After a few weeks with this useless thing, I’m in love with it. It holds all of my sheet music (tabs… I can’t actually read music – yet), gives me quick access to rules for games I play, and is a nice time waster with all the games on it of course. Even my cats love it as there are apps with little mice they can chase around the screen. But most importantly, it’s become my sketchbook.
The concept of a digital sketchbook Has always seemed less than real to me. You can’t replace the feel of sketching on paper. But this thing is doing a good job of getting me over that hang up. Some of the sketching apps are incredibly powerful and for some reason I find myself reaching for the iPad more often than the moleskine lately. We’ll see how long that lasts, but for now it looks like the iPad has become a welcome tool in my arsenal.

We booked a room in the French Quarter at a guest house in called the Biscuit Palace . Yeah, it’s an odd name. It was built in 1820 by the founder of the Tulane University School of Law and the current proprietor has all the rooms decorated in a quirky manner. For instance, one of the rooms had an elaborate Asian style dragon mural painted on the wall with what looked like lightning streaking all over the walls in glow in the dark paint. It was a nice little place and we spent a good deal of time sitting on our balcony relaxing in the heat. So why is it called the Biscuit Palace? Best as I can tell, it’s because on one side of the building there’s a huge old advertisement declaring “Uneeda Biscuit”.

Let me get Bourbon Street out of the way. I guess this is why most people come to New Orleans. I’m not sure why. We spent very little time here. It’s like a dirty version of every tourist spot of every big city. It’s just a huge concentration of bars, restaurants, strip clubs and other generic tourist traps designed to screw you out of your money by offering you things you can find elsewhere for half the price and double the quality. And it smells. BAD. Most of the street reeks of rotting meat that’s been sitting around in pools of piss and beer that have been simmering in the hot sun all day. The rest of the New Orleans we saw is nothing like this and is actually great. Avoid Bourbon Street at all costs.

My favorite part of New Orleans is the architecture – at least in the French Quarter. Lot of old houses sitting on top of shops. It reminded me a lot of San Francisco except for all the balconies. They balconies are great. And the gaslamps. There are tons of places that are still running old gaslamps all over. Walking down the narrow streets at night with you path lit by the flickering lamp flames was beautiful.

We escaped the city one day to take a tour of a swamp. Yet more beautiful scenery. Trees covered in Spanish moss, alligators swimming past the boat, graveyards resting on the swamp’s edge. I need to go back and do that again at night some time.

The other journey we took outside of the French Quarter was over to the old Metairie cemetery. Rows and rows of tombs everywhere. The New Orleans cemeteries really do look like cities of the dead. As you’d expect, the older the tombs, the more beautiful they were. All of the modern ones just seemed to lack style. The older ones looked like little houses. The next trip I make out there will definitely include more cemeteries.

It was a great trip and I had tons of fun. Met a lot of great people and finally got to see a city I’ve been wanting to for years. I’ll definitely be going back in the future. Check out more pictures below!