Day 57

Day 57: 7/13/15 (New Orleans)

298 miles

Rico headed to his haircut while Jillian stayed at the house.  She was trying to preorder some cronuts for when we’ll be in New York City.  The bakery makes a small batch each day so usually a line forms an hour before opening.  We are planning on waiting in line for standby tickets to The Tonight Show so we knew we couldn’t do both.  Another option the bakery has is preordering which is every Monday at 11am sharp.  Jillian sat refreshing the page, but you could tell the website was crashing due to heavy traffic.  A few times she got through, but could never complete the order, and the next thing she knew, they were sold out.  After waiting 10 minutes, she figured she would reload the page and check if anything had become available and sure enough, all the orders were open again.  We’re still not sure if they just sell in batches or what, but the charge went through and we have a receipt to prove it so, holla!  We’re getting cronuts! 

Once that whole ordeal was over, Jillian could finally jump in the shower and get ready.  We didn’t leave until the afternoon for Avery Island, but we still made it on time.  Along the way, we stopped at a grocery store where Amy’s Candles (the candle shop that we tried to go to before but was closed down) had another location.  We picked up some candles for us and some as gifts.  Finally, we arrived at Avery Island, the only Tabasco bottling facility in the world.  We got a short tour through a very small portion of the building, but at least we got to see some production lines in action.  We visited the country store where they sell all the Tabasco products and did a little bit more taste testing including raspberry chipotle ice cream.  We ended up leaving with two bottles of hot sauce, some BBQ sauce, some pepper jelly, and some garlic sauce.  At least we know we’ll have hot sauce if nothing else when we move into our apartment.  The island also has a jungle garden that you can drive through, but we decided to skip it so we could get back to New Orleans.

During our search for good New Orleans food, we found a video of Emeril raving about some pho from an episode of The Best I’ve Ever Had.  We hadn’t looked up an address, but we found the restaurant in the GPS so we plugged it in and headed there.  We tried calling just to make sure they were open and everything, but the number was disconnected.  Jillian suggested that we call Rico’s dad to double check the location for us, but he didn’t want to.  We finally arrived at the location which ended up being a mall so we went inside to the food court – no pho restaurant.  We went back to the car and used the hot spot to try and find where we went wrong.  Apparently they closed down and hadn’t opened a new location yet – I guess that call to Rico’s dad wouldn’t have been a bad idea after all.

We were in search of something to eat since the pho place was closed so we drove over the bridge into New Orleans and went to the French Market area.  Frenchmans street is known for its jazz so we figured we could get dinner and a show.  We went to Maison’s which was already had a band set up and playing.  We enjoyed a few drinks including the Steigl Radler that we found in Montana and an alcoholic root beer which was delicious!  We also ordered some gator bites since you can’t leave New Orleans without trying gator.  They ended up being mixed with a Cajun stuffing and fried so they weren’t all that bad.  We walked up Frenchmans to see if there were any other places we wanted to go to, but there weren’t many bars that had bands playing yet.  Instead, we found this little ally art market with lights strung all around.  We walked around and checked out some photographs because we love to find art in the places we visit.  Nothing really appealed to us so we headed back to the car to grab the tripod so we could take some night photos at Jackson Square and around the area.  We finally made it back to Anne’s and ate some of the lasagna she had made for dinner – it was the home cooking we had been missing.  Jillian spent the rest of the night watching The Bachelorette (she had it recording so she could watch it once she got back). 

Fact:

Cronuts have to be the most sought after pastry

Lesson:

If a restaurant’s phone line is disconnected, there’s a good chance that they are not open

Eat Well; Travel Often

Rico & Jillian