Day 3 of Vacation

July 23 - New Orleans, LA to Destin, FL

Stats – 276 miles, 4 states (1244 miles total)

Day 3 started with putting right a missing piece of the past.  Almost 15 years after we were first in New Orleans on our honeymoon, we finally went to Cafe DuMonde for breakfast.  We shared a couple of orders of beignets and coffee, and sat in the French quarter watching the rain come down while we ate.



 

We shopped around the French Quarter stores, bought a few things in the market, walked through Jackson square, and walked across the levy next to the Mississippi for a while... the kids all got their feet wet in the river.  We drove a few more miles to the south east and visited the Battle of New Orleans site, and yes, we did have the song playing when we drove into the park :-)  It was another neat thing for the kids to see, guess we can all check that one off of the bucket list.

Along the way we there we drove through the lower 9th ward, some of the areas that were hardest hit by Katrina.  It was amazing to see how bad some areas of those neighborhoods still are.  There were whole apartment complexes that were just sort of caving in and falling over, but there were quite a few new houses that had already been built.  It's hard to believe how much damage there still is all along the coast, clear up into Alabama.

When we left for Mobile, AL we went through the back highway of the bayou, seeing lots of different types of houses along the way.  This was pretty typical of what we saw all along the way, not made for the physically impared.



 

We drove to Mobile, AL where we visited the USS Alabama battleship.  The kids were real troopers climbing through the ship and seeing all of the different things.  About half way through Eli pointed out to us that it was kind of like a floating city or something.  We toured the Alabama, and a submarine that was next to it, then loaded up and headed for Destin.  It was a fairly quiet drive, but according to pattern, we arrived a little later that we'd planned, so it was already after dark by the time we made it into town.  We unloaded our stuff and headed to the grocery store for some milk and frozen pizzas.  We came back to the room and made pizza, but it was almost 11:00 when we were done for dinner, so we headed to bed.