Adventures In Growing Up: You can take the girl outta the South...

...but she is bound to return any chance she has! That's how the saying goes, right? Spurred by back to back wedding weekends, we recently embarked on a little Tour of the South. Our trip started in Mobile, Alabama for our dear friend Ann Taylor's wedding. Mobile is a nice little sleepy city and we really enjoyed our time there. The weather was perfect and ATR made such a beautiful bride!

The happy couple and their first dance

After a weekend in Bama, we headed over to New Orleans to spend our next 3-4 days. As one tends to do when there is good food around, we ate our faces off. Day 1 Highlights:

Coffee & beignets - the breakfast of champions (or all New Orleans tourists)!!

Barry and I met Randy and his daughter at French Quarter Fest, which held around 300k people.

My #1 priority of the festival was to eat a New Orleans style SnoBall as soon as possible. This one was Chocolate Cream flavored from Plum St. Snoballs. Pretty much tasted like a Yoo-Hoo.

Day 2 was a little bit more low key, but we had a very special lunch at Commander's Palace. Commander's is a local institution in NOLA known for $.25 martinis, turtle soup and bread pudding. I had two out of three, Barry had all three. Sorry no pictures of this one, but trust me when I say it was all delicious and totally lived up to the hype. For dinner we learned a very important lesson: anywhere you want to go to eat on Monday night in New Orleans will be closed. We tried Johnny's Po Boys, Palmcourt Cafe, and Central Grocery - all closed Mondays. Coop's Place had a tourist line outside of it, so we headed outside of the French Qtr to an up and coming area of Freret St. We had awesome Chicago style pizza at Midway Pizza and like all food places in Nola, I highly recommend.

On Day 3 Barry had to go to Dallas for a day trip, so I hung out with a dear college friend the whole day. She has two little boys of her own (one was barely 8 weeks old) so she was full of really great baby advice for me. I left her apt with all kinds of pregnant lady snacks, a belly band, and a book full of baby product advice! I topped the day off with a shrimp po boy from Domilise's...according to the locals its the best you can get.

Finally Day 4, our last day in New Orleans. As you can tell from the original picture, we made the mistake of only ordering one plate of beignets at Cafe Du Monde. Well, we made sure to fix that error and went back for more coffee and beignets...this time each with our own plate. Lunch wasn't really lunch as much as it was 'where else have we not been yet?'. We had not been to the other 'must do' Sno Ball place! Hansen's Sno Blitz - Barry had Cherry and I had a Satsuma and nectar flavored one.

We saved the best for last and went to Jacque Imo's for dinner that night. Again, another New Orleans establishment with awesome cajun food.

Outside of Jacque Imo's

Soft shell crab. Massive portions!

My fried chicken...I swear this is not to size, it was huge.

Oh, I'm sorry did I imply Jacque Imo's was the last place we went? There was one more thing on the list...Krispy Kreme bread pudding. Yes, despite our massive dinner we went a few blocks over to Boucherie and ordered the sinfully delicious desert. It did not disappoint!

And with that, we were off for a long weekend at the beach. I will write about that one in a separate blog post and leave you with a few other snapshots from our time in Nola...