June 18-19 New Orleans

For two days in New Orleans I've not done much tourist things and left my camera in the room. Actually, I spent a lot of time in my hotel room researching and ordering a new Lenova Thinkpad 13 Inch Laptop. Traveling with my 2006 Sony laptop had finally led to me needing to replace.  For sometime now I have known the battery was probably ineffective as I could only use it while plugged into power.  A while ago two of my USB ports stopped working and I discovered that while traveling with me, a third USB port had stopped working leaving only one USB port still working. I need two - one for my portable external hard drive which I backup documents, etc and so that I can bring the files, etc. from my desktop to keep up on my laptop and then use the external drive to update my desktop. I use both Quicken and Microsoft Excel on both desktop and laptop.  The second need for a USB port is for my wireless mouse. Yes, the touchpad still works but I don't like using the touchpad. So, hopefully, the new laptop will arrive before I leave for Texas to visit friends and to Louisiana for my great niece's wedding in July.

The photos today were taken Saturday as we arrived in New Orleans and a view of Mississippi River from my hotel room and also a painting in my room.

One of the joys of traveling especially on Amtrak is meeting people from all over the world.  I met one such family from Oregon on the Empire Builder and they send me the photo below of us sitting and visiting in the sightseer lounge card.  The young teenager Russell in the photo invited me to join with him and mom and dad to play "spades" after dinner one night. That was a lot of fun.

Tomorrow I fly home to Nashville on Southwest Airlines arriving around 5 PM. I have ridden on five Amtrak trains and all five arrived at the final destination on time and usually a few minutes early. I will organize, optimize and update my photos to my photo galleries while at home and my next blog update will let you know when the photo galleries are ready for you to view.

My next "big" travel trip will be in October when I visit my friends, the Andersons, in Albuquerque for the hot air balloon festival. I will travel on Amtrak's Southwest Chief from Chicago to Albuquerque. 

In July and August I am driving to Texas, Louisiana, and East Tennessee for family activities and to visit long time friends who use to live in Nashville. I will not be posting travel updates during these family and friends travel.