Our youngest son, Clay, age 23, is a new student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He recently had a blog post of his own that sounded like he really missed home & family. Mom couldn't stand it !!! so we went to visit him. We arrived Friday night just before midnight & met Clay for just a minute. We stayed at the Providence House, a guest-house type of hotel for seminary-related visitors. Price was very good :) and accomodations were fine & dandy.
Saturday we did as much N.O. tourism as we could. We ate a late breakfast at Cafe du Monde. (Actually went to the one in Metairie, as the main one had a VERY long line.) I love it when the hype surrounding an experience is actually true- and beignets REALLY are as good as their reputation! Cafe au lait was good, too.
Before the day ended, we had:
*driven around the seminary campus, taking advantage of some good photo ops,
*visited the "Before I Die" wall- the side of a building on a small side street that has "Before I Die I want to ______" painted on it, with lots of fill-in-the-blanks that people complete with chalk- it is erased when it is full & the process starts over- very interesting,
*walked around the French Quarter (went to the original Cafe du Monde, just so we could say we did),
*watched some fun street performers doing crazy acrobatics & comedic dialogue,
*walked along Bourbon Street,
*seen a silver lady, one of those funny folks that look like mannequins but are real,
*ridden the ferry across the Mississippi River,
*eaten Mexican food in Metairie (had an interesting lost-in-translation experience trying to order "punch- fruit punch"...),
*driven through City Park (looking forward to taking the grandsons there!),
*taken a 2-hr. trolley/streetcar ride to see The Garden District, nice houses, universities, interesting people.
Sunday, we began with the discovery that 10 a.m. is not a good time to try to go to the new Waffle House! Ended up having a gourmet breakfast at McD's. Then headed to the launch of a new campus of Vintage Church in Metairie. There were 300+ people there, but only about 20 of us were 50 yrs. old or older. We were the only ones that got to sit in chairs during the service :) Glad age has some privileges! We then had a nice lunch at Houston's. We wanted to make sure Clay would want us to come back to visit, so we took him to a few places he couldn't afford to go on his own :)
The entire weekend trip, from driveway back to driveway, lasted about 53 hours. But it was definitely worth it to see Clay. He seems content, though he surely misses familiar faces. We don't expect to see him again until Thanksgiving. I'm not a huge fan of long road trips, but I'm getting better at them. Gotta admit, "I have a dream" where my 4 little children (and all their children) live no more than 1 hour away from the house where they grew up. But as long as they are doing what God has called them to do, I am teary-eyed proud of them!
A few visuals of the weekend:
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