Home again, home again! It’s been five days since we’ve completed the trip loop – Minneapolis to New Orleans to Minneapolis again – and I have to say, even though people warned us (“New Orleans in the summer?!”), NOLA was an amazingly rich experience. Even in the summer. We originally booked the trip because we were invited to speak about none other than the nerdy-awesome 🔥email marketing🔥 (I know – ooooh, ahhh) at an event called the Sustainable Seafood Blog Conference, which ended up being a completely awesome experience that taught us TONS TONS TONS about how to be responsible seafood consumers – something I’ve really wanted to be intentional about, but haven’t always known how to do. Plus it gave us the chance to connect with people doing really incredible things in the online + food world. I had no idea what to expect with this conference since it was so new, and it totally rocked. Look for the conference around this time again next year – location: Boston! As we often do when we travel for conferences, we decided to book ourselves a few extra days to explore the famed city of New Orleans. So while we did go initially for the conference, we also took a few days to just mosey around the French Quarter and hop on and off of tour buses. Read: eat beignets. Hot? Yes, very hot. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. We’re talking Philippines-type hot (the only type of hot I really know, if we’re being honest), where it’s super humid and sticky and you pull your sunglasses out of the bag and put them on your face only to find that you can’t see a thing because: FOGGED. People warned us about the heat (again – New Orleans in the summer?!) but both of us sort of enjoyed the steamy-ness for a few days. It’s a novelty to us Midwesterners. Obviously, ob-vi-ous-ly, we ate and we ate and we ate: beignets and oysters and fried green tomatoes, catfish and gumbo and barbecue shrimp, plus a few new-to-me things like lobster ceviche, shrimp remoulade, rabbit and sausage jambalaya, and crawfish étouffée (OH HAI FANCY). I documented all the food on Snapchat as I will now do for all my future trips because it was just way too fun to share and hear back from many of you on what you thought we should eat. It’s like I packed a few hundred of you into a suitcase and brought you along for a mass-eat-along. Only better, because you could stay in your pajamas. 💃 Luckeeeeee.
That being said, today’s post isn’t a list of restaurants or recommendations because we really only had four meals on our own, in the city, outside of the conference. Today’s post is just a collection of pictures from this really wacky, historic, beautiful, wild city. I split it into three parts. Part one: the conference – complete with a photography session by none other than Molly Yeh and Graham Blackall. Front row, edge of seat. 👓👓👓👓👓👓👓 Part two: the city – the eatings, drinkings, and sightings experienced through not one, not two, but THREE city tours. 🙈 Old souls? Is that what they call it? Part three: Cubs the Poet – a street performer with a really creative and unique set up who type-writer-ed a few really poems for us right in the middle of Royal Street. Which was just really cool and inspired a ten minute photo frenzy on my part, so even though it’s a little random and might not mean much to anyone else, I included a few of those photos at the end. WELCOME TO PICTURE LAND.
I don’t want to break the flow of pictures here, but I DO need you to know that Brad and Angelina own this secretive and charming old-world mansion in the French Quarter. Which is why I’m standing outside it looking like fan-girl fool. OBSESSED.
Got any insider tips or tidbits about visiting New Orleans? plz share! Because I never got to try a real shrimp po’boy and I feel like that might (DEFINITELY WILL) require a trip back.
