French Quarter 
New Orleans
When Kendrick and I first decided to drive across the country to get to our new home in California, we each made a wishlist of can’t-miss places. First on his list was New Orleans, a city that each of us had only been to once before (and both only very briefly), and that we’d always talked about visiting together. So we sat down and mocked up our drive, calculating hours and miles and distances we’d need to travel to have everything make sense…and realized that we couldn’t make New Orleans happen.
Getting to experience New Orleans together – and with our kids – was important enough to us that we played around with our itinerary, trying to speed through some stops, maybe skip others altogether, but we just couldn’t make it work; it would have meant an additional four days of 8-straight-hour drives to get down there and back up to our route, and with two little kids in tow adding that much car time didn’t make sense. We said we’d go there someday. And I always believed we would; I just didn’t think we’d get a chance this soon.
I remember thinking how cool New Orleans was during the single night I spent here while on a post-college cross-country trip with my dad – the night consisted of live music on Bourbon Street and oyster tequila shooters – but I was wrong.
It’s not just “cool”…it’s magical.
We spent our first afternoon wandering through the French Quarter, popping into boutiques and voodoo shops and ending up at Three Muses (recommended by reader @kmrussellecki via Instagram; please keep the recs coming!) for live jazz and gulf fish crudo. After dinner, we crossed the street to explore the Frenchmen Art Market, an open-air space where you can chat with local artisans while checking out their crafts, jewelry, and canvases (favorite finds: cameras, teapots and books repurposed into Edison-bulb light fixtures by Junk Evangelist). We were planning to Uber back to our hotel, but our kids ended up catching a second wind (weirdos), so we walked back through Jackson Park instead, listening to buskers play harmonicas while the sun set.
You know, I grew up in New York City and have always thought of it as very singular in that the city feels like a living, breathing entity of its own…but New Orleans is alive.
Day One
This post was created in collaboration with New Orleans Tourism.
