Road Trips and Hike Reports

Not a lot of photos for this leg of the journey. We spent 4 nights in New Orleans at the Maison Du Puy hotel in the French Quarter.  The weather was cool on some days but two days were about 70. It didn't take long for all 3 of us (Brian's friend from Vermont being the third) to decide that we weren't crazy about New Orleans.  It wasn't that anything awful happened there it just isn't our style.  Even our hotel rooms had a constant background noise.  For Brian and I, facing the courtyard, our noise was the quiet but incessant New Orleans style jazz music played in the courtyard, seemingly 24 hours a day.  For Jim, facing the street, he had a variety of loud cars, ambulances, people fighting, screaming and hollering each night.  The streets in the Quarter are ALL narrow one ways and not much sun gets through the tightly packed buildings and sometimes there are a lot of stacked up cars and some honking etc.  It strangely felt like what NYC might have felt like 100

Road trip basics: Driving from home in New Jersey to New Orleans and back. Dates: January 15-26. Originally we planned on taking the train to New Orleans.  In fact, we had it all booked and we were going to come home on the 23rd, getting home on the 24th.  Well, on December 13th an innocent looking email said that something had changed on one segment of our trip and to call for more info.  I've had these happen a lot with airlines and Amtrak and its usually something like we changed your departure from 9:05 am to 9:08 am due to an annual schedule adjustment.  Not this time!  Our return trip was summarily cancelled because there will be no service from NOLA to Trenton on the 23rd.  Turns out not on the 24th either.  So at that point we'd be coming back the 25th and even if everything went perfectly I couldn't make my flights to LA for work that day.  So we made the trip into (a slightly longer) road trip. Day 1 - Tuesday January 15 After a short and busy work day

We tried very hard and there were a few that we didn't post after the NH hike but we fell well short of our 52 hikes goal.  What can we say?  Brian going to school plus all the other normal pressures of day to day life made 52 hikes a huge stretch in 2018.  Still, the goal motivated us to do a lot more hikes than we otherwise would have. 2019's goal is different.... 10 hikes of at least 10 miles in 2019. Chris