NOLA

Date: Tuesday May 10 - Saturday May 14

We're in New Orleans for my daughter Abby's graduation from Tulane University. Abby graduated from Tulane with a degree in Art. She is an accomplished painter. She will be beginning Law School in the Fall at Loyola University in New Orleans. I am incredibly proud of her!

The graduation was surprisingly pleasant.  Despite being seated on a folding chair in the New Orleans Convention Center for about 4 hours, we actually enjoyed ourselves. There was lots of jazz playing, and Stevie Wonder, who received an honorary degree, played and sang a bit as well.  The keynote speaker, some lib reporter for the New York Times named Thomas Friedman, was actually pretty inspirational. He encouraged the graduates not to hide behind their computers, but to get out and change the world by taking it to the streets if necessary. He quoted a marine officer whom he interviewed after "the surge" in Iraq.  Friedman asked him about the success of "the surge," and the officer said "we were too dumb to quit." Acknowledging that it would be tough for the grads to find jobs in the current economy, Friedman encouraged them to make their own jobs, to use their brains and their imaginations to create a new innovation or a new business. He advised them to be "too dumb too quit."

We are staying at a campground in New Orleans called Ponchetrain Landing. They have done a pretty good job of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.  It is located in an industrial area, but is on a little canal that leads into Lake Ponchetrain.  It has a nice little pool, a hot tub, and its own bar (this is New Orleans after all.) It also has the coveted full hookups. For those of you who are not RVers, when you get to any given campground, each campground has some combination of what's called "hookups." Think of it like a utility hookup.  Your electric hookup provides electric power to the RV. A water hookup provides a steady stream of water. A sewer hookup allows your waste water and whatever's in it to drain into a septic tank. And the gold standard of hookups also provides a cable TV hookup and/or wi-fi. Your typical national park has no hookups at all, in which case we use our on-board fresh water and waste containment tanks. Power is supplied by either a bank of batteries or our on-board generator.