New Orleans, part 1 (a photo essay in food)

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I've been postponing the writing of this blog entry, because I realized that a list of all the stuff we've done would really just be a list of all the food we've eaten. While I know at least four people who would be thrilled to read that list (you know who you are), I'll spare the rest of you. 

Okay, that was a lie:

We ate grilled mac & cheese sandwiches! What?! (We forgot to take a picture of the mac and cheese and bacon sandwich, but here's one of the "Big Cheezy")

We also ate a fried bologna and potato chips sandwich at the restaurant that was recently voted the best new restaurant in America, which, in my totally pretentious opinion, was just okay. But look at the picture anyway! What?!

We've done muffulettas and beignets, of course, and my favorite peanut butter bacon burger:

Oh yeah, and this Vietnamese coffee flavored donut filled with sweetened condensed milk pudding and tapioca balls (though I have to admit, I preferred Gourdough's in Austin). Apparently we forgot to take a picture.For the mental image: it was large and looked like a donut.

We ate fried pepper rings and the biggest platter of fried seafood I've ever seen while watching the Saints' brutal defeat to the Vikings last weekend:

And we went to my favorite restaurant in the world, Boucherie, where every bite of the meal lived up to my exalted memories and where the owner at least pretended to remember me and comped us some Krispy Kreme bread pudding (Mike's favorite):

In an effort to maintain some semblance of normalcy and still get work done, we decided to stay in most weekdays and do New Orleans on the weekends. What this actually means is that I will be losing and gaining the same two pounds weekly until we leave here. (Worth it.)

How Well My Pants Fit At Any Given Time: A Graph

Since we've been here, I have learned about myself that, contrary to my previous belief that I have a terrible memory, I somehow can remember every restaurant I've ever been to and what to order there. Mike has learned about me that I suddenly care about football as soon as I enter the state of Louisiana. We are both surprised and amused.

Look! More pictures:

The other adventure has been the cold! We thought we'd escaped it once we got here, but there's been a freak arctic blast here for the last few days, and New Orleans CANNOT DEAL. Before it even hit freezing temperatures, the schools all closed and the government shut down and nobody knew what to do with themselves. It lightly dusted snow that night, to the delight and confusion of all the locals, who giddily took pictures of the thin layer of white that wasn't even thick enough to obscure the sidewalk underneath. Some of the highways got shut down because of the ice, but apparently people are just moving the blockades and driving down them anyway. (I love this town.)

First, everyone was saying that you should turn on your faucets with a slow drip, to prevent your pipes from freezing and bursting. Now, the city is telling everyone to NEVERMIND  JK TURN OFF YOUR WATER because running all the faucets put the city's water pressure to a dangerously low level which somehow hightens the risk of dangerous bacteria. So now the store shelves are empty of bottled water, and we've got a pot of water boiling on the stove. Fortunately (?) we now have plenty of practice living without drinkable running water, so, it's not bothering us, but I do hope that the rest of the people around town are able to stay warm and have access to clean water.

Meanwhile, our bedroom is the only room in the house that stays warm, so we're spending our days working in bed. Again, no complaints here!

Our BFFs Tony and Dane are coming to visit this weekend! Which means there'll probably be another post full of pictures of food next week. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Final Tester Weekend: Dry Camping

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So far, we've only stayed in the RV when we had water and electrical hookups. When you stay at someone's house and run a regular electrical cord to the RV, you can't really use high power things like the microwave, but you have an unlimited supply of power for charging things, small appliances, etc. When you're at an RV park, you can use your 30 amp extension cord instead, which gets you basically all the power you could use, including microwave. You can also hook the RV up to a hose with (hopefully) potable water, which then also gives you an unlimited supply of running water instead of just the stuff in your holding tank.

Dry camping means that you don't have access to an extension cord of any kind, nor to outside water, so you can only use whatever you bring with you in the water tank, and can only use low-power electricity that runs off the RV coach battery (the battery that runs the "house" part of the RV, not the engine). In normal circumstances, that means in our RV we'd still be able to use 1) the coach battery for low-energy stuff like lights and for charging devices, 2) the potable running water that we bring with us in the holding tank, and 3) things that run off propane, like the heater and the stove. So we were looking forward to dry camping and testing out the RV without the hookups to see how it would go.

We met up with our friends at a campsite called River Ranch (which also got us out of the thick, smoky, dangerous air caused by all the NorCal fires), and quickly learned two things: 1) our running water was for some reason coming out of the faucet foamy, as if it had soap in it. So apparently, to err on the side of caution, no potable water. And 2) our propane tank is empty -- perhaps a leak? So no stove, and worse, no heat. All we had was enough electricity to turn on the lights, and presumably-non-potable water to wash our hands with.

I hate to call it roughing it when we're still sleeping on a king size bed and have a working toilet at all times, but as far as RV life goes, this was as close to roughing it as it gets.

Luckily, our awesome friends let us use their propane stove to make dinner and coffee. It did get into the 40s at night without a heater, but we bundled up and it was perfectly fine. And it finally gave us an opportunity to try running our generator for the first time, which we had been a little intimidated to do. We learned that we can't use it at night if there are people nearby, because it's incredibly loud. (Sorry, friends!) But we also learned it takes about 45 minutes to heat up the RV in case of necessity, without having any noticeable difference on the gas gauge, so that's good to know!

RV life is a funny life. Back when I was in college, I did some pretty hardcore hiking and camping. I spent an entire summer backpacking all around California with nothing but a 50 lb pack. We would stay a night at the trailhead and poke fun of the people with their beds and boxed wine and bacon, before hiking in 13 miles the next day to camp without even a tent. As I started getting older, I switched to softer mats, and shorter hikes, and comfy tents, and car camping, and a part of me fought it for a while. But eventually I realized that sleeping on the ground hurts, and sleeping outside when it's 35 degrees is not fun, and I started embracing the fact that, really, comfort is okay. If it comes down to nature in comfort versus no nature at all, I pick nature. So on the way to River Ranch, we had to laugh and acknowledge... man have we gone soft. And I don't even care. Bring on the bacon.

Most of all, it was a really nice time to sit around with friends and do nothing for a few days. We'll definitely miss all of our people up here, and we're trying to get in as much quality time as we can.

Mike was also able to test out his new drone! But we're too busy packing, so those photos and videos aren't processed yet. We'll post them when they're ready!