And beyond some more...

Trip Start Jan 25, 2008

Trip End Jan 25, 2009

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Where I stayed

Bannana Bungalow

(Los Angeles hotels)

Flag of United States San, California, United States
Sunday, March 9, 2008

hello to all. im now couple of weks behind on this so inot decided if it will be long or short you will just need to read on to find out. so anyway we left memphis at 6.50am on the trin to new orleans , on the 17th of FEB, where the NBA all star game was actually happening. we stayed in a very nice hostel called india house which we arrived at around 3pm. decided we would check out the town and watch the basketball somewhere but didn't think town would be anywhere nar as busy as it was(people where saying it was like a second mardi gras interms of how busy it was) we ended up watching some bands and missed a bit of the game but watched most of the game in an irish bar and also caug some of the rugby highlights from the weekend. after that we just walked around and the main street bourbon st. and just wanderd around not realising it would be quite so busy. anyway the next day we just decided to check out the city in the day and it as very hot. we seen a few street performers and jut wanderedaround the french quater which is really nice and funnily enough reminded me lot of france? at night a well they had a presidents ay party an had loads of fresh craw fish which id never trie before but it was nivce and i at loads(although they are really small) the following day we thought we would do one of the tours we seen advertised and went for the swamp tour. this was about 45mins outside of new orleans in the swamps which totally suround the city. on th way out the guy driving the bus was acting a bit like a tour guide and we seen a lot of the devastation which hurricane Katrina caused and i never realised how vast the area was that got affected.

A hippo on top of a building

i mean as i said we travelled outside the city for 45mins and we still seen houses that had been totally submerged by water( also we seen lots of houses with the makings on the side which indicatd the date ofthe search on the house and how many dead people were foun in the house which was a bit of an eye opener) but the tour was really cool. got to see loads of aligators, snakes and turtles. other stuff to but they were the coolest. also our tour guide who drove the boat was this old guy who was just craking jokes the whole time and telling stories which was good. i got burnt aswell though which wasn't good but luckily not too bad. at the end of the tour i got to hold an aligator aswell, just a small one but im sure it probably still could have done some damage. that night though i tried some aligator in a restraunt in town which was a little strange having been admiring them all day but very tasty....tasted like chicken, only kiding can't really descibe the taste but was good. new orleans had lots of good food actually, specially seafood , i pretty much ate sea food the whole time i was there. also i forgot to say that how surprised i was that you could tell there had been a hurricane there. in terms of the houses you could see that were ruined and all the homeless people, we actually had a sort of tent town just down the road from us hich we had to pass most days to get into th city and this was a bit strange to see all these people 2years on still living in a tent??

anyway we left the next day on to austin and had to get a train at 12pm to san antonio for our connecting train.

A less busy part of Bourbon St.

we got in to san antonio at about 3am and had to wait till 7am to get a train to austin for our hostel. (it was a long day) got to hostel at around 10am and it was really nice. sort of hung about most of the day and then i went out at night with a load of guys we met in the hostel(kev not feeling well). the next day we checked out austin during thday, very nice place bu not a lot to do but that was probably a good thing in terms of us saving money. went back to hostel and played a bit of football with the other guys (the hostel was in a very nice location aswell right on the lake and we got really hot weather the whole time there) went out again with everyone that night and as we got into town there was an Obama rally going on in town when we got there and we watched him doing his speech for a while and all he americans loving it and shouting and stuff, pretty good to see. then we went out after we had enough of all the cheese and whooping!! the next day was rugby day and we decided to head to the pub to watch the game and it kicked off at around 11am and spent the morning to late afternoon there.(it was the day of the scotland v ireland game) anyway t next day we got up to gt our next train St. lewis which left austin at 9.30am and we phoned the taxi at 8.45am but it didn't turn up until 9.20ish and we only got to the train as it was leaving which was lucky due to there being no room at the hostel that night but we got there for the conducter to shout...all aboard! we got it though.

An aligator

notice we didn't actually do that much in austin more of a night time place.

we eventually arrived in st. lewis at 8.30am with no where stay so phoned around and ended up staying in a pretty swanky hotel next to the station. they hd a free breafast asell so we made sure we ook advantage of that. i did anyway. to save money we just wandered into town and walked around, again a nice place but didn't seem too much to do. seen there main attraction which is called the gateway arch which is huge you can go up it but were trying to save cash so just looked at it then wandered around a bit more. then we took advantage of the microwave in the room and then just hung about the hotel. the next day we had a train to kansas booked and it left at 4pm. we were due to catch a conncting train in kansas onto flagstaff but our first train was delayed so we missed our train but amtrak paid for our hotel for the night and gave us 35 dollers each so we didn't really spend much. in the morning we took a wander around and yet again it was a very nice city but not much to do so we ended up heading out to this mall place were we walked around to kill some time until our train which wasn't till 11pm at night, we seen a couple of movies as well to kill more time ("vantag point" and "no country for old men" both pretty good, old country very good though) anyway we got our train that night an went onto flagstaff.

anyway wrote a lot and need a break so will carry on the rest another time. added a few photos to last entry and will try and add some to this one at somepoint, speak soon px