Part of my 30th-birthday road trip was a one-day stop in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Neither my wife nor I had ever been there, and it’s something we’ve wanted to see. We both love history, and I love learning about haunted locations, so it was a natural choice.
I heard parking inside the Quarter was an absolute nightmare, so we parked on Canal Street and walked in. Our main goals for the day were to learn a little history, do a little shopping—especially antiques and oddities—and take a ghost tour we read about online. We were unsure of where to start exploring, though, so we decided on Bourbon Street, the area most commonly associated with the neighborhood.
As soon as we turned the corner from Canal to Bourbon, it was like we entered a whole different world. We weren’t in downtown New Orleans with wide streets, tall buildings, and lanes upon lanes of vehicles; instead, we were walking down narrow streets that had very little traffic and were lined with small businesses that didn’t rise more than three stories or so off the ground. The scene was filled with such a crazy amount of charm and an old-world feel that it was almost unreal, kind of like those backlot movie sets at Disney World or Universal Studios.
But the quiet appreciation didn’t last long. All at once, we were hit with an assault on almost every one of our senses: Music was blaring. People were yelling. The scent of hard liquor and stale cigarettes was inescapable no matter where you were. People were in skin-tight outfits no one should have ever let them out of the house wearing. And you had to play what felt like a human version of Frogger to avoid running into all the stumbling drunk people.
In all my years of partying, barhopping, clubbing, and gay pride festivals (including ones in San Francisco, L.A., and Chicago), I had never experienced anything like this. My 21-year-old, two-packs-a-day self would have been in heaven and gotten a kick out of the place, but my newly 30-year-old self who enjoys reading a physical copy of the newspaper in the morning and going to bed at 9:00 at night was on stimulation overload. It was just too much. Too many people. Too many sounds. Too many smells. All at once.
There has to be more to the French Quarter than this, I thought. We were planning on spending the whole day there, and I knew I wouldn’t make it an hour at that rate. Thankfully, my wife was about as overwhelmed as I was, and we decided to move away from Bourbon Street to see if surrounding ones had something more our style than bar after bar after bar after bar.
We turned onto a side street to walk away from the noise, and I saw a group of adults in their mid-40s without drinks in their hands walking toward Royal Street. “Follow the quiet, middle-aged people!” I cried, pointing in their direction.
We did, and we found something much more our speed. People were meandering about the sidewalks, slow enough to window shop but fast enough that you didn’t get irritated walking behind them. We heard people talking about taking history tours, and others had bags in their hands from the local shops. It was quieter. Calmer. Nice.
It was also a realization that I’m not in my 20s anymore. Yes, technically, I had only been out of my 20s for one day at that point, but I had mentally moved on a while ago. This only confirmed it in a more obvious way.
But it was OK. I was happy being this person, taking my ghost tours, reading brochures, and eating lunch in a restaurant while watching the crazies go by instead of being one of them. That part of my life was fun while it lasted, but I’m ready to leave it behind, to move on to something new and different. We did the French Quarter our way—our new way—and I wouldn’t change a thing.
The Procrastinating Writer 