I have my reports! RT was just too mad for me to do a daily blog, and at the end of every day I was wiped, so I made notes, so here they are.

First, New Orleans.

Wow, what a place! I arrived a week early with my friend and colleague, author Cait Miller, so we could enjoy the city without trying to cram in quick visits to places. It was well worth it. We stayed at the Hotel Provincial, which is an old New Orleans residence that served as a hospital in the Civil War, and part of it is haunted. We didn’t stay in the haunted part. It was a great base for exploring the city. We enjoyed our stay very much.

Shopping – boutiques abound. If you shop around you can get things like carnival masks at very varying prices, so if you can stand it, it’s worth having a preliminary hunt around. You could spend a week in the shops and still not get around to them all. The French Market is a craft market, and has some great stalls.

A lot of the jewelry in these places is made in China, but there are also a lot of craftspeople who work in New Orleans.

The tours – don’t miss the swamp tours. We went on two – one run by Cajun Encounters which was awesome and very informative. On that tour I learned that Cajuns have a wonderful sense of humor and I have to write a book with a Cajun hero.

Then we went on one on an airboat with Captain Lou. This was with five other RT attendees, and we had the greatest time. That was a company called Airboat Adventures. Captain Lou soon got our measure and he was as friendly and as “adult” as we liked, giving us a fantastic tour.

We went on the plantation tour of Laura and Oak Alley and they were great. A good idea to put them together, as they were very different in approach, layout, and ethic. Laura was a Creole plantation, very work-centric, and Oak Alley was more of a home with gracious furniture.

The ghost tour and the Strange but True tour – they were walking tours of New Orleans. Our host, the magnificent Jeffrey, is a New Orleans native and told us some fascinating things about the city. Friendly and knowledgeable, he even offered to give us a ghost tour in the pouring rain, but gave us a rain check, although he took us to a bar and told us some chilling stories about the city. I was sad that I couldn’t take advantage of the rain check, although Cait did!

I want to go back. I didn’t see nearly enough. The only thing I was mildly disappointed with was the food. It’s heavy and a bit on the greasy side, so not my thing, but you might love it. The beignets were good, though.