2014 New Orleans Bike to Work Day!!

Two pedals will set you free.

April 9, 2014 is Bike to Work Day in New Orleans.  Two pedals will set you free.

As recent visitors to our street know, Esplanade Avenue is being repaved.  Two of the current four lanes of automobile traffic will be replaced by two lanes for cars and two lanes for bicycles.  Our street is about to get a little bit nicer, if you can imagine that.

La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast is serving as a hub during Bike to Work Day.  We'll be out front in the morning with coffee, maps and Bike Easy surveys.  We'll be out front until the coffee runs out.  If you want to relax in the middle of your morning commute, sit in our garden for a spell on New Orleans Bike to Work Day.

Many of our guests borrow our bicycles when they stay with us.  

Our fleet of cruisers

"It's the best way to see the city," they say, afterward.  We think so, too.  That's why we offer the option without charge.  You should see as much of New Orleans as you can.

There are currently 50 miles of dedicated bike lanes in New Orleans, with another 20 planned or under construction.  Esplanade Avenue is about three miles long.  You'll notice more on foot, but you see more on a bicycle.  It's the best way to see the most of the city.

Even if you are on a street without a bike lane, New Orleans is remarkably flat.  You won't strain your lungs or your legs unless you are spinning fast.  You wouldn't know it, but Esplanade Avenue runs on top of Esplanade Ridge.  It is imperceptibly higher than the streets surrounding it.  That's the way hills work in New Orleans; like obstacles, you don't notice them.  Nothing is steep.

If you are in the neighborhood on Bike To Work Day, feel free to stop by, even if you don't have a reservation.

2216 Esplanade Avenue

It's the orange house with the blue shutters.  You can't miss it.  For other hub locations: there's a map at this link.

A votre sante,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.

A Difference Between Housekeeper and Innkeeper

Tammie, the housekeeper

"I read your blog," Tammie, the housekeeper, told me the other morning.  "Why do you always have to refer to me as the housekeeper?" she asked.  "I am more than a housekeeper, you know?"

She is also a mother, a grandmother, and a licensed dental hygienist.  She performs all her roles equally well.  "You and Frau Schmitt make beds and dust and mop, too.  Why do I have to be singled out as the housekeeper?"

I answered that she is La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast's housekeeper, and she should be recognized as such.  "People don't see you as much as they see us," I answered.  "What you do is behind the scenes when the house is empty.  Why should we, the innkeepers, get all the credit?"

"Let's ask Frau Schmitt what she thinks," Tammie said.  "She's usually right about these things."

We asked Frau Schmitt, who thought about it awhile.  "He's right this time," Frau Schmitt told Tammie, the housekeeper, ruefully.  "An innkeeper isn't a housekeeper.  We couldn't do it without you.  People should know that."

With the matter judiciously settled, I asked Tammie, the housekeeper, if she had seen where I had left my glasses.  "They're on the desk in Les Saintes Suite, Mr. Innkeeper," she told me.

The desk in Les Saintes Suite

Tammie, the housekeeper, was right.

A votre sante,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.

Smoking in New Orleans

Everything is glamorous in New Orleans

People from elsewhere are often surprised that smoking is still common in New Orleans, and it's not just the coronas rolled at the New Orleans Cigar Factory.  Smoking is still allowed in bars.

It takes some getting used to.  After their first night out, many of our guests express their surprise.  "We outlawed that years ago!" they say.  New Orleans is a haven for people trying to escape restrictions.  Live and let live is written into the municipal code.

Before they went out on their first night, the couple from Brooklyn who stayed with us recently asked about smoking in New Orleans.  They wrinkled their noses when we told them they were probably going to be exposed to secondhand smoke.

No smoking in this dining room    

The next morning, over breakfast, they were more enthusiastic.  "I haven't come home smelling like a stale ashtray in years," Ivan said.  "I smelled my hair when I woke up and I felt like I was in college again!" Nadia piped up, cheerfully.  

New Orleans makes people feel young.

Some people say New Orleans is behind the times.  Others say it is a world of its own.  The city and its people play the game of life by different rules, that's all.  Laissez les bon temps rouler is not just a phrase to print on a tee shirt.  It is a motto for setting priorities.

A New Orleans bed and breakfast inn

Smoking is neither encouraged nor discouraged at La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.  It is, however, limited to outdoors.  The furniture on the private balconies is equipped with ashtrays, but if you are going to smoke on the balcony, close all windows and doors.  We don't want to charge you for deodorizing the suite, which is more work than you think if you have an asthmatic staying next week.

A La France Suite view of the gardens

You are always welcome to enjoy smoking tobacco in the gardens in back.  It's beautiful there.  With the tinkling fountain and the breeze rustling the leaves of the palm, pecan and fig trees, it's not just a smoker's paradise.  A recent guest from Des Moines spent a morning on her needlepoint in the garden.  I asked why she wasn't out exploring the city.  "It's nice to sit in the sun, here," she told me.

If you have a hankering for tobacciana while you're indoors, you can always study the exhibits in our cigar box museum during breakfast.  Your host will be happy to discuss the collection.

A view of the cigar box museum

A votre sante.

La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.

Weekdays in New Orleans

The view from 2216 Esplanade Avenue

So many people come to New Orleans for a weekend, two or three nights between Friday and Sunday.  You can't blame them.  Those are the days that are easiest to get off from work.  The Crescent City Classic 10k race went by our house this past Saturday (photo above).  Some of those runners stayed only for the weekend.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't spend two nights in New Orleans so that I could spend the morning in between on a 10 kilometer run, but that's me.  I spend all year here.  I spend more time pleasantly strolling picturesque Esplanade Avenue than I do jogging along its shady neutral ground.

The street is not usually this crowded

If I were you, I would come to New Orleans for a weekend, too, but if I could finagle it, I would come during the week.  Here's why:

It's less crowded.  

Granted, Frau Schmitt and I have only lived in New Orleans for three years.  We are far from acclimated to the point of being natives.  It takes much, much longer for that to happen.  We are still tourists in our city.  As I've alluded to elsewhere, between more than 25,000 people moved to New Orleans between 2010 and 2012. That's a lot of people who are still learning their way around.  I don't mean there are less tourists (though there are).  There are just less people.

Sometimes, when I'm walking the dog before breakfast, we turn a corner and I still say, "Now what the heck is going on here?"  I am still not desensitized to the everyday surprises the New Orleans contains.  It is never anything alarming.  It's just something that you wouldn't see anywhere else, only in New Orleans.  

Why are people serving up waffles off a gas grill on their front porch?  Why is a man doing a word search puzzle by flashlight in the middle of the sidewalk at 6:00AM?  What's a Rhode Island Red rooster doing in Louisiana? After I live here long enough, I'll be able to tell you without batting an eye.

It's the only town in which you'll bump into a dog-tired tuba player at 6:15AM.

During the week, there are fewer people who are only here for a day or two.  There are more people who are interested and invested in what makes the city tick.  There are more people with skin in the game.  There is less to gum up the works, get in the way, or vomit on your shoes.  When you commit to spending time in the living city, you may go home hungover after overindulgence, but its the kind of katzenjammer that inspires more daydreams than headaches.

You can stay on Bourbon Street or near the convention center every day of the week and every night will be similar.  Some parts of New Orleans are sold as a constant party.  In the rest of the city, it is a meditation.  For the people who spend long enough here, New Orleans is a city full of surprises you can't read in guide books or tourist brochures.  There are some memories that cannot be manufactured.

If New Orleans East, a part of the 9th Ward, was its own city, it would be the fourth largest municipality in Louisiana.  I know it's nothing to brag about when the competition is Shreveport and Bossier City, but it gives a sense of scope of how big New Orleans is.  There is much, much more to New Orleans than what most people cram into a short stay.

People who only stay a night sometimes ask us if every street is as colorful and tranquil as Esplanade Avenue.  The answer is no.  Not every one.  The vast majority, however, are.

The corner of Banks and South Alexander Streets

After the Crescent City Classic had passed by our house last Saturday, and the guests who had stayed all week had checked-out for a drive back to Chicago, and we wished them fair winds and following roads, Frau Schmitt and I headed uptown.

The only way to travel

We went to the corner of Banks Street and North Alexander Street, in the heart of Mid-City.  We went to Crescent Pie and Sausage Company at 4400 Banks Street.

Est. 2008 in New Orleans, LA 70119

It was a Saturday afternoon, and it was pretty crowded.  Luckily, as a party of two, we didn't have to wait long.  Sometimes, it is all in the timing.  

The restaurant is open Mon.-Sun.  I'm sure it sees its lunch rush during the week (the food is very good) but I am just as sure it is much more relaxed Mon.-Thurs., making the Creole chaurice with sauteed greens and macaroni and cheese even more savory.  

When you don't have to pack a city's worth of experiences into a weekend, you'll find more to enjoy.  Some magic happens in New Orleans during every hour of every day.  It isn't a place where you have to rush from one thing to the next.  Some people experience New Orleans that way and they still fall in love with the city.  It is a very seductive place.

Some people come during the week, adapt to living in New Orleans time.  There's no hurry.  By the third day, they think, "I could live here, too."  When you think of the millions of people who visit New Orleans, very, very few say that after a Saturday night on Bourbon Street.  Stick around awhile during the week.    

In other news...   As our guests for the past two weeks have heard me say, I've been working on fixing the fountain in the back garden.  As all of our guests have heard from myself or Frau Schmitt or Tammie, the housekeeper, I am not very handy.  Unfortunately, I am the resident handyman.  Two weeks of jiggering with the pump and hoses (I dislike getting up to my knees in cold water while playing with electric appliances), and the fountain is working:

Leda and the Swan fountain

The swan is spitting water about four inches into the air.  Of course, it has done it before during the past two weeks, but it never lasted more than a few hours.  I'm pretty confident that the fountain will be adding its dulcet tinkling to the garden air tomorrow morning, and many more mornings after that.

A votre sante.
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.