Now that my computer and LiveJournal are allowing it, let's head back to Louisiana for another day of photos! Oh, and thanks to astein142   for pointing out that my photos would contain a record of the time they were taken. My software didn't keep it exactly where you suggested it might be, but it was no problem to find it once I knew to look.

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I had arrived in Baton Rouge only the night before, so this was the first full day of the trip. Much of it had to be spent in an NFPW board meeting. But we also had some fun.

 
2:20 p.m. It was threatening rain, but I wanted to see the Mississippi River in daylight (such as it was) before our afternoon meeting started. This was taken from the levee adjacent to the hotel. The bridge is the same one that was lit up in my photos from the night before. The riverboat is for gambling; you could reach it from my hotel without ever going outside, by walking through the atrium and then into the attached buildings and along the enclosed pier. No, I didn't gamble. Time was short, and I really dislike gambling. Besides the financial risk, I mostly just find it boring.

 
2:21 p.m. This was taken from the same spot on top of the grassy levee, but facing away from the river. That highrise hotel with the red writing at the top, the Sheraton, was where I was staying. As soon as I finished taking these pictures, the rain began, just in time for me to be heading inside for our 2:30 meeting.

 
6:23 p.m. Our board meeting over for the day, we set out to walk a few blocks toward the Louisiana State Museum, where a reception was planned for us. We lucked out, again, with the rain. It ended around the same time that our meeting did, and started again only after we were safely inside at the museum. Then it stopped again before our trip home later that evening. By the way, the tall building in the distance is the State Capitol, built by Huey P. Long.

 
6:26 p.m. We arrive at this wonderful museum for our reception. The reception was much more elaborate and bountiful than the light appetizers we had expected, and included wine. I don't think any of us wanted dinner afterward. The best thing about it was that the museum was closed to other visitors, so we had the whole place to ourselves to explore the exhibits.

 
6:29 p.m. This hanging sculpture dangled over our heads in the lobby. Very cool.

 
7:10 p.m. Time to explore the exhibits, beginning with this large interactive map to orient us. Louisiana is outlined in lights here. My favorite phase was when the whole Mississippi watershed was lit up in different colors, but I couldn't seem to capture those lights in a photo.

 
7:25 Louis Armstrong, Mississippi legend and a personal favorite of mine. This portrait took up a whole wall.

 
8:00 p.m. Wonderfully tacky postcard on steroids. Accompanied by wonderfully tacky lobster on steroids. That's a real highway guardrail, to give you an idea of the scale here.

 
8:19 p.m. This dragon was part of a Mardi Gras float. And you know how I feel about dragons.

 
8:51 p.m. We arrive back at the hotel by trolley. Time to hit the bar! (And then my room, because Battlestar Galactica is on.) See you tomorrow!
 

Did you hear about this one? Just when you thought the airlines couldn't treat their customers any worse, JetBlue has outdone them all. Here's an article....

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Man sues Jetblue for making him sit on toilet during flight
by Grant Martin
May 13th 2008

Think that your seat on the airplane is uncomfortable? It could be worse: you could have been Gokhan Mutlu, a New York man who just filed a lawsuit against Jetblue for making him sit on a toilet for more than three hours of his flight.

Apparently, Mutlu, who was flying on a buddy pass ticket (a free fare), was the last person to get a seat on his recent journey. A flight attendant on a non-revenue ticket was also on the aircraft, but she gave up her real seat to sit in the jumpseat during the flight so that everyone could fit.

But when she got uncomfortable, the pilot came back and asked Mutlu to relinquish his seat, telling him literally to "go hang out" and directing him to the toilet. When he objected, court papers say that the pilot apparently said that "he was the pilot, that this was his plane, under his command [and] that [Mutlu] should be grateful for being on board".

After nearly three hours in the lavatory, a flight attendant returned to tell Mutlu that he could return to his seat, but at that point, my wager is that he was pretty ticked off. The lawsuit was filed for over two million dollars. Jetblue should be glad that he didn't sue for more.

I hadn't planned to, but I skipped a few days. Sorry about that. It was a rough weekend. My husband was sick, it rained buckets, my basement flooded, and my office ceiling leaked. Happy, Happy Mother's Day.

But I do have more pictures of my trip to Louisiana. These are from Day Two, which was Friday, May 2. Previously on "A Week in the Bayou," Cathy flew into Gulfport, Mississippi (cheaper fares), rented a car, and drove to Baton Rouge for a board meeting of the National Federation of Press Women. May 2 was the first day of the board meeting, to which I did not carry my camera. But we had an outing later in the day....

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Well, for some reason LiveJournal is not allowing me to insert photos right now. I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm going to take a break and come back later to try to post these shots.

***

I give up. Comcast keeps kicking me offline, my signal strength is very low even when I'm online, and I have to assume that has something to do with why I can't seem to post photos tonight. I'll try again tomorrow.

The next week or so of posts will be inspired by the "Week in the Life..." rules that I used last month for chronicling a week of my life in photographs. But I'm not going to follow the rules exactly this time. For one thing, I'm posting photos from LAST week (when I had no computer access). And instead of including only the exact time and a title for each picture, with nothing else, I will not give times at all, since I have no way of remembering the exact minute each photo was taken. And I'll probably include some travelogue, and not just a title. But it does seem like a good basic format for telling you a little about my trip to Louisiana last week.

The user pic at the top of the page, by the way, is a shot of me holding a LIVE baby alligator (as opposed to the usual one of me in a similar position, holding a toy dragon. This one was, of course, taken a few days ago in a Louisiana swamp.

So, here's a slice of my week in the Deep South. Today I'll show you some photos from the first day of my trip, which was May 1.

Oh, wow. New Orleans was fabulous in every way. I'm told that people visiting New Orleans for the first time either love it or hate it. I'm definitely in the first group. I have tons of great pictures, some of which I hope to post soon. And various NOLA adventures to recount. Unfortunately, right now I have a six-year-old in the next room who wants his mommy to watch TV with him, so details will have to wait until later.

I almost forgot: the meeting in Baton Rouge was good, too. I saw a lot of old friends, heard a lot of good ideas for NFPW (National Federation of Press Women), and attended a fun street festival.

All in all, a great trip. More later....

I'm not sure I'll have time to post in the morning, so I thought I'd say bye now. Bye! I'm leaving for Louisiana tomorrow and will be gone for six days. My husband and son will be holding down the fort here. I still do not own a laptop, so I may or may not be able to check my e-mail or post any entries while I'm gone, depending on hotel internet access. If not, I'll see y'all online next week!

Now, I've got to finish packing....

I'm  traveling in two days to attend an NFPW board meeting, and I'm already fed up with airlines. I booked my flights weeks ago on Delta's website and only afterward learned that they were Delta flights "operated by Northwest." That didn't bode well; I've had problems every time I've ever flown Northwest. But I assumed the problems would not start until I actually arrived at the airport. 

Today I received a confirmation/reminder e-mail from Delta. I was surprised to see that the confirmation listed my seats as "not assigned." I really, really prefer aisle seats, so I always reserve early. In fact, I reserved assigned seats when I booked, but now my seat reservations were gone. So I clicked on the provided link, but it did not take me to the promised place to reserve seats. I e-mailed Delta and received one of those form-letter e-mails that discuss vaguely the same topic as your question, but without actually answering it. I e-mailed back again and finally received an e-mail saying I can't reserve my seats through Delta; I have to reserve them by telephone through Northwest Airlines. I called NWA and hopelessly paralyzed its endless voice-mail menu. I later learned this was because my Delta confirmation number confused it. But nobody had given me an NWA confirmation number. I finally spoke with a real person, who said all seats were booked, except for one seat left, a middle seat, on the final leg of my return flight. She could reserve that one for me, but it would cost me $15, because it was a Delta flight and I should be reserving my seats through Delta, the same Delta that insisted I had to reserve seats through NWA. She told me I could do it online at the NWA website for free, if she gave me a NWA confirmation number. Of course, that would only work, she said, if there were actually seats available.

Armed with my new confirmation number, I went on the website to find that one leg of my flight had only one available seat (a window seat) and another leg had one seat (a middle seat). The other two legs had no available seats. That's because large numbers of Northwest seats are now classified as "premium" seats that cost extra, including bulkhead seats, exit row seats, seats near the front of coach, and many other random aisle seats. I had heard Northwest was charging extra for premium seats, but I haven't flown Northwest in years and didn't realize what a high percentage of coach seats fall into that category. I booked the two available seats. I'll have to get my other assignments at the airport.

Airline and airport hassles are the reason I drive on all but the very longest trips. If Baton Rouge weren't 17 hours from here, you can be sure I'd be loading up my car tomorrow instead of sticking 3-oz. bottles into a quart-size Ziplock bag. As it is, I'm starting to fantasize about doing this as a long road trip. But no, I already bought the tickets.

So I leave on Thursday. If anyone has suggestions for must-see sights in Baton Rouge or New Orleans, I'd love to hear about them!







 

My book about Dragons has won an award. I recently attended the spring conference and awards luncheon of Virginia Press Women and received the First Place award for Children's Nonfiction books. The first-place statewide winner in each category is automatically entered in the national communications contest of the National Federation of Press Women. NFPW will announce national contest winners at its conference in September in Idaho.

 

After a long day of driving, we got back from our trip to New England on Saturday night. We had a great time! It was funny to see lots of snow there, though, with spring fully sprung here at home. Maybe I'll post some pictures after I figure out how to download them from the camera. More on the trip later.

In the meantime, I've come home to more than 600 e-mail messages(!) so bear with me as I work my way through them. Oh, and if you left a voice mail message on my phone last week, you might want to call again. Apparently we had a brief power outage while we were gone that obliterated some of the messages on the machine.

The computer is doing better now; in fact, I'm actually online via the broadband connection rather than the old dial-up one, which is a huge improvement. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Today we're leaving for our annual Birthday Weekend Trip, a short family vacation we take every year around my son's birthday (he turned 6 on Wednesday). He asked to go to a state he's never been to before. There's only one left that is close enough for an easy weekend trip, so we're off to North Carolina this afternoon. We're going to The Outer Banks, which will probably be too cold this time of year. But the hotel has an indoor pool, and I love being near the ocean in the winter -- especially when we can see it through the window if the weather outside is daunting. We're staying at Kitty Hawk and will visit the Wright Brothers Memorial. And there's an Aquarium on Roanoke Island, not far from there. And there are plenty of bridges to cross, which my little Cutie Pie always enjoys. (Trains are another passion of his, but we decided to hold off on another train-related trip until warmer weather.) We'll be back Monday.

Happy Weekend!

I'm back now from four back-to-back out-of-town trips since mid-September, which is why I haven't written regularly. I really do need to buy a laptop so I can write from the road.

The most important of my recent trips was to Richmond for the National Federation of Press Women conference. It was a great conference in many ways, but the highlight of the week was the "Bold Women" program, in honor of NFPW's anniversary. We had a narration that covered important world events, recounted milestones in women's history, and traced the history of NFPW. For each time period, one or two of us appeared in period costume and walked out on a runway, like a fashion show. I was 1880-1900, and several spectators told me I was the hit of the evening. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd found a costume shop in Frederick with a great selection of Victorian costumes for rent. We even had an amazing hairdresser backstage who did everyone's hair in period styles. That's me circa 1890 in the photo that accompanies this entry. It really was a blast!

 

My friend Lawrence has asked me to explain what Chincoteague is. So, for those of you who are not Virginians and/or survived deprived childhoods that did not include reading the classic kids' book, Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry, here is the scoop:

Chincoteague is an island off the eastern side of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, just south of the Maryland line. It's a great little town in its own right. During the summer there are a lot of tourists, but it's not nearly as commercial as the big Eastern Shore beach towns, probably because it doesn't actually have its own beach. In the summer, it's still a fun vacation spot. Off-season, it's simply wonderful. It's a nice, relaxing fishing town where real people live and work, but it also has fun little shops that are probably kept in business by the tourists. And some great seafood restaurants -- nothing fancy, just great fresh local seafood, including flounder, crab, and oysters.

But the thing Chincoteague is really known for is wild ponies.