New Orleans – Day 2

From 4 hours sleep Saturday night to 6 hours sleep last night.  I’ll hopefully get 7 tonight and be back to normal.  The 6 hours sleep was due to the fact that our team was hosting a 7:00am breakfast session, so I had to be down there by 6:45 to make sure all was well (which it was).  After that session I went in search of the meeting room our team has reserved for any side meetings we want to host through the week.  I planned to make it my base of operations until I learned it would cost me $250 a day to activate the wireless.  (!!!!)   So, now I’ll be shuttling back and forth between my room on the 43rd flor and the meetings rooms downstairs because wireless up this high only costs $10/day.   The other kink in my plan of the week is working out – I’m much busier this year than last year and the gym costs $10 to use.  So, we’ll see how many times I make it to balance out the gorging.  I better do a few push ups and crunches before I go to bed.  Maybe I’ll only get 6.5 hours of sleep…

But onto more important things.   Breakfast was a very unexciting granola bar.  Lunch however found me walking into the French Quarter with Peter B to Napoleon House on the recommendation of the concierge.  It was a great old building from 1797 – I had a roasted chicken sandwich with herbed chevre on an onion roll while Peter had Shrimp Remoulade in an avocado.  Both were good.   Since we now nearly in Jackson Square, we were easily swayed over to Cafe du Monde to have beignets for dessert.   MMM – how they can they be so good?  Warm and sweet, crispy and chewy.  Sadly though, we eventually had to wander back to the hotel for more meetings, logistics and email.

Dinner #2 was at a newer restaurant near the Convention Center called Grand Isle:  http://www.grandislerestaurant.com/home.php

Starters included calamari, oysters with jack cheese & tasso ham, and Angela got frog legs!  ewww.  For dinner I got a fish I’ve never heard of and still haven’t figured out how to spell – phonetically, it’s papadrum but I’ve googled various spellings and can’t find anything.  It was good – pan fried with a beurre noisette (nut butter) served on top of spinach and sweet potatoes.  Others got tuna, pasta with lobster sauce and I can’t remember what else.  Everything looked good, except Bose said his mac & cheese side was “two thumbs down” after the best mac & cheese EVER he had in Boston a couple days ago.  I finished off with bites of Peter’s Pecan pie, Jan’s dreamsicle cheesecake and Doug’s german chocolate cake.