2013/06/24:The City of New Orleans...

…is the name of the train running between Chicago and New Orleans. The train ride of about 1,500 kilometers (19 hours) has two highlights: leaving Chicago – with views at the skyline at night from different perspectives – and entering New Orleans via the 9.3 km long Lake Pontchartrain Bridge, the longest rail bridge in North America. In between you mostly see trees, cotton fields and some sleepy villages. The only interesting city along the route is Memphis, Tennessee.



“The city of New Orleans” is not the most interesting train ride Amtrak offers, but the city of New Orleans is one of the greatest cities in the US, if not worldwide! “The Big Easy” lost 1/3 of its population after Hurricane Katrina hit ground in 2005 (1,500 people died, many more moved away to other cities and states), but it didn’t lose its unique easy-going spirit and its nonstop party town image. It seems to be a Las Vegas of the South, with 24-hour drinking licenses and drinking alcohol in the streets (“beer to go”) – unthinkable in most US cities – being more common than in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Bourbon Street, the heart of the noisy French Quarter, offers many possibilities to listen to live music every night, from Jazz to Hard Rock, from Blues to Rock’n Roll. As it is warm and humid outdoors, live takes place on the streets till the early morning. What a big surprise, what a wonderful experience, what a great highlight after exactly one month of travelling.

What I didn’t mention yet are two special means of transport: New Orleans’ old streetcars and the Mississippi steam boats. Of course we took a ride on both. Some streetcars date back to the 1920s, others are younger, but designed in an old style. The streetcar network consists of five different lines. The oldest one, St. Charles Avenue Streetcar, is the oldest streetcar line in North America still in operation (since 1835). The youngest one, Loyola Streetcar, has been opened in 2013. Almost comparable to San Francisco or Lisbon, the streetcars are an important brand mark of the city and printed on lots of tourist shop t-shirts.

The steam boat tour was another highlight of our two days’ stay in New Orleans. The roundtrip – naturally with live jazz music onboard – brought us along the Mississippi to harbor and industrial areas south of the city. As the Mississippi is the third largest river in the world, New Orleans has the fifth largest harbor in the US. And (they pointed it out at least three times) the Natchez is the only ship along the Mississippi which still works with steam engines (although they nowadays use diesel and not coal), other ships look also original, but work with diesel-electric engines.

Although the weather (a lot of rain especially on the second day, very humid all the time) wasn’t perfect, New Orleans is one of our favorite cities, if not the highlight of the whole holiday. Good that we didn’t take the direct train from Chicago to New York.