Ants on the Melon
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I returned to San Antonio today after spending the last 5 days in New Orleans. A few months ago Mandi called me and said that she was planning to give Tate tickets to Jazz Fest for Valentine’s day, and she wanted to know if we would be interested in meeting up with them there. I am always looking for an excuse to go to New Orleans, so when Mandi told me they were going to be there for Jazz Fest, I bought the tickets right on the spot. Tate had no idea that we were coming, so while he was grabbing their luggage, Mandi called me where I was waiting in the rental car across the street from the airport. She told him that their hotel shuttle would be there in 5 minutes, but instead we picked them up!

We spent a lot of time hanging out and eating at restaurants throughout the city, it was a lot of fun. Mandi booked a suite a the Prytania Park Hotel, which turned out to be really nice. Chad let us stay with him on Thursday night, and we stayed at Prytania Park with Tate and Mandi on Friday and Saturday nights.

James joined Tate and me on Friday for JazzFest while the girls shopped on Magazine street. I had some great Jambalaya for lunch that day, and then I discovered fried plantain, that stuff is great! Later that night we had dinner at Figaro’s Pizzeria, a nice little Italian restaurant that I used to eat at every Sunday when I lived in New Orleans.

Ken flew in on Saturday from Oklahoma for his first visit to the Big Easy. After picking him up from the airport we all caught the Dave Matthews Band show at Jazz Fest. It had been raining that morning, so the venue was a little messy, but not bad enough to deter the DMB fans. After the shows we drove back down Carrollton avenue and met up with Chad for dinner. It was really great having that many friends from all over the place at dinner, it’s not too often that stuff like that happens.

Chris had been telling me about this band Mofro, and I was excited to see that they were playing at The Maple Leaf, a bar close to where I used to live. Tate, Ken and I showed up at 11:00, when Mofro was supposed to go on, we paid our $20 covers (a bit expensive, but i really wanted to see this band), and go inside. There was a band play who obviously wasn’t Mofro, but I figured they would be finishing up soon so we just stood there and tried to ignore the idiot fratboys who were dancing like idiots in front of us. The band finally finished up, and I said something to Tate about Mofro when the fratboy in front of us turns around and informs me that they aren’t going to be going on stage until 1:00am. This was a serious bummer, as we were all dead tired and probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. So, after paying $20 to see 5 minutes of drunken college idiots dance to some local band, we decided to ditch the effort and call it a night. BOOOO…

The weather on Sunday was much better, but the bad news was that we had to take Tate and Mandi to the airport after lunch. It really sucks when good times have to end, but so it goes…. After dropping them off at the airport, Ken, Alana and I rode over the Maple Street P.J.’s Coffee to get a snack and check email. Once we were sure that the Internet was still moving along, we got back in the car and headed to our third day of Jazz Fest. We met up with Justin and Traber at the Trey Anastasio show, which was really good. I tried to get some more of that tasty fried plantain, but the lines were too long, sigh. We made a couple stops at the Blues and Gospel tents before finally calling it quits.

After the show we drove over to Covington to have dinner with the Taurman’s. It had been a really long time since I had seen my third family, and there was no way I could go all the way to New Orleans and not make a trip over there. As usual they had this amazing dinner for us, including my favorite artichokes. When we finished eating dinner we all went out to the famed back porch and talked for a while, consuming pound cake and coffee like it was going out of style. It was really great seeing them, and there is no way that I can go another year and a half without making another trip out there.

Earlier in the day we decided with Ken to get a double room at the Prytania Park Hotel for Sunday night. So after leaving the Taurman’s we made it back across the lake to the hotel by about 10:30. Ken had never seen the French Quarter, so I took him down there for the standard tour: Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, Cafe du Monde, etc. And that was pretty much the end of the trip. Alana and I woke up extremely early today to catch our flight back to Texas, and I should have gone to sleep hours ago.

I can’t wait for Jazz Fest 2006.