After a well slept night in Natchez we decided to look for a place to change the oil for our car. It had been complaining about it for couple of days, and we thought maybe better to take care of it than having it completely signing off somewhere in Death Valley. We called the car rental, and they said we could go to any Goodyear or Firestone repair shop and they'd take care of it.
Here we are, on the crossing of Main street looking for the repair shop. And it was not on Locust Alley. It mainly looked like all the things we'd find there would be the locusts themselves.
We tried, we really tried. After the fourth place that turned out to be some abandonded "Jack's repair shop" that had gone out of business years ago we decided to give up. We will try again in Texas.
In the mean time, we focused on tornado/storm wathing. During yesterday's driving we already hit quite severe winds every now and then. The scenery was just like from the movie "Twister" and I was just waiting for some car full or antennas showing up and chasing tornadoes. Fortunately (?) we saw none, but the wind was sometimes pretty heavy blowing up sand in the air so that we could not see anything. R kept convincing the scared part of the travel group that "it is nothing" while A kept on thinking of strategies what to do if we would see a tornado in the horizon.
On Monday morning breakfast the Weather Channel gave some interesting new insight reporting that we had been basically driving through the storm area yesterday while continuing exactly to the direction of the tornado birthplace.
Luckily we only had 130 miles to cover to New Orleans. On our way we got regular rains which were so hard that it was impossible to see anything. Also the temperature could go down from 30 to 20 Celsius within minutes. Very interesting travel!
We ended up to NO without problems. After some googling we found a nice hotel in Garden District which we had booked. Navigator guided us there without problems, and the hotel is a really beautiful old house with big rooms. We got the advice to stay either in Garden District or French Quarters, so we decided to take a street car to the French Quarters.
The French quarters was a really beautiful place! Full of old houses with balconies overflowing of plants and flowers, with all kinds of boutiques and sea food restaurants stretching over streets that were miles long. There were also really cool art stores, and while walking the famous Bourbon street R got an offer of a lifetime: "There's no romance like New Orleans lapdance", but he decided to skip it :-)
At some point the thunderstorms began and we went to a music club to keep the rain. After it quieted down a bit we took the street car back to our hotel. On the way we stopped to a local pub (Blind Pelican) for some dinner, and it was really good. They also had a really comprehensive beer menu on the tap, and with some cider and 'Arrogant Bastard' we finished off the evening.
When getting back to the hotel the Weather Channel told us that the city of New Orleans is flooding. Let's hope our car still starts tomorrow! :)
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