New Orleans- Sunday, August 5, 2018

     We are staying at the French Market Inn, and it's actually a really nice place.  Even though it took us a while to check in yesterday, we really do like it.  Our room is quirky and elegant.  It has a huge king-sized bed with a high headboard, though the room itself is relatively small. Two of the walls are brick accents, and the beams in the ceiling are exposed and painted a beige color.  It reminds Scott of the room he had the last time he was in New Orleans, though that was a little larger.  But the best thing about it is that we are right in the French Quarter.

     After we woke up this morning, we walked towards the National World War II Museum, which the GPS says is about a 20 minute walk away-- it may be a little longer.  On our way, we passed the fire station for Engine 29, which serves the French Quarter.  Previously, we probably wouldn't have paid much attention to it, but Anna knows a fireman pretty well now.  A sign said that t-shirts were available, so we asked a fireman we saw who was washing some of the vehicles, and he got us one.  (We're betting that Noah doesn't read this blog, so don't tell him.  And if you do read the blog, Noah, just act surprised when we give it to you.  ;-)  A little further on, there was an espresso shop that had opened and we stopped there for breakfast, because our hotel doesn't serve any.

     We walked on to the World War II Museum.  Back when we first visited New Orleans in 2006, it was just the National D-Day Museum.  It became a museum to all of World War II after that.  Scott has seen the museum before when he was here in 2015, but it is continuing to grow quickly, and there were big parts that were new since then.  Julie was jealous that Scott got to go there back in 2015, and has wanted to get to New Orleans to visit it since then.

     The first thing that we saw when we got there was the movie called, "Beyond All Boundaries."  It is narrated by Tom Hanks, and is shown in its own special theater.   It gives an overview of the scope of the entire war, and does it with lots of special effects.   The seats rumble when a tank seems to roll over you.  Physical pieces rise from the floor or lower from the ceiling as the story of the war is told through the words of people who were there.  The nose piece for a B-17 bomber lowers from the ceiling when it is being built by Rosie the Riveters, and then we experience it flying in formation as flak explodes around it.  Snow falls in the theater at one point.  At the end of the movie, people walking across the screen look unnervingly real, even when Scott was prepared for the effect, having seen it before.  Scott asked Julie if it felt like a Disney production, and she said it was better.  There is a brief trailer for it here on YouTube here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecQNbs-fZ98 but it doesn't really give you a sense of how well done the production is.  If you come to the World War II Museum at all, don't miss this presentation.

     We went through the rest of the museum in a logical order (which Scott didn't do last time he was here).  Our first stop after the movie was a train car, which represents people leaving their homes to join the war effort.  You are given a "dog tag" (actually, a plastic card like a credit card), which you touch to a sensor at the train seat.  Then, you are assigned a person whom you will follow through the war.  As you go through the rest of the exhibits, ordered chronologically, you are supposed to tap the card to other sensors, and hear about what your assigned person did at that point in the war. Julie was assigned Geri Nyman, a young woman from Idaho who became a WASP pilot, and Scott got Roy Rickerson from Louisiana, who ended up working in intelligence in the OSS.  Both of them survived the war.   It's a great idea, and we tried our cards later on, but we decided not to do it at every stop.  There's a lot of other things that we were looking at, and the ultimate fate of the person you were assigned can be seen on the side of the screen anyway, and you are able to look up their story on the Internet later at your own leisure.

     In the first building, we went to a temporary exhibit called, "So Ready for Laughter" which is about Bob Hope and the performances he gave for the troops.    We watched a video about him there, and looked at a few of his personal items that were there, including a moving letter from the mother of a serviceman who was killed in action shortly after Bob Hope had brought him some comfort in a performance.  After that, we started in the permanent exhibit called, "The Arsenal of Democracy."  It examines life on the Home Front both before and during the war.  We watched an interesting presentation that showed how strong the isolationists were before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the arguments that they were making against getting involved.   Throughout the museum, multimedia presentations like this one are very well done, and worth waiting for.   The exhibit also went through how life changed when America shifted to support the war.  Each of the "rooms" in the permanent exhibits is almost an immersive experience/ At one point, you walk through a "house" from the 1940s, and are invited to open drawers, and such.   Of course, the exhibit covers the training camps and the industrial production.  After that was the exhibit on D-Day.  This topic was the core that the rest of the museum was built around.

        After lunch, we had two major exhibits to explore- “The Road to Berlin” and “The Road to Tokyo.”  As the names imply, each follows the American progress in the European and Pacific theaters of the war.  The rooms are filled with artifacts, uniforms, weapons, flags, and so forth, but again two things really make this an experience- the multimedia presentations and the settings in each of the rooms.  As you pass into the room about Bastogne, for example, you seem to be walking into a winter forest.  The Road to Tokyo begins inside an American navy ship, and so forth.  Whether you’re in the ruins of buildings in Italy or the jungles of the South Pacific, the designs of each of these rooms make a huge impact.  Scott had seen the Road to Berlin before, but the Road to Tokyo had not yet opened.  If the museum were only these two exhibits, it would be worth the admission.

     Scott remembered one more building, but we couldn’t find it and had to ask where it was.  Construction had closed off the path to the building, but it was still open.  We had to go outside the museum complex, wind through and across the streets and circle around to the backside.  In this building, several warplanes are hanging from the ceiling.  There are catwalks to allow you better views of them.  The last time Scott was here, there were more vehicles on the floor, but they seem to have moved elsewhere.  There are a few more exhibits in this building, but on the whole, it didn’t seem worth the work we had to do to get to it.  Even the traffic pattern in the building seems poorly planned because it seems like everyone is funneled through a single slow-moving elevator.  The stairs don’t seem to go to the levels you want them to.  We did like seeing the planes, though, including a B-17 bomber, a Mustang, and Julie’s favorite, a Corsair with its distinctive wings.  

     There seems to be two themes in the museum.  First, World War II was an incredibly large conflict on a scale that the world had never seen before (and hopefully never will again).  The size and scope of the war is hard to fathom.  Second, it wants to tell this story using the stories of the participants- the everyday Americans of that Greatest generation, and really, that’s logical thing to do.  The result, though, is information overload.  There’s way too much to see here.  It’s comparable to going to a Smithsonian museum in Washington.  Scott wondered, if you took all of the copy in the exhibits and printed it out on paper, how big would that book be?  And how long would you normally take to read a book of that size?  The high quality of the multimedia presentations helps enormously by giving a visitor some context for what they are seeing. 

     The World War II museum’s campus has several very large buildings, and construction is continuing there.  While we were passing between them, we got a view of the column where General Robert E. Lee’s statue used to stand until very recently.  This was the statue that Scott and his friend Dean were puzzled by when they were here in 2015, and it made the news when they figure of Lee was removed.  Scott got his picture with it today, while he was giving the thumbs-up in support of that decision, though he knows that is a controversial opinion even among some of his friends.

     Julie's hip was bothering her a little by now, so instead of walking back, we took a cab.  We returned to the comfort of the hotel so that she could take some Tylenol and lay down for a bit.  She took a short nap and awoke refreshed.   Meanwhile, Scott started typing today's blog.

     There was a list of things that we might do this evening, but the one thing Julie wanted to do was to visit the Villalobos Rescue Center.  Just like how Fixer Upper brought her to Waco, Pitbulls & Parolees brought her to New Orleans.  The show is on Animal Planet, and it's one of Julie's favorite shows.  It shows the stories of dogs are saved by a woman named Tia Torres, her family, and the parolees that she hires.  Their shelter used to be in California, but they moved it to New Orleans a few years after Hurricane Katrina.  We saw tonight how the shelter is located right in the Ninth Ward, which was the part of the city hardest hit by Katrina's floods.  On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays there are free tours of the facilities, but not any other days, and we missed being able to take the tour.

     One thing that Villalobos does invite visitors to do everyday is to help walk dogs.  Three times a day, certain dogs are walked for exercise.  We decided to try to go to the 7:00 walk, and so we had the valet get our car because it's a few miles from the hotel.  There are lots of papers to sign and rules to follow when you go.  For example, the dogwalkers start about 15 paces apart, and if the dog in front of you stops, you have to stop yours too, in order to maintain a space between them.  About four dogs are brought out at a time, and the dog walkers are waiting for them at traffic cones to space them apart properly.  The evening walk is supposed to be a shorter and simpler walk than the other times of the day.  The cars are basically parked under the ramp to the large bridge on Clairborne Avenue.  The dogs are basically walked once around where the cars are parked.

     We got to see a couple of dogs that have been featured on the program.  We saw Gemmill, who was rescued from a 40 foot deep drainage hole that he had fallen into.   His story is shown here and we saw a pair of dogs named Thick and Molasses, who were rescued from an abandoned molasses warehouse.   Since there was only one other family of four there to walk the dogs, Julie ended up walking two different ones.  The first was a chocolate lab named Ricky.  He an older dog and was very gentle and happy.  (Scott jokingly asked, "We came all this way to walk a chocolate lab?")  The other was named Saber, and she looked like a pitbull mix.  She was a little more interested in sniffing around as she walked, but was also very gentle and liked kissing Julie.   All the dogs seemed very sweet.

     After walking the dogs, it was going on 8:00, and we still hadn't eaten.  We drove back to the hotel.  We passed by a lot of the "Shotgun houses" that seem to make up much of the Ninth Ward.  These are houses that are very narrow, with a long thin floor plan.  They are a very typical style for a New Orleans house.  We entered the French Ward again, and negotiated through the heavy pedestrian traffic once more.  We left the car to be parked by the hotel's valet, and went off in search of food.  We had wanted to go to the restaurant/bar run by Villalobos, but that is apparently closed for renovations right now.  We ended up eating at a cafe across the street from old Jackson Brewery.  It was only a short distance to walk back to our hotel now, and we were both getting tired.  We certainly have a long drive ahead of us tomorrow, so we decided to call it a night.