Let's Catch Up

Let me get you from New Orleans to Pensacola Naval Air Station, where we arrived yesterday. We basically back-tracked from New Orleans to Biloxi - a very long day. Since we have already talked about that, I didn't take any photos (I knitted instead). We took a slightly different route from Biloxi to the Mobile area. Instead of going up Mobile Bay, we crossed the bay and went to Gulf Shores.The scenery is now looking quite a bit like home, except that there is lots of commercial barge traffic.

The day ended at a marina that featured Lulu's, a restaurant owned by Jimmy Buffett's sister Lucy. The whole complex is new and is a great place for families to come in warm weather. The whole place is set in deep white sand, with palm trees, volleyball nets and lots of lawn chairs. There is a shrimp sculpture next to volley ball court that is really cool. The Mountain of Youth is a "ropes" course that you can climb with a safety harness. It's not open right now because it's cold and the place is not crowded, but it would be fun to see kids climbing all over it!

Lulu's is the restaurant and it was a fun place to eat. I enjoyed the live music and Lulu's signature beer, Weird Sista Honey Ale. The windows all around the outside are big garage doors - they can all be opened when the weather is nice to let in the fresh air. We left the next morning headed for Pensacola.

We've been blessed with calm seas the last two days as we crossed some fairly big stretches of water. Some of the way was in canals and creeks. We are seeing lots of homes along the way and big hotels in the distance. One condo and marina complex had a ferris wheel! We also saw the homemade raft again that we first saw on the Tom Bigbee. Those folks had to be freezing! We crossed into Florida and started seeing bluer water, lots of porpoises and some nice sand dunes. The porpoises love our bow wake and even the side wakes. The cool thing here is that the water is so clear you can see them plainly underwater. I just love porpoises!

We arrived at the marina here at Pensacola Naval Air Station yesterday and will stay here for a few days. It's time to resupply and do some Christmas shopping. There is also a naval museum here, and the town of Pensacola. We will keep you posted and add updates as we head east across the panhandle of Florida.

Leaving New Orleans

Down the industrial canal

Don't know what this is, along the industrial canal

Coming up alongside a dredge

The pipes for the dredge, with a freeloader

This is starting to look like Savannah

And even marsh!

Coming into Lulu's

The Mountain of Youth

Love the shrimp

A ferris wheel at a marina down the canal

Coming up on the raft

We're in Florida now - and will be for a while!

Mom and a baby. You can see them well even under water

Getting close to Pensacola

There were four or five of them riding our side wake

There were five of them all trying to ride the bow wake

Why is the rum gone?

Most of you know that Steve likes rum. We kind of tied a Pirates of the Caribbean thing into that since Capt. Jack Sparrow is partial to rum. In one of the movies he asks "why is the rum gone?" and in another, after seeing the woman who once burned all the rum, he says, "hide the rum!".

It seemed appropriate that for Steve's birthday we would visit a rum distillery. Old New Orleans Rum distillery is 15 years old and offers tours. We arrived early and immediately wondered if the GPS was wrong. The surrounding neighborhood looked pretty bad. A cab drove up and let a couple out of the car. The cab hesitated before it left, and the people looked nervous. Two women got out of their car and walked over. The door did say Old New Orleans Rum. An employee opened a big overhead door and we could see barrels. Yep. We were in the right place. A policeman showed up and asked if there was any trouble. Apparently the alarm had gone off. He went inside to talk to the employee. Another policeman showed up and waited for the first one to come back out. They left and other patrons started showing up. We were allowed into the office/showroom.

It was actually pretty full by the time the tour started. We had a rum tea cocktail while we waited. It was a pretty interesting tour, taking us through all the various steps to making rum. At the end of the tour, there were samples of the various types of rum made by ONOR. We didn't eat a big breakfast before we left, so I skipped the samples.

From the tour, we went to find a late lunch. Chris looked up a place our Garden District tour guide had recommended and we were off to the French Quarter again. Turns out that what he found on his I-phone was the business office. Back to the car and off to find the correct place. We found it, but it didn't serve lunch and wouldn't open until 5:30. By then, we had another Savannah friend in tow. Colleen Willoughby is attending graduate school at Tulane and had just gotten back to town.

We dropped Rebecca, Chris and Colleen at a local snack bar so they could visit for a while. Steve and I went back to the boat to walk Ryder and then picked them up for dinner. We finally got to have our long-awaited meal at Ralph's on the Park. It was well worth waiting for! Ralph is Ralph Brennan. His family owns several well-known restaurants in New Orleans, featuring French and local cuisine. It was one of the best meals I've had on this trip - and that's saying something! I didn't take pictures (sorry) because it was a very nice place and I can't take pictures without a flash.

All good things come to an end, and our kids left at 4:30 the next morning for Atlanta. They arrived safely home and probably slept all day! We spent the next two days tinkering on the boat and waiting for the winds to be a little friendlier before we headed back to Biloxi.

This is what we saw when we pulled up.

This is the neighborhood.

They raised the overhead door - that's promising

It looks like a distillery...

OK - we're safe!

Now this is more like it!

These bottles show the progression of the rum.

Now it's a party!

The "good" rums are aged in barrels.

Rum comes from sugar cane

We got a chance to smell different stages of distillation

See the dark/light mark on the post behind this man? That is the water mark from the flooding. They had 8 ft of water in here.

The bottle to the left is the raw molasses. The middle one is distilled rum. The one on the right is aged rum.

This is their "research and development" department. They try new flavors out here - in fact, two new flavors will be coming out in about a year and a half.

They hand-bottle their rum.

Now for the sampling!

Back in the French Quarter. You can't eat at a business office!

This is the view from the real restaurant - Ralph's on the Park.