I think on a previous trip I observed that no stories about air travel are interesting. I suppose crashing on a deserted island in the middle of the South Pacific is the exception to this rule, but that is another story, and one, I hope, for someone else to tell.
It is also true that no trip from the airport to the center of a city, no matter where that city is in the world, is attractive. That is certainly true for the bleak trip from Louis Armstrong Airport to the downtown New Orleans. As we turned off Interstate 10 onto Elysian Fields Boulevard all I could think of was, “Well, Elysian Fields is hardly Champs Elysee, no matter what the Larouse dictionary may say.” Getting out of our cab in front of our small hotel, looking at the surrounding vacant lots, the cyclone fencing, the police cars parked on the corner I just thought to myself, we have made a terrible mistake.
A little background here. We decided to stay in the Fabourg Marginy, the new trendy bohemian section of New Orleans, just east of the French Quarter. Based on the reviews in Trip Advisor, we picked the Elysian Fields Inn. As I said, standing there on the street, I was sure this had been a dreadful decision.
But it was not. Once we were inside our bed and breakfast, I liked it right away. It was bright, it was clean, and the innkeeper was very friendly. We had a room on the main floor of this renovated New Orleans house. Like most homes in the city, the main floor was actually the second floor of the house.
Our big event for the evening was a staged reading of A Confederacy of Dunces. John had read this book when it had been posthumously published some 20 or 30 years ago.
