Chris Moss Online

Our annual camping trip happened this past weekend. It was a heap of fun, as per usual. Because we typically have so much fun, this has turned into one of our annual events with Bobby & Ian. This was our fifth trip.

The brand of camping to which we subscribe is not so much the traditional type, so much as it is temporarily relocating most of our possessions to a more rural setting. There’s no way James or Ian will sleep on the ground in a tent, so we compromise and rent a cabin. In the past, the cabins have been a bit more rustic – small but with modern conveniences. The cabin we rented this time was a 1600 sf house, complete with gas fireplace and a washer and dryer.

Photos are available on my Flickr page.

Mood: Exhausted
Current Music: “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do” – Steve Winwood

All in all, our trip to New Orleans was good but not as great as was hoped – but that’s okay. Every trip can’t be a Grand Slam, and most of our trips lately have been Grand Slams, including camping trips and Key West last year. A lot of it is the destination, but when you are with great friends you can make the best of it.

I think New Orleans kind of disappointed us all this time around. James and I had a lengthy post-mortem during our trip to East Texas to retrieve the dogs from my parents’ house. Thanks to them for dogsitting 🙂

More on the post-mortem, but for now, here’s a short list of thoughts:

What I Like About New Orleans:

The history
The architecture
The culture
The food
The drinks
“Go Cups” (Geaux Cups?)
The river
Jackson Square
St. Louis Cathedral
The artists
The weird people
Antiques
Authentic jazz
The Garden District
Cute men
St Charles Ave streetcars
Audubon Park
Oz (still magical!)
Bourbon Street Pub/Parade
Good Friends (and good friends at Good Friends)
Pat O’Brien’s
Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop
Blue Dog
House of Blues
Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo
Cafe du Monde
Place d’ Armes
Coop’s Place
Small cafes in courtyards
Out-of-the-way courtyards
Royal Street

What I Dislike About New Orleans:

The tourists
The bums/hustlers/crazy people
Traffic
Constant construction
Neglected buildings
Talentless quasi-street performers
Crappy restaurants masquerading as non-crappy ones
That special smell only New Orleans can achieve
Taxis
Pat O’Brien’s
Cafe du Monde
Every voodoo place except Marie Laveau’s
Every t-shirt crap shack on Bourbon Street

My boss just asked me what time I got back to Dallas yesterday. I asked him, “which time?” He said, “how many times did you come back?” I said twice. He thought initially there must have been some bizarre airline mishap, but I explained that our flight landed at about 7:30 pm and after driving home, James and I made a five hour round trip to retrieve our dogs. So our heads hit the pillow about 3am.

Crazy? To you, maybe. It was worth it to get our dogs back right away and get the trip over with – I’m sipping my coffee and gearing up for what will be an extremely busy day and I’m not even tired at all.

Current mood: Satisfied
Current music: “Round Here” – Counting Crows

Your smile is fading a bit so I ration it
don’t think about it
here where the Mississippi quits
where its still got a bit of Minnesota in it

No one will give you a thing these days
they’d rather kill it or throw it away
you don’t ‘do’ dark American streets so
if New Orleans is beat
if New Orleans is beat
where’s that leave you and me?

The river takes takes takes and takes
it doesn’t change and only changes
see it there in a picture with me
there’s a caption beneath,
“New Orleans is beat”
and if New Orleans is beat
if New Orleans is beat
where’s that leave you and me?

your smile is fading a bit so I ration it
try not to think about it

Current mood: I’ll go with “sleepy”
Current music: “If New Orleans is Beat” – The Tragically Hip

In my last post I made a reference to EGB. That might have made some of you scratch your heads. EGB refers to our house, on EaGleBend Lane. We adopted that name for our house some time back because of our love for travel and because of my tendency to refer to cities by their airport code (EYW is Key West, for example). The FAA currently is not using the code EGB, so if anyone ever wanted to get me a really unique gift, perhaps the FAA would be so kind as to officially designate my house as EGB. Hopefully that wouldn’t cause planes to land here.

So far I have only used 1.5 days of my 16 vacation days per year. I receive 3 weeks and 1 personal holiday. It’s kind of a nice feeling, given that 1/3 of the year is already behind us. We have been talking about the possibility of a motor home type trip with Bobby & Ian late in the summer, and very soon we will need to go visit Tim & Kate. That will be a long weekend, and there may be some other long weekend trips in there too, perhaps to SFO or ATL (San Francisco or Atlanta).