18 February 2009

New Orleans

We arrived in New Orleans in the very early hours of Tuesday morning. After breakfast, Dale, Dieter and I decided to take advantage of some promising weather to head into the city. This proved to be a bit more difficult than we expected.

On reaching the gate we were informed by the local rent-a-cop that we were not allowed to leave unless we were escorted by a person holding a "TWIC card." For those of you not part of the transport or logistics industry, the TWIC card is the latest thing to make our borders safe; it is the Transportation Worker Identification Credential and is soon to be required by just about anyone who works within a secure area on a port. Anyone without this new credential who has business in a port area needs to be escorted by someone who has it.

Like so many large-scale programs, this one was implemented without all the details having been thought out. Right now, according to some of the workers I've spoken with, the real losers are the ships' crews who can't leave their ship without an escort. This can be a bit disheartening for people who've spent the better part of a month at sea and just want to get to Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

I'll leave that rant for now. The TWIC program won't be implemented in Houston until mid April so I'm hoping things will go smoother there.

We were finally able to leave when one of the cargo agents kindly arranged to escort us. The amusing part was that when we got to the gate there wasn't the slightest check of us or our IDs.

In the French Quarter we took a bit of time wandering the streets and observing the pre-Mardi Gras preparations, mostly the delivery of staggering amounts of beer. This was my first visit to the Big Easy so I enjoyed just taking in the sights.

After lunch and some book shopping we decided to spend the night in the city instead of returning to the ship. This was due to the potential complications and expense of getting back to the ship and the likelihood of similar difficulties if we tried to get return to the city on Wednesday. We got a very good deal on some rooms just a few blocks from the French Quarter.

Dinner was excellent. We went to a one of the smaller, friendly restaurants down one of the side streets, the name of which escapes me right now. The crowds of conventioneers and regular tourists were quite modest so the streets and restaurants were full and lively without being packed. I'm sure that will change next week when the drunken revelers descend for the big celebrations.

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