New Orleans, Possible Hurricane’s and Greyhound again
The Hurricane and Greyhound stories are interwoven so I’ll start with them.
The Greyhound from Austin to New Orleans was going swimmingly. I had Fred the nicest bus driver ever (and I told him so at the end of the Austin-Houston leg) who’s bus had tv’s and we all rode merrily along watching Kung-Fu Hustle 2. Then a hurricane warning left me stranded in Houston at 1am. I decided to find a room and ended up in a rather damp smelly motel room for the night. That was fine as one of my wants for this trip was to spend the night in a dingy roadside motel for the evening.
The Hurricane turned out to be only a tropical storm so the following morning the bus just drove on through it. It was kinda cool, the traffic lights were all swinging on the wires like it happens on the news.
So got to New Orleans on Tueaday 5th August and it was great with tons of live music. I watched a local 12 piece brass band playing jazz/dixie/funk on the first night and they were amazing. I bought a couple of their cd’s they were that good. I watched a lot of good music in my four days in New Orleans and on the last day I was in this really cool record store called Peaches records buying a cd of the brass band. I had been playing my guitar in a park in the french quarter so I had it on my back when I was in the store and after a while of chatting to the owner she asked me if I would come and play in the store. This was at 6pm on Friday the and I was booked on the bus to get me to Memphis at 8.15am the following morning. I was pretty disappointed but never mind.
In the middle of all this music I hit the Honey Island Swamp for some alligator spotting. It was great. I got tons of photo’s so I’ll let them do the talking but there was one really amazing fact the guide told us. He said that the sex of alligator hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the eggs in the first 21 days of incubation, below 86 degrees F will produce all females, above 93 degrees F will produce all males. He also said that the hurricane wiped out about 30% of the population of alligators in the Honey Island swamp and that since then all of the hatchlings have been female. This is because the more females that mature the quicker the population can recover as one male can impregnate many females in season. How clever!
Check out the photos
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2202458&l=e3021&id=61006708