2/4/2022

Hello Blog Readers,

Welcome to New Orleans! Hopefully you have your vaccine card and mask in tow when you get here, or you won’t be doing much of anything in this place. This is the only spot during my southern tour where both proof of vaccination and a mask are required to go or do just about anything in the city. They stop you at the door of every establishment to ‘check your papers.’ Luckily, I’ve got both my vaccine card and my mask on my person.

Right now it is a rainy, cold time to be in this historic city (it’s about 30 degrees outside with windchill, and icy wetness covers everything). A lot of the famous, renown restaurants (including Emeril’s restaurant, Nola) are closed due to the pandemic lockdowns and lack of help, and the insane number of tourists within the city are all crammed into and jockeying for space in the few places that remain open. The streets are slick and grimy, full of excrement and substances of unknown origin, and many of the people wandering the streets for some reason look like they are practicing for an audition in the next Mad Max movie. Yeah…if you are looking for a fun, relaxing getaway in 2022, you might wanna look someplace other than New Orleans.

I drove here yesterday from Birmingham, and the drive was seriously intense! There were tornadoes in western Alabama, floods along the interstates of Mississippi, and rains falling so fiercely from the sky that sometimes I could not see the road even when I slowed the Jeep down to 30 mph. I only got through it by saying about 1000 Hail Mary’s and Glory Be’s and vowing to myself that I would not pull over and stop until I reached New Orleans. Even then there were a few points where I thought to myself, “Welp, this is it. This is how I die.” Nevertheless I finally got here, and when I did I was starving having not eaten anything all day.

The good news is that the hotel where I am staying (the JW Marriot) is ridiculously nice and has been pampering me the entire trip. As it should be too, because this is also the most expensive hotel I’m staying at on this trip. Emphasis on expensive. I went to the hotel bar to grab a burger and two Old Fashioned’s after my long drive and my bill was $70. It may not just be this hotel though. I’m noticing that just about everything here in New Orleans is pretty dang expensive. But man! What they say about New Orleans cocktails is true. I don’t think I had ever truly tasted an Old Fashioned until last night. Everything about the drink was perfect, nectar-like: strong in alcohol, but balanced to the point that you didn’t even taste the alcohol. It tasted different from every Old Fashioned I had ever tasted before, as though this was the authentic version of the drink and everything else was some cheap knockoff. If you come here, just know that you will be spending an insane amount of money on just a few drinks, but every sip of those drinks will be worth it.

While sitting at the bar, I overheard the conversation of the two people sitting next to me. One of them was wearing a pair of wranglers, some cowboy boots, and the sort of button up pink shirt that cowboys would wear to the Red Bluff Round Up on Tough Enough to Wear Pink breast cancer awareness day. The other was wearing what looked like a very, very expensive suit. It looked like the guy dressed as a cowboy was actually giving life-advice to the guy in the suit, and the guy in the suit was listening so intently that I thought I would listen-in on the story.

I didn’t hear too much of their conversation, but from what I could tell, the guy dressed as a cowboy got to where he was half-on-luck and half-on-skill. He was an investor in the 1990’s and invested big on tech. Unlike everyone who lost their shirts in the 2000 crash, he got out early in 1999 and was very wealthy. He then took his money and split it between two homes, one in Texas and one in Irvine, California, and started a new business. I couldn’t figure out what the new business was exactly from the bits-and-pieces that I overheard, but it had something to do with international trade and China. Recently, he has shifted most of his business out of California and over to Texas. Towards the end of his conversation, he leaned close to the other man and whispered something. He then yelled out, “Can you believe that? I’m paying the guy $50,000 a month to avoid problems like that and he comes to me with that very problem!” He then slapped the bar and the two men went on joking and enjoying drinks as though taking a $50,000/month bath on a problem wasn’t a big deal.

The really crazy thing about the guy was that he appeared to have just come to New Orleans to clear out the hotel’s bar of bourbon. When I first ordered my Old Fashioned, he yelled over to me, “Hey, sorry, you’re probably not going to find good bourbon for that. I cleared them out of Basil Hayden two nights ago and Blanton’s last night. I’m working off their Angel’s Envy supply right now, but here, you can have some for your drink.” At that moment I noticed that he had an entire bottle of Angel’s Envy sitting in close proximity to him. The bartender came over, took the bottle, made my drink using it, and then sat the bottle back within close proximity to the man. I was impressed. It was definitely a “Dang, who is that guy?” moment for me, and one of those moments where I sort of wavered on my drive to get back to a simple life in a small town, instead wondering what life might be like for me if I really tried to “go big” like this guy. But no…looking out the window from my hotel room right now at the grimy city before me, I must confess, it’s the simple, country life that does it for me. I can’t wait to get back to it!

So those were the most eventful moments of yesterday. And then there’s today! This morning, I woke up with two goals on the agenda. First, New Orleans is famous for beignets, and so I had to go find me some of ‘dem beignets. Second, it turns out that my family actually has roots in New Orleans. My great-great grandparents (that would be my mom’s, mom’s, mom’s parents) moved to New Orleans shortly after immigrating here from Italy. They lived in a home in the historic French Quarters in the early-1900s. In fact, my great-grandmother was apparently born in that very home back in November 1909. My nonna had two clues as to the spot: the address was 724 DuMaine and it was located near a Cathedral named the St. Louis Cathedral.

First thing’s first, the beignets! There are many beignet spots in New Orleans. Cafe du Monde is probably the most famous, as it was the original spot for beignets. However, I chose Cafe Beignet Royal, which is a pretty highly rated spot. Wandering the wet streets, I found the spot and after fighting the crowds to the front of the line, I finally got to try authentic beignets for the first time. Sadly, I had to eat them outside in the rain because it was so busy inside that I could not find a table. They were still delicious though! First goal of the day: success!

With my tummy full of beignets, I next started work on the second goal of the day. It didn’t take me long to find the Cathedral, as it’s one of the most iconic spots in town, located right in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarters:

From there I plugged the address, 724 DuMaine, into Siri and let my iPhone guide me to the spot. Now before I go on, there’s something that I need to share. When people meet me, it’s usually not very long before I inform them that I am cursed. They usually think that I’m joking, but I’m not. In fact, when my ex and I started dating I told her that I was cursed and she thought it was the most ridiculous thing ever. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” she laughed, thinking me crazy. But, towards the end, she was in full agreement. Something unusually bad would happen, and she’d be like, “It’s the curse. You’re cursed.” In fact, the curse doesn’t seem to just impact me but several members of my family. It just seems to be most pronounced in me, for whatever reason.

So what is the curse? It’s hard to explain exactly, but the general symptoms include: freak bad weather and natural disasters occurring wherever I go (Notice all of the unusual cold, stormy weather following me about during my time in the South? Tampa even got below freezing! Mega droughts, wildfires, floods, wind storms, ‘snowiest year in decades;’ you name it, I’m usually in close proximity to it); institutions collapsing or having extremely unlucky situations as soon as I come on board; a general sapping and feeling of decay in all of my romantic relationships over the years that makes it tough to sustain a long-term connection; and general all around bad luck in my life, usually most pronounced around the time of the full moon. Yup, that’s the curse! It’s a thing.

Okay, so back to the day! It turns out that there is more history to 724 DuMaine than just my great-great grandparents living there and my great-grandmother being born there. Sometime after they moved away from the address, the place was purchased by this woman right here (who oddly looks like she could be a family member too, haha):

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Hoodoo Queen from Avoyelles Parish, who along with a man named Mr. Gandolfo, obtained the entire home at 724 DuMaine and transformed it into this:

Yes, 724 DuMaine, the very building my great-grandmother was born in, is now the voodoo museum for the City of New Orleans and an active site of voodoo practice and worship. The place is chuck full of historic voodoo artifacts, voodoo dolls, voodoo altars, and in its off-hours has voodoo practitioners casting all forms of juju, mojo, hexes, curses, etc. from its site. If all of that magic is not somehow rubbing off on the family that was born and raised in that place, then I don’t know what is. I think that I’ve found the source of the curse!

I don’t know much about magic and witchcraft, but I have a hunch that the full breaking of this silly curse won’t be possible by sprinkling some Holy Water on me. No, it won’t be broken until the dark arts are no longer being housed and practiced in the old family home on a daily basis. So, the best I can do for now is probably just learn to live with the curse, perhaps find a way to channel it towards good or diminish its impact. I’m not sure exactly how to do that yet, but maybe at some point during what remains on my travels through the south, I will find someone who knows. We’ll see. I guess I’ve learned another lesson on my travels though: sometimes you’ve got to be careful when you go hunting for history. You don’t know what you might find. In the meantime…New Orleans still beckons, and look, outside my window I see that snow flurries have just started to fall. How unusual for a place like this. It’s like I’m cursed or something.

BOO!

Cheers,

-Rob