Our hotel offered a free breakfast – it was rudimentary – coffee, juice, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, bacon and sausage with toast. We ate breakfast here throughout our stay – free breakfast meant we could splurge on places like Tableau. One of the pluses about being in New Orleans on Thanksgiving was our ability to walk around the French quarter and take photos of all the buildings, relatively free of panhandlers and bar touts. I suspect there are less of them most mornings, but it was quieter than I expected to find it. We almost had the streets to ourselves as we weaved through the suburban areas around Bourbon Street, taking photos of Christmas wreaths and stopping by a neighbourhood grocer. We avoided Bourbon St as far as possible as quite a portion of it was blocked off for construction.

While I imagine Bourbon St is probably fairly busy all year round, February and March when Mardi Gras is held is sure to be the peak. America doesn’t on the surface seem to be somewhere that protects its history and heritage, but here the sense of history and recognition of the economic benefits heritage protection brings are clear. And flying over the city of New Orleans that is obvious. Almost the whole French quarter, built two high, has been preserved, including the balconies on the buildings. An aesthetic we largely destroyed in Australia, bar a few pubs in country towns. And here, the heritage is largely a catalyst for even the ramshackle of these old buildings to have plants hanging from balconies as originally designed, or for old weatherboard town houses to have freshly painted front doors atop their concrete stoops.

For a change of scenery, we walked to the edge of the French Quarter and bought a ticket for the Charles St Trolley car. Trolley cars are essentially trams and this is one of the oldest in the US. We are fans of all types of trains and trams (in case that wasn’t already obvious) so catching our first tram in the US was an experience we enjoyed. But where it dropped us was even more spectacular. The Garden area is lined with what you imagine were once the type of Southern mansions you see in movies about the south. Immaculately preserved against the trees and gardens that are missing in the French Quarter – even the tram track ran through a grass median strip – this was a much calmer experience of New Orleans. We wandered along each side of Charles St through rows of old weatherboard mansion, every so often dotted with a modern building that had replaced an unsalvageable relic, including one that had been turned into a three dimensional green wall, allowing it to largely meld into the garden landscape. We looked around for somewhere to get a snack to tide us over until our (early) thanksgiving dinner. It was just sit down restaurants which wasn’t what we were looking for. What we did find though (although it was closed) was a restaurant that was originally the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. It had been removed from the tower and transported to New Orleans and was set up here as a restaurant. We wandered for a bit longer and then caught the Charles St cable car to our dinner destination – Luke’s. [Yellow – Coldplay – I am not the world’s biggest Coldplay fan but Yellow is just one of those perfect songs. It captures a feeling. In this case the feeling of summer. It just screams the end of a sunny day at a festival.]

It turned out that Luke’s was actually an Oyster Bar and steakhouse (which may have been why the concierge at our hotel looked a bit sceptical when we said we had booked into Luke’s for Thanksgiving dinner). It did have a Thanksgiving menu – I had Turducken (which was delicious but a bit too much meat for me). It came with awesome gravy and I chose some traditional sides -. It came with awesome gravy and I chose some traditional sides – baked yams, sweet potatoes and green beans. Dan shied away from the Thanksgiving menu, opting for a steak instead. We also had dessert – Dan predictably chose the cream Brule and I chose apple pie (which was sweeter than I expected). I had been hoping for either pumpkin or pecan pie but alas these didn’t feature on the menu.

After dinner we did the traditional American thing and went back to our hotel room to lapse into a food coma while watching the Football on TV (Dan watched the football. I just did the food coma thing.) I didn’t really understand how the football worked (nor did I have the patience to learn). After a couple of hours, we decided to head out and see if we could find some jazz. We headed for Frenchman St institution The Spotted Cat Jazz Club and experienced their local Thanksgiving tradition.

Each year they put on a community Pot Luck dinner. Everyone is welcome – they ask those who can to bring a plate but invite everyone to share in the bounty. Still full from dinner and feeling guilty because we didn’t contribute, we didn’t eat but did grab a beer and a spot to listen to the house band – Hot Cats. The Spotted Cat has a one drink per set rule but doesn’t charge a cover. It would be pretty hard to drink much more than that because unless you are sitting at the bar it would take a set to get to it. Performers, in true New Orleans style, shake a can for tips as that is how they get paid. The band, essentially a rag tag group of musicians who all read sheet music, played a rousing set of New Orleans jazz. Full of brass, punctuated by solos and the sublime vocals of a French Chanteuse (who just happened to be the wife of the band leader). It was clear this was a walk in the park for most of them and they had come together for the show to earn some cash to fund their own endeavours but that didn’t make them any less infectious or enthralling. They were what I expected a jazz band to be after watching Treme – the trombone player turned up on a bike in a suit (probably straight from a more formal gig) just moments before they started. It was a great way to end our day and so we could let some of those lined up outside come in (and because we were tired) we wandered back to our hotel to get some sleep.

US states – 5, t-shirts – 7, fridge magnets – 6