What we ate and didn’t eat in New Orleans

We woke up at 3 a.m. even though the alarm wasn’t set to go off for two more hours and decided to just get on the road.

The truck was already packed with camping gear, kayaks, bikes and jars fresh harvested honey from our downtown bees to give to my family in Wyoming.

“Let’s get to know each other,” Earl joked as he started the truck.

Our first stop was New Orleans, a big push for the first day.

I made a dinner reservation at Jewel of the South for 7:45 p.m. and booked a night at the Hotel St. Vincent, and that would be our reward for 11 hours on the road.

In the dark, we sipped coffee, sweetened with leftover heavy cream because we were trying to clean out the fridge before we left.

As we drank and the sun came up, we recounted the plan.

I created a route to Wyoming and back that would let me show Earl places that have been important in my life. It’s a mix of art and nature and one fried chicken restaurant in the cornfields of Southern Illinois.

We will cross Texas and stop in Luckenbach for a night of two-stepping. Then Marfa and Big Bend National Park. Bisbee and Jerome, Arizona. Escalante, Utah, and a stop at the Spiral Jetty at the north of the Great Salt Lake. Jarbidge, Nevada, population 16. Kayaking through the Snake River Canyon in Idaho and a soak in the hot springs of the Salmon River. I’ll show him the Seven Wonders of Casper, Wyoming, and the place on Casper Mountain where I used to go as a teenager to sit on a rock outcropping and look out on my hometown. Steamboat Springs and Crested Butte, Colorado. Cutting across Grant Wood’s Iowa. Cahokia Mounds with its distant view of St. Louis. And then heading home.

As we drove, we listened to “Hard Crowd,” a collection of essays by Rachel Kushner. I downloaded it onto the Hoopla app and borrowed it from the Charleston County Public Library. As the miles went by, Kushner’s voice recounted a terrible motorcycle accident in Mexico and her time as a café racer. But it was about more than that – about suffering as a girl on a bike, and how that suffering is liberating and eye opening and horrific.

As the sun baked off the clouds of morning and we crossed the Florida panhandle, we both noticed that the air conditioning wasn’t cooling us anymore. It was just blowing.

I looked through the owner’s manual in the glovebox. I bought my 2008 Toyota Tacoma used with 38,000 miles on it. The man who owned it before me kept meticulous notes about the maintenance and filled the pages with asterisks and reminders. But there wasn’t a solution in the manual.

So, Earl drove and I searched Reddit and YouTube. I found a channel normally dedicated to firearm safety, but there was one Toyota Tacoma instructional video explaining how to change out the blower motor resistor. It looked easy enough.

We found an auto parts store and Earl changed out the part. A fix that cost less than $50. We crossed our fingers as we thought about driving across Texas in August. I started the engine and cold air poured out of the vents.

The rest of the drive, I had imagined myself at dinner enjoying a sugar-rimmed Brandy Crusta and a plate of chicken hearts.

We pulled into New Orleans and checked into our hotel with its jewel toned, color-soaked walls. I learned the word bolthole from an article describing the Hotel St. Vincent as a Bohemian bolthole. It’s an animal den. A place to hide and seek refuge.

We sat down at Jewel of the South as if we’d just crossed a finish line.

I’ve never seen a menu like it. There’s a mid-century English love of organ meats and nose to tail cooking. Sweatbreads. Duck neck sausage.

With the side of our forks, we cut into a square of black pudding topped with rhubarb and cherries and it reminded us of meals we ate in people’s homes in Finland.

Outside, a Haitian family walked by, talking and laughing. One of the women was wearing a long sequin dress and she had a shy and expectant smile on her face that showed the laughter was about her.

They weren’t serving chicken hearts that night, but imagining the dish all day made it a new quest.

So, as we drive west, we will search for restaurants that serve chicken hearts to satisfy the craving. The magic about organ meat cooking is that is crosses genres and nationalities. Setting ourselves on this little food quest – in small town and big city America - could lead us down unexpected roads and side streets, or so we hope.

From Post and Courier Travel: ?

Two spots opened up this past week on the January trip to Rwanda. If you haven’t seen a mountain gorilla in the wild, this is a bucket list moment. The trip also includes a chance to see the Big 5 in a lesser visited national park, to see the chimpanzees and learn more about the work of Dian Fossey.

https://www.postandcourier.com/travel/rwandas-unforgettable-primates-and-wildlife/article_d05ea4b8-5cd1-11ee-ba5b-3f6c3384bcc3.html