Yahoo Ramblers: French Quarter Festival

After leaving Alabama, we spent a quick couple of days at Louisiana’s Bayou Segnette State Park - just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. The campground was quite nice with spacious sites,

Campsite at Bayou Segnette

decent restroom/showers and, unbelievably, free use of washers and dryers. The park has a healthy population of waterfowl, most notably Yellow Crowned Night Herons and Wood Ducks. A nearby canal with boats roaring up and down it was rather obnoxious, therefore, one big minus for the campground.

Our reason to be here was to attend the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans, which is billed as the ‘Largest Showcase of Louisiana Music in the World’.

French Quarter Festival 2015

This is a free four (4) day event with stages set up in various spots in the French Quarter featuring musicians from Louisiana.

We started the day by driving to Algiers

At the Ferry

and taking the ferry across the Mississippi to the French Quarter. The ferry is reasonably priced at $2 per person.

New Orleans Skyline from the Ferry

Our first stop was Café Du Monde for beignets.

Cafe du Monde

There was a pretty long line to get in, but it moved rather quickly and before long we were seated and eating the sugary, powdery beignets.

Coffee and Beignets

Now, between Loretta and me, she is by far the one that craves ‘sweets’, but I gotta admit these were pretty tasty with a cup of hot coffee au lait.

My craving was for a muffuletta sandwich from Central Grocery,

The Famous Central Grocery

the originator of the famous sandwich. We had heard about long lines waiting to get one and sometimes they (gasp) run out. We made a bee line to get there pretty early and get one to go to eat later back at the Rambler, and that worked out perfectly.

For the next several hours we just wandered the streets of the French Quarter checking out not only the performers on stage, but the street performers, too.

Talented Street Performers

Some were quite talented and some were just plain weird.

Very Disturbing...

ALL of them were entertaining though. One thing about New Orleans, it ain’t boring!

Our favorite was the stage that featured Zydeco music. One band in particular, Dikki Du & the Zydeco Krewe, has a guy playing washboard that I can only describe as a total ‘spaz’ but damn, he sure was good!

Washboard Guy with Dikki Dee & the Zydeco Krewe

By late afternoon we were pretty wore out and made our way back to the ferry and then somehow figured out the maze of streets back to the Rambler at the state park. We had a blast in New Orleans at the French Quarter Festival! Oh, and the muffuletta sandwich was mighty tasty!