several folks whose opinions I trust that it is good – Dead End BBQ in Knoxville for example. I’d still rather go to the local BBQ than a chain place and when I drove into the parking lot to find 25 motorcycles, my spirits were lifted. On talking to the pit master, he advised his ribs were killer, so I ordered a ribs and chicken combo and Bev got a pulled pork plate. The easiest thing to start with was the wing of the breast quarter. I was pleasantly surprised, it was moist, tender, smoky, and with a nice rub. It was all down hill from there as the ribs and breast were both way over cooked and dry and while tasty, they weren’t even helped by a generous addition sauce which I had ordered on the side – I know the trick of hiding mediocre meat under sauce. Bev’s pulled pork came already sauced and it too was very dry. I believe one of the keys to a great BBQ restaurant is being able to keep the meat hot without drying out and it seems few have mastered it. Oh well, at least it was filling with the one other good thing being the sweet potato fries. Turns out the cyclist seemed to be a group of older locals trying to recapture their youth and were meeting at the local joint - they probably went to the ice cream parlor next.

I’ll have pictures or tomorrows adventure – thanks for stopping by.

Larry