On the drive to NOLO we made a stop off at the Laura Plantation which was right on theMississippi river. Originally run by a creole family, the house was raised up to avoid any flooding as was the style of the time. Apparently these houses were more like offices, used to conduct business, designed to allow the breeze to flow through them in the hot sticky Louisiana summers. The owners actually lived in the big town houses of New Orleans. We were told lots of interesting stories about the place; the Brér Rabbit stories were collected here by one of it´s owners from the Senegalese slaves, a decendent of the orginial French creole owner wrote her memoirs of living on the plantation - painting a less than pretty sight of her Grandmother who was plantation mistress, and who attempted to sell a mother and daughter slave seperately to different owners (something frowned upon by the slave traders at the time apparently), until her son - Laura´s father bought them both to keep them together. When Laura inherited the plantation, which had been in the family fo generations, she sold it all off and moved away to start a new life with her new husband.

We then finished off the drive and arrived at our beautiful hostel right in the Garden District. It had only just been set up as a hostel, we were in fact only the second ever guests to stay there! The owner, a young guy named Robert was super sweet and with his two little dogs soon made us feel like we were staying at a friends house rather than a hostel. We took a little stroll out to get a feel for it and ended up in a bar called Lucky´s , which quite frankly felt anything but! After I spotted a cockroach walking up the wall we gave eating there a miss and stuck to the bottles of beer and the pool table. After grabbing some food with some locals at a different establishment, we drifted off to sleep on the most beautiful matresses of the trip so far.