Vicksburg and New Orleans

Vicksburg, Mississippi Civil War Memorial

I was extremely excited to get a chance to go on a slight detour while on a road trip to go and see the Vicksburg National Civil War Park which was a sincerely powerful and somewhat emotional thing for me. Not only because as a living history reenactor, one tends to put themselves in the literal shoes of how the people of the past lived, but because you begin to empathize with the loss, the trials, the triumphs, and all of the often overlooked details that no school history book will ever touch upon.

The centerpiece item of the park is the USS Cairo, which is an incredibly powerful statement of that era’s engineering and invention in time of war.

 Many personal items varying from shoes, to dinnerware, to utensils and tools were available for viewing in the museum next to the Cairo. When you do any kind of living history, these are the kinds of things that help develop an edge in being as accurate in your impression as you can possibly be.

What I really liked seeing on many of the items were the human touches of natural wear and usage in some cases, and the purposeful markings of names and symbols scratched onto the bottoms of items like the bottoms of plates from soldier’s personal mess kits. My mind goes to the moments in times when some young fellow was scratching his initials into the bottom of his plate. What was he thinking? Where was he from?

 The best part of the restoration and preservation effort of the Cairo was that visitors can board the ship and walk around the inner area and get a true sense of the cramped and robust majesty of this old ship.

I was walking around in it trying to imagine being completely encased in iron and wood with the acrid smell of gunpowder and the loud sound of the cannons as they fired going on all around you… the feelings must have been overwhelming for the men inside of there.

Ironclads always come off to me as being more like a step in evolution to the modern day submarines in design and the USS Cairo’s inner dimensions made my head swim with the visuals of how much this was a machine of war built for defense and offense and not even batting an eye in the direction of the word comfort. Granted, I’ve only just started really researching and looking into the history of Ironclads, but I’m already hooked.

 And just take a look at the paddle wheel and the massive steam engines it had. I don’t know what it is about seeing huge cast iron engines like these that get me all weak in the knees, but I remember years ago when I read about this in passing in a history book, the one paragraph dedicated to it just did no justice. It was like when I saw the German U-boat that is installed inside at the Chicago MSI. It’s one thing when we are armchair historians, but another to get out there and see these behemoths in person.

New Orleans – or, there is not enough Lysol in this world, to ever make me want to go back to Bourbon Street.

Now that might sound like such a terrible thing to say about New Orleans, but let me start off by saying that I always try to keep an open mind when I travel because it’s all about various cultures, people, and places being different and me learning something in the process.

My first real impression of New Orleans was the really clean and neat bed and breakfast hotel (that is very pet friendly) in the Garden District called “Creole Gardens“. Like many buildings in the south, it was painted in the kind of colors that no self respecting bible belt resident would even look at in Sherwin-Williams. I found it to be a breath of fresh air and a nice compliment to the warm and colorful personalities that ran the establishment. If you have the app Trip Advisor for you phone, you can check out my review on there (under of course, the Artisan Rogue)

The room I was in was supposed to be haunted, but not even one ectoplasmic bit of residue was to be found over the course of the days I slept there. I did leave an audio recorder going to see if I could pick up any sounds or talking or anything out of the ordinary. Zilch on that as well.

Every bit of Creole Gardens had me feeling like I was right at home, but I revel in places that have character and a semblance of not being the touristy kind of crap that all to often I feel people fall victim to. There was nothing but a genuine stretch of chaotic love that was cobbled together in the building.

Being a pet friendly hotel in the Garden District of New Orleans is a challenge from one point as the neighborhood is a little dodgy and you want to make sure that your dog has a really good harness on it (especially if it likes to chase cats because there are a lot of random loose ones in the area just sitting on porches)

If any of you ever stay there and do bring your fur kids with you, there is a really nice park (granted a few homeless people abound there, for me that’s not an issue, I see and interact with homeless people while working at Power & Light in KC all the time, but for some people, they might feel uncomfortable) that is about a block and a half’s walk away.

I am far from a tree hugging hippy, but I do love nature, and I would probably chain myself to a tree if I had a good reason to. These trees would be a reason to do so.

Like some kind of crazy creeping Treant from the Lord of the Rings movies, the way these trees grow are really like nothing else I’ve seen. Almost like they are embracing the earth, weighed down by age and size.

had to fight the urge to go climbing up the arms of the trees. For one, I’m not 14 anymore (well… at least not physically), and two, I’m pretty sure I’d have been breaking some city ordinance and I had not budgeted for bail money. This time. Just kidding. But really. I didn’t.

Upon going down into Jackson square where all the touristy stuff was I managed to catch a performance by a former Disney artist turned night show performer (video on that coming soon) named P’Link Floyd. The man clearly loved performing for people, and had a mastery of the banjo that was undeniable.

I could go on and on about the people there from the street performers to the panhandlers, to the living caricatures that were tourists (I really did see a group of Japanese tourists each with iPhones and 2 cameras EACH in tow that were talking pictures of everything that would not mug them. I thought that kind of stuff was made up by the Zucker Bros. comedy writing team. (…for all of you born before the seminal comedy film “Airplane!”, go google it.)

Now as the day wore on, the cuisines to be found in many of the places around New Orleans were not bad, but not unlike a kitchen with a seedy semblance of operation, when the lights go out. Out come the roaches. That’s not a racial joke, I saw one on Bourbon street that I don’t think I could have taken in a fair fight.

Now I had always heard stories and endless things about the infamous Bourbon Street. Stories about men and women both being served beverages with questionable additions, the extremely adult themed and oriented performance bars, the high number of transients, and all sorts of shenanigans and goings on like that.

But even someone like me, who has worked in the bar industry part time for many years, found Bourbon street to be way overwhelming. And not necessarily in a good way. I’m not a drinker, nor am I really one for the whole night life thing. I’ve worked for too many years part time doing security at various bars to ever be comfortable being out and about in a place like this. But I do have to admit the people watching from the balcony where I was sitting was pretty cool, if not interesting.

If there had been better light where I was sitting, I’d have gladly spent the night doing sketches of people because after about 4 hours of Bourbon street, all I could think was how do I get back without getting mugged? Now don’t get me wrong, the REST of Louisiana is what I really like. I found time to work with cattle, go looking for antiques and rare books ( 150 year old bible now added to my growing collection! 😀 ), and enjoyed more humble less commercial food fair like beignets, meat pies, pork cracklins, and a crawfish boil. Those are the things that make traveling all the better, when you take the time to appreciate the quiet moments and soak in the stuff on the backroads and by ways. I know as I sat out on a small boat dock overlooking a pond, I felt the most clear sense of mind and body. I meditated for about 30 minutes on things, letting stressful aspects in my mind out, breathing in the sounds of nature around me.

Until next time, support your local artists, be kind to your fellow beings, and always take the path less traveled!

- Mario, the Artisan Rogue
Illustrator, Podcaster, Writer, Toy Collector, and Animal Rights Activist

www.theartisanrogue.com