We woke up early in the Villa, in a parking lot in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
We took a walk in the early morning light…
After about one mile we arrived at the famous Cafe Du Monde…
We took a table inside, and ordered Beignets and cafe au laits… (They are famous for Chicory coffee, but I don’t understand why; chicory is a cheap substitute for coffee that doesn’t taste like coffee nor does it have much caffeine in it. It is used where people can’t afford coffee, of when coffee supplies are rationed, such as during WWII… No real coffee drinker would touch the stuff. Leave it to the South to romanticize and popularize bad food, like chicken fried steak, or grits, or biscuits and near-rancid gravy…)
But we had a great time, watching the early birds come in for their coffee and beignets… After scraping about two cups of powdered sugar off the beignets they were quite tasty…
We walked over to get a better picture of the Basillica. It sort of reminds me of Cinderella’s castle…
We caught a few more early morning street scenes on our way back to the Villa. We love early mornings in big cities…!
We returned to the Villa and prepared for travel. We headed out, found the 10 freeway, and pointed ourselves east. It wasn’t long before we arrived at a new State:
We pulled into the Visitors Center. It looked like the inside of your grandmother’s house, with some grandmotherly women offering us coffee and assistance.
We asked how to get to the scenic Gulf Coast Highway, and maps were supplied. We returned to the truck and soon we were on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico…
The sand is like powdered sugar – just like what we scraped off our beignets earlier this morning…
I put my feet into the gulf waters, the first time since I did it in Galveston in 1984. This time, when I pulled my feet out of the water they were not covered in tar and oil…
There were thousands of seagulls on the sand. Probably because there were millions of sea shells on the sand…
Other than the seagulls, the beach was deserted. We don’t see deserted beaches in California at any time, day or night…
Across the street from the sand are these houses, fronting on the highway. They are built up on stilts to protect from flooding and storm surges…
A house under construction – note the brick columns…
We eventually left the coast and drove through several swamps and other wetlands…
Soon we arrived at…
We stopped in for a minute, and continued on…
Alabama is a lot like Mississippi… until it doesn’t. Mobile is a big city!
Mobile has a tunnel under the bay!
And then Alabama looks just like Mississippi again…
We stopped for lunch at a Cracker Barrel. Our first visit to a Cracker Barrel. It seems to me that almost everything Cracker Barrel represents or espouses are things that I dislike. But they are RV friendly, they are located at every major interstate interchange (usually right next door to a Waffle House), and we are meeting fellow Airstreamers at a Cracker Barrel in Tennessee in a few weeks…
We able to find a few items on the menu that we could eat, and the portions were only double what we can handle, not the 4x they usually serve… The food we had was pretty good, and I think if we eat here once or twice per year the food won’t kill us… Don’t get me started on why we, as restaurant diners, should have to stand in line behind trinket-buying tourists in order to pay our check…!
But soon we were in Florida!
We will stay four nights in Florida… Tonight we are outside Freeport, on the western portion of the panhandle. It amazes me that we still are not yet in the eastern time zone…!
The RV Park is quite nice. There is even a boat launch; this river gives access to the salt water bays and the freshwater lakes…
The Villa is set up and Happy Hours occur…
And an enjoyable time was had by all…
Adventures in the Villa 
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