It’s been over a month since we got home from our April trip across Texas to New Orleans and back. As noted in our previous post, that adventure ended abruptly when Mike came down with his first real fever since childhood and Maureen had to drive 10 straight hours from Dallas back to Santa Fe. Thanks to everyone who saw that post and reached out to express their concern about… What? Nobody asked how I was doing or even seemed to notice? Nice. Real nice, people.

Anyway, I survived a week of whatever mystery illness afflicted me (not that any of you care) and I’m finally getting around to finishing a post about Louisiana and New Orleans that I’d started before getting sick. So let’s step into the Wayback Machine and set the dials to late April…

Louisiana has a lot of nicknames: The Bayou State. The Pelican State. The Creole State. Sportsman’s Paradise. (OK, so the only person who actually uses that last one is whoever designs the license plates.) The glut of names reflects the wide range of things to see and do here in The Boot, as well as the fascinating history and geography of this area.

Our original itinerary had us spending four nights in the Sugar Cane State (three in New Orleans), but we quickly decided we wanted more time in The Mardi Gras State (see, there are two more) and juggled our schedule to add another day. Maureen had been to the Big Easy before, but I hadn’t, so there was a lot to discover while we were here in the Cajun State.

Click through the following photo gallery to learn more about what we learned about the so-called Child of the Mississippi.