'Rest' day in New Orleans during Jazz Fest

 

For Nigel our rest day in New Orleans turned out to be anything but. The good news is that he hasn’t cooked his engine with the serious overheating yesterday. Parked outside the front door of the Fontenot Hotel he proceeded, with a constant stream of interested public watching, to change his water pump, a dirty and messy job at the best of times, and then to extract his magneto to give it yet another service. A long, hot and dirty mornings work but successful we hope on both counts. Ham rewired the ignition switch which has been causing problems but otherwise continues with the ‘if it ain’t broke why touch it’ approach.

 

In the meantime the rest of the team went and visited the Whitney Plantation about 40 minutes outside New Orleans and a monument and museum to the iniquities of slavery. It is very well done and extremely moving. It is astonishing that despite slavery having been abolished in the US in 1865 the last decedents of the Whitney Plantation, effectively economically dependent ,only left the Plantation on the 1970’s over 100 years later.

 

Ham spent the afternoon in the National World War 2 museum, the creation of that master historian and story teller, Stephen Ambrose. Originally conceived as a monument and museum to D day it has, with the support of congress and the State of Mississippi developed into the national World War 2 museum. As with all such museums around the world quite understandably it has a somewhat nationalistic bent but is extremely well done none the less. It certainly pulls no punches when covering the behaviour of the Japanese in the pacific campaign.

 

 

 

Jazz was the order of the day that night and we all spent an enjoyable evening dining of fish, drinking cocktails and listening to jazz. Tomorrow we are off to the site of the final battle of the Civil war, Vicksburg.