laissez les bon temps rouler

I'm thoroughly exhausted, but I'm delighted to be in New Orleans. Why have I waited ten years to come back?

That could probably be the end of this blog post - and probably should be, since I had considered going to bed an hour and a half ago. But I will continue writing. I woke up at 4:30am, showered, dried my hair, and was out the door exactly on time to meet my 5:15am ride to the airport. All of my travel today was completely smooth, which was v. much appreciated. I also wrote a bit and figured out some crucial stuff with Thorington's book, so now it's all a matter of executing it. And, I happened to be in first class on the way from LAX to New Orleans, and I happened to sit across the aisle from Craig T. Nelson (aka Coach), which was a fairly exciting celebrity sighting. Clearly flying first class out of LAX yields much better results than all the douchebags one might see out of SFO.

Sooo...(no comment on the fact that I fly out of SFO), eventually we arrived in New Orleans. I happened to be on the same flight as Tessa Dare, and so we shared a cab to the hotel and caught up on the way, which was v. nice. Then I took an hour or so to unpack, hang up my clothes, etc., before it was time for dinner with some people I know from twitter. Yes, this is the kind of conference where one gets super excited to go out with people one has never actually seen in person. But I'm really glad we went out; we took a streetcar to the Garden District (the hotel is on the edge of the French Quarter, right on the river) and had a sumptuous feast at Commander's Palace. It's located in an old plantation-style mansion, and the service is super old-school - they have multiple waiters so they can serve all the food at the table at exactly the same time, they swapped out our water glasses halfway through when the ice started to melt, and they brought the girl with a black dress a black napkin instead of a white one so that she wouldn't get lint on her dress. Classy. So classy that I almost felt bad taking photos of all my food for Alyssa, but I did it anyway.

And she may not like what she sees, although I thought it was to die for. I started with a pisco sour (drink of champions, particularly if you like egg whites), had the pork belly appetizer (my favorite thing there, and perhaps my favorite thing this year), their special gumbo for soup (only ate half of it because it was so filling, but it was pork belly + andouille + some other pork product and it was stellar), the shrimp and grits (yummy and gluten free), and a praline parfait of which I could only have a few bites, but it was also amazing. And I switched over and had a v. good glass of zinfandel with my entree, so that was great. All in all, I was super impressed - it was a really fun introduction to New Orleans, and I'm v. much looking forward to eating my way through the city over the next week.

But now I'm going to indulge my jetlag and whatever flour may or may not have been in the gumbo and go to bed so that I can hit it hard tomorrow - goodnight!