The Briddish are coming… Road Trip to New Orleans

Our drive to New Orleans, along the majestic Mississippi, was nothing if not interesting.

We stopped at a Taco Bell outside New Orleans and the lady was really friendly and said she loved our accents, and she had friends in Europe. For a bit of fun, I asked her to guess where our accent was from. I was surprised and delighted to find that she thought we were Italian. Bless her heart. I am very flattered as the Italian accent is very sexy, but my accent is as English as it comes, and is far from Italian! We had to laugh! 🙂

We had a similar experience at the McDonalds we stopped at in a small town in Louisiana… we placed our order and the lady just started laughing and turned around and shouted in delight to her colleagues “Hey! Come out here… They’re Briddish!!”. We were pretty delighted with this reaction also! I’m guessing they don’t get many tourists in these places! Anyway I think she liked us as she gave us a lot of tomato ketchup sachets. I don’t know how many sachets you would normally get to accompany a regular chips? I normally take 1 or 2. She gave us 14.

We drove to New Orleans and the amount of industry we saw was ridiculous. I’ve never seen an oil refinery before but there’s more chimneys and twisted metal than I could ever imagine! At night with all the lights they look like big cities.

We rolled up at Lake Pontchartrain, a vast expanse of water north of New Orleans. It was via this lake and the canals coming off it that the water rolled in during Hurricane Katrina. And it was sobering to see the giant levees, sheltering homes, shops, and schools behind them. Horrific to think they were breached so dramatically.

After our journey along the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain (neither of which I have any hope of ever being able to spell!), we were excited to arrive in New Orleans!