A solo weekend in New Orleans

aldrinjenson@gmail.com (Aldrin Jenson) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 02:00:00 -0400

Trip: New Orleans, Louisiana · June 19–21, 2026 · solo · one backpack

New Orleans had been on my list for a while. It’s one of those American places that feels like its own country — French, Spanish, Caribbean and Southern all layered on top of each other — and I wanted to see it before I run out of weekends in the US. So I booked a flight, packed a single backpack, and went alone for three days.

This is how it went, what I ate, and the things I learned along the way — including a museum that I went in expecting to tick off a box and came out of genuinely moved.

A mule-drawn carriage near Jackson Square — the first thing that hits you about New Orleans is that it doesn’t feel like the rest of America.

First impressions: a wall of humidity

I almost missed my flight (a story for another day), but I made it, and by early afternoon I was walking from my hotel toward the French Quarter. The first thing New Orleans gives you in June is the humidity. I was sweating within minutes of stepping outside — it was somewhere around a 110°F “feels-like” with a heat advisory in effect. The first thing I bought in the city was a straw hat.

The Quarter itself is wonderful to walk through. It reminded me, oddly, a little of Bangalore at first, and then it settled into something more Caribbean — colour everywhere, wrought-iron balconies, people out eating and laughing and putting on a show. It’s a place that wears its character openly. Bordering the Quarter is Canal Street, the wide downtown boulevard, where I was amused to spot a Caesars casino — the same brand I’d walked past in Las Vegas only the month before.

I stayed in the Arts / Warehouse District, a short walk from the Quarter and, as it happened, right near the museum that would become the highlight of the trip.

Friday — the French Quarter

I’d booked a walking history tour of the French Quarter for the afternoon. Honest take: it was a bit long (about two and a quarter hours) and very heavy on theory — and I made the rookie mistake of trying to power through on nothing but protein bars, so by the end I was fading. But the history stuck, and it’s the kind of history that reframes the whole city:

New Orleans passed through three hands — French, then Spanish, then American (after a treaty) — and you can read that in the architecture. The buildings look French, but many are actually built in the Spanish style that went up after the great fires.
Sicilian Italians came later, for work.
The land was reclaimed swampland, made valuable by all the sediment the Mississippi River dumps here. At one point this was one of the richest places in the country.
And the fact I keep repeating to people: the city is not named after Orléans in France — it’s named after the Duke of Orléans, the regent for the boy-king Louis XV. (Napoleon turns up in the story too.)

St. Louis Cathedral, framed by Jackson Square and the Andrew Jackson statue. It was closed by the time my tour finished on Friday — I’d have to come back for it.

For lunch (well, late lunch) I ate at Napoleon House, a roughly 200-year-old landmark, where I had Creole jambalaya. More on the food below — there’s a lot of it.

Preservation Hall

The evening was the surprise of the day. I went to a set at Preservation Hall — $28 for a standing ticket, about 45 minutes — with basically no idea what to expect. I’m not someone who knows jazz. But it was wonderful. At one point I closed my eyes and just listened to the instruments chime in one by one: a big upright bass, a keyboard, and three wind instruments — clarinet, trombone, and one more — carrying the melody between them. Totally worth it. (I had no cash on me to tip the band that night — so I came back on Sunday, when I had some, and dropped a bit in.)

Outside Preservation Hall before the set — an unassuming, beautifully worn old building.

A packed house at Preservation Hall — standing room only, in a beautifully worn old room. I went in not knowing what to feel and came out a believer.

Afterwards I walked Bourbon Street in a light rain — costumes, street performers, a kind of permanent carnival energy that reminded me a little of Times Square. I capped the night with gumbo and a chicory coffee.

Saturday morning — into the swamp

Saturday I went out on a swamp and bayou boat tour — a covered pontoon boat (not an airboat), with a hotel pickup around 8 AM, out to the Barataria / Jean Lafitte wetlands south of the city. We saw alligators, glided through the bayou, and the guide turned out to be a great source of facts that I’ve been hoarding ever since:

A bayou is a slow-moving body of water whose water can flow in both directions — unlike a normal river or canal, which always runs from high ground to low.
Spanish moss is one of the great misnomers: it’s not a moss, not a parasite, and not from Spain. It’s a silvery plant that, during the Great Depression, was harvested as a cheap substitute for cotton to stuff cushions and pillows — and gave a lot of people work.
Cypress trees here can grow as large and as useful as redwoods.
Marsh vs. swamp: a swamp is forested; a marsh is treeless, floating vegetation.
On the wildlife: everything we saw was alligators, not crocodiles. Alligators are relatively lazy, docile, nocturnal predators — they mostly take prey smaller than themselves and only go after a human by mistake (a squatting person or a kid slapping the water can read as “small prey”). Their teeth don’t even touch when their mouths close. Crocodiles are the aggressive ones.
A genuinely odd fact: Louisiana — and New Orleans especially — is one of the only places you can privately own a body of water. You can’t feed gators in public waters, but in private waters the rules are looser, which is why the guides can lure them with marshmallows.

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One of the locals, swimming right up to our boat. Alligators are surprisingly docile — they mostly ignore you.

Saturday afternoon — the National WWII Museum

This was the best thing I did all weekend, and the thing I’d most recommend to anyone visiting New Orleans.

I’ll be honest about why it landed so hard. One of my long-standing weaknesses is history and geography — I’d pick up scattered facts in small museums and never had a frame to hang them on. The National WWII Museum gave me that frame. I did the guided tour plus their signature cinematic film, “Beyond All Boundaries,” narrated by Tom Hanks. It’s not cheap (around $76 all-in), but it’s worth every dollar.

The National WWII Museum. I came in expecting to tick a box and left wanting to learn for months.

For the first time, the whole war clicked into a timeline instead of a pile of disconnected facts. A few things that crystallised:

The war “ends” in 1945, but the trouble really starts in 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles. After that comes the Great Depression, and roughly a decade later the war proper.
Two forces expanding at the same time — Nazi Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific — eventually threatening both Europe and America, until Pearl Harbor pulled the US fully in. (I’ll admit it: before this trip I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was.)
What stayed with me most was the sheer resilience and coordination — building weapons and ammunition at scale, organising across an entire society without any of the communication tools we take for granted, and a country that was deeply divided by race and class at home pulling together for the war effort. It left me with a real respect for what was achieved.

It also left me with a pile of questions I’m still chasing — what was Italy’s stake in joining the Axis? What was Russia’s role, and why did Hitler march on Moscow? I walked out wanting to learn the map of the world properly and to memorise a few anchor dates so the next thing I read has somewhere to attach. The single biggest realisation: most of my confusion about history came simply from not knowing where countries are and not having a timeline. Fix those two and everything else has a place to hang.

And there was a nice little connection on the way out: the Spanish moss I’d learned about that very morning became popular during the Great Depression — which I now knew sat before the Second World War. Two facts from two completely different tours, suddenly linked. That’s the feeling I travel for.

Dinner at Cochon

I had dinner at Cochon, chef Donald Link’s Cajun restaurant near the museum. It was a bit of a splurge (around $42 with tip) and worth it — proper South Louisiana cuisine: fried alligator, wood-fired oysters, and the namesake cochon — slow-cooked pork with cracklins.

Dinner at Cochon — fried alligator, wood-fired oysters, and the pork dish the place is named for.

Sunday — a slow goodbye

My last morning was deliberately unhurried. I left the hotel late, wandered back into the French Quarter, and finally got inside St. Louis Cathedral — this time for the 11 AM Mass, which felt like the right way to close the loop after finding it shut on Friday.

Inside St. Louis Cathedral during Sunday Mass. The flags down the nave represent the nations whose flags once flew over New Orleans — France, Spain, Britain and the US among them.

Then the part of the day I’d most been looking forward to: breakfast at Café du Monde. I’d actually tried to go on Friday and been defeated by not carrying cash (a recurring theme — more on that below), but the main Jackson Square stand runs basically around the clock, so I came back for it. Beignets and a café au lait — powdered sugar everywhere, exactly as advertised. They were fine, honestly — pleasant rather than mind-blowing — but it’s one of those things you do for the ritual as much as the pastry. I wandered the French Market alongside it.

Café du Monde beignets and a café au lait. Bring cash.

To get out to the Garden District, I took the St. Charles Avenue streetcar — one of the oldest continuously operating streetcars in the world, an olive-green wooden car that rattles down a track shaded by enormous oaks. It’s a lovely, slow way to watch the city change from the dense Quarter to wide avenues and grand houses. Out there I joined a pay-what-you-wish walking tour of the Garden District (I caught it about halfway through, gave $15), had a mocktail at a café, and then headed for the airport.

The St. Charles streetcar out to the Garden District — my favourite way to move around the city.

The Garden District — enormous live oaks arching over quiet streets of grand old houses. A completely different New Orleans from the French Quarter.

Music everywhere

If there’s one thing that defines New Orleans more than the food or the history, it’s the music. It isn’t confined to venues — it’s the city’s baseline hum. Beyond Preservation Hall, live jazz pours out of the bars all down Bourbon Street and Royal Street, and street musicians set up on corners with a trumpet, a clarinet, a sousaphone and a bucket for tips. You genuinely can’t walk far without running into a band. It’s the most musical place I’ve ever been.

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Street jazz in the French Quarter — this kind of thing is happening on half the corners.

By the river

It was down on the bank of the Mississippi that I came across the Monument to the Immigrant — a white marble statue of a family stepping off the boat, dedicated in 1995 by the Italian American Marching Club. It stuck with me more than I expected.

The Monument to the Immigrant, on the bank of the Mississippi.

It got me thinking about how much of America is a story of people arriving from somewhere else — though it’s worth being precise about who. The French and Spanish who founded and ruled New Orleans in the 1700s were really colonists, establishing colonial rule rather than immigrating to a country that already existed. Much of the city was then physically built by enslaved Africans, brought here by force — not immigrants in any sense, but central to what the place became. It was only later, in the 1800s, that the genuine waves of immigrants — Sicilian Italians, Irish, Germans — arrived through the port to settle and work. That last wave is what the Monument to the Immigrant honours, and it’s what rhymed with two places I’d visited recently back in New York: the Museum at Eldridge Street, a beautifully restored synagogue that tells the story of Jewish immigration, and the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, where Italian and Jewish families were packed into a single building. Different city, same story of arrival.

The river itself is worth a pause. The Mississippi is a mighty thing to stand beside, even if it’s not the cleanest water you’ll ever see — one of my guides told me flatly that you can’t swim in it. He talked about the city’s endless fight with water: New Orleans sits low and floods easily, so the river is held back by levees (the raised embankments built up along the banks), and about Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when those defences failed and much of the city went under. It’s a reminder that this lovely place lives in a slightly precarious truce with the water around it.

The food

New Orleans food deserves its own section. Over three days I worked my way through most of the classics:

Jambalaya — a rice dish with meat cooked in; mine was Creole-style at Napoleon House. Hearty, a little sweet.
Muffuletta — the famous New Orleans sandwich, stacked with cured meats, cheese and an olive salad. I had mine at Café Beignet on Canal Street.
Gumbo — a thick stew over rice; I had a bowl with a chicory coffee.
Fried alligator — yes, really, at Cochon. Tastes a bit like firm chicken.
Wood-fired oysters — also at Cochon, smoky and rich.
Cochon — the slow-cooked pork dish the restaurant is named after, with cracklins.
Beignets and café au lait at Café du Monde — the iconic finale. I’ll be honest: the beignets were okay, pleasant rather than a revelation. The ritual is half the point.
Chicory coffee — the local style, coffee cut with roasted chicory root; worth trying at least once.

Jambalaya, served as three rice scoops with bread and butter. There’s a reason people come to New Orleans just to eat.

What I made of it

Honestly, it was a good trip and I’m glad I went. It was humid, and I walked a lot — but walking is the way to see the place. The city is walkable enough, and the public transport (the streetcars especially) is good; the only time I needed an Uber the whole weekend was to and from the airport.

The people were what I remember most. Every guide I had — the French Quarter history walk, the Garden District tour, the swamp tour — was warm and genuinely good company. That’s not a given, and it coloured the whole trip.

On cost: it was a little cheaper than New York, but not by as much as I’d expected. I’d assumed a Southern city would be a fair bit easier on the wallet, and it was only marginally so. Still, the things worth doing were worth the money. If I were advising someone, I’d say skip the big riverboat cruise and do the swamp tour instead, and spend an evening at Preservation Hall for the jazz — those were the right calls. And just sitting by the water for a while was lovely in its own quiet way.

The best thing, by some distance, was the National WWII Museum. I came away having genuinely learned — about the war, and about the French and Spanish layers of the city’s own history. That’s exactly what I want from travel: to come home knowing more than I did, and to have it stick.

It’s been a memorable trip. I’m really glad I went.

Practical notes

For anyone planning their own New Orleans weekend:

When to go. Avoid high summer if you can — June was brutally humid with heat advisories. Spring or autumn would be far kinder.

Where I stayed. The Arts / Warehouse District — walkable to both the French Quarter and the WWII Museum, and quieter than staying right on Bourbon Street.

Carry cash. A few things here are effectively cash-only — I got caught out with only cards and had to come back the next day for my Café du Monde beignets and to tip the Preservation Hall band. Bring some cash and you won’t have to backtrack.

Eat real meals. The food is half the reason to come — don’t try to power through the day on snacks like I did.

The things worth booking:

Thing	Notes	Rough cost
National WWII Museum	The highlight. Get the “Beyond All Boundaries” film and consider the guided tour. Give yourself more time than I did.	~$76 all-in
French Quarter history walk	A licensed-guide history tour (I did Friends of the Cabildo, from Jackson Square). History-dense — eat first.	~$30
Swamp / bayou tour	Covered pontoon boat with hotel pickup, out to the Barataria / Jean Lafitte wetlands.	~$75 with pickup
Preservation Hall	Standing-room jazz, ~45 min. Punches way above its ticket price.	$28 standing

Getting around. The French Quarter is very walkable. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar is both transport and an attraction — take it out to the Garden District.

Don’t miss: Café du Monde beignets (the Jackson Square stand runs ~24h), St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and a Garden District walk.

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