One of the things we like most about this adventure of Semi Cruising / Living aboard / Still working, is that we don’t typically stay in one place long enough for us to get tired of seeing the new sights. Being in the New Orleans area has been a great place to people watch, sight see, and eat, eat, and eat.
We decided to go into New Orleans proper, the Garden District to be more specific and check out some of the local cemeteries. There are a lot of tour companies that you can hire to take you on a tour of these, which would be pretty cool for getting the “back story” or the history of them, but we wanted to go at this at our own pace. We wanted to be able to take photos and videos and just check it all out at the pace we decided. So we just went to one of the cemeteries without a tour guide and it was a great way to see them.
This happened to be the St. Joseph’s Cemetery which is just off of LaSalle in the Garden District of New Orleans. Chasity has wanted to take a cemetery tour since she was with us last year and we did a haunted house walking tour in the French Quarter. She was really hoping to have caught some spirits on the camera as she was filming. She has gotten into blogging and has enjoyed using our camera or her go-pro style camera and recording commentary and the things she is doing or looking at. She found this neat set of mausoleums all in one section with a wrought iron gate at each end. It was kind of creepy since the gate had a haunted creeping sound as it opened.
After parking on the street and loading the 2 year old into the stroller, we wandered on through the Cemetery. The small tombs and mausoleum were beautiful and I was both amazed at them and saddened by the fact that some of them are just not kept up and are falling apart after a couple of hundred years.
Deb and I visited something very similar in Buenos Aires and while this was really neat, it wasn’t quite as nice and ornate as the ones there in Buenos Aires.
We saw quite a few broken tombs and it begged the question of what is in there. I ended up putting the front of the camera into 2 different tombs that had openings in the front of them. In both cases, I am fairly certain that I am seeing the remains of a human being. It is odd to be that close to someone that is dead. It is an eerie feeling. I remember thinking the same thing when Deb and I were in Rome at the Vatican and walking by all the popes tombs. They are basically in glass tombs so you can see them preserved there. It is just strange.
As we walked around the cemetery, my brother and his wife were also really enjoying the details and age of the stuff in there. Ryan, my brother, has a fairly new camera and is still learning all of the controls and what he can and can’t do with it. So this was a great place for him to practice and get to know his camera better. He showed me a bunch of the pictures he had taken and they were phenomenal, so clearly his practice is paying dividends.
He and Cassie were looking for pictures that could be stylized and enlarged and then framed to hang in their house. I am not sure if they found one worthy of that, but there is no doubt that they found a lot of options.
As we walked around the cemetery, we saw a few interesting things. The first was that there were so many crows around. They seemed rather fitting for a cemetery with their dark black feathers and their squawk.
We saw a tomb with a a 420 sign and a marijuana leaf engraved into it. That seemed like a really odd way to be remembered, but I joked that even in death it is good to be known for something.
All in all this was a pretty cool trip and I think the next one we do will either be with a guide or we will plan ahead and see if there is a walking tour app that we could download to get some historical perspective and information on the cemeteries. Check out the video (embedded or the link to view it is below too) from this trip.
If you are receiving this blog via email or on a device that won’t play the embedded video, click this link for the video directly on Youtube. The link is https://youtu.be/FF-FJ78tIaw