A Weekend New Orleans! Part One

We shall return to your regularly scheduled workout with my next post, but I wanted to share my weekend with you first! Warning: it's long.

New Orleans is one of those cities I absolutely love, but can really only handle in small doses - a long weekend like this past one is the perfect length. I was down there for a combo bachelor/bachelorette (jack and jill?) party for two very good friends that I met in college. There were about 15 of us renting a house in the Garden District, a mix of the bride and groom's high school friends, college friends, family members, and the odd significant other. We had an absolute blast romping around, drinking (as one does in New Orleans)

Although he's only met the happy couple a few times, I decided to bring boyfriend along for the weekend, as it's February and it's about time for a vacation. We got in Friday, fairly late, and after a minor debacle with the cabbie (you don't know how to use the credit card machine in your own vehicle? you have to give me the CC option, it's the law... fine, take me to the nearest ATM ... no, I'm not tipping you) we met up with the rest of the party and headed out to a bar named, very creatively, The Balcony. It wasn't anything super special, as it was a bit too cold to use the titular balcony, but it was nice to meet the new faces in the group and it was close to our rental house so altogether it was a win.

Saturday morning is when the fun really started. A dozen of us got up (waaaaay too) early and cabbed to the Villalobos Rescue Center - the canine rescue facility featured in Animal Planet's 'Pitbulls and Parolees' show (not linking because I looked at that site for about 3 seconds before wanting to cry. People SUCK.). As rescue dogs are a cause close to the couple's heart, we decided to use part of our weekend volunteering and walking the dogs at the center. They have around 270 (yes, two HUNDRED and SEVENTY) dogs at the shelter, most of whom are pit bulls or pit bull mixes although they don't turn anyone away. Over the course of several hours us volunteers each got to meet 6 or 7 new best friends. I swear I wanted to take all of them home. But probably mostly I wanted the one that spent half an hour chewing on his plastic igloo doghouse. His name was Monday and he might have been a bit special and I loved it. While I sadly only got to admire him from afar, I did have the honor of walking Bullet, Pacific, Earlina, Wilma, and Henry. They were all very well behaved and I would have adopted any one of them on the spot had I been allowed -- sadly the shelter won't allow out-of-staters who already have a dog to adopt one of theirs, although they will go above and beyond to deliver a new adoptee to a qualified dog-empty home anywhere in the country.

Unfortunately we did eventually have to leave all the lovable pups. And that's when the day took its first turn for the worse -- we had to call cabs because we were in an out-of-the-way (truthfully: waaaay sketchy) part of the city about 5 miles from our house. So we called, and a very reasonable 15 minutes later a huge 15-seater van shows up. Score! Everyone in, let's go get lunch because we missed breakfast to play with dogs and now we're all STARVING. But wait, no, sorry, says the driver, there's a law in New Orleans that says you can only have 6 people in a cab, so you 6 have to get out and wait for the second cab they're sending ... Then why on earth do you have a 15-person van? I don't understand. So 6 of us get back out of the car to await the cab we're assured is coming. And we wait. And wait. Around 15 minutes later there's no sign of a second cab, so the future groom gets back on the phone to find out what's going on. Dispatcher says she's sent a car, it'll be there shortly. Great! We order some sandwiches (sorry, "po'boys") to pick up on the way home. While on the phone ordering sandwiches, there is a second call that gets send to voicemail. It was the dispatcher from the cab company with a short and sweet message: "you are very rude". ... are you kidding? Who calls someone they don't personally know and leaves them a message telling them they're rude?

About another 15 minutes go by, still no sign of the car. Call the company back. There's a heated interchange between our guy and the woman on the phone, as we've now been waiting around 45 minutes, and the people at Villalobos are curious as to why the hell we're still there. We decide to walk down the block to the nearest busy street to see if the cab is lost. Still no sign of the cab. At this point, even the homeless woman realized we needed more help (she offered to call us a cab - do homeless people have cell phones now? serious question). We started looking up more cab companies online and dialing them at random. Most of them don't pick up the phone. One connects to the exact same woman who was dispatching for the original company -- she hangs up on us after informing us that the cab had been there and she had tried to call us to let us know, but the call went to voicemail (apparently 'you're rude' is dispatch speak for 'you're cab is outside. I know you're standing literally on the street in front of the address and don't see anything, but it's there. IT'S THERE. Goodbye'). At this point, we've been waiting over an hour. It's cold and windy, we're hungry, and getting a bit desperate. What exactly do you do when you're in an out-of-the way place and can't get a cab to come to you? There certainly weren't many cruising the streets, and the few that did ignored our attempts to hail them. Our groom even ran down the block like a madman after several of them in an attempt to make them stop. Didn't work out. Uber doesn't exist in NOLA yet. Boyfriend started checking out the nearby bus stop and claimed that he had figured out the route -- theoretically if we got on we'd end up at least downtown, which personally I thought would at least be a better place to try and hail a cab on the street but made the rest of the group uncomfortable. So we missed the bus.

We waited nearly two hours from the original call to the cab company before we made any progress towards home, and that progress wasn't actually thanks to ANY cab companies at all. At one point, a giant orange SUV painted like a taxi drove by. Naturally, we tried to hail it, but it pulled into the post office next door. Another one lost. However, 3 minutes later we notice that the driver of the car was yelling at us from across the parking lot. We ran over to meet our saving angel. Her name was Bev, she was a taxi driver, off-duty at the moment, but willing to help us out. She explained that this orange monstrosity was her 'old' taxi and that the meter didn't work, but if we wanted to get in she could drive us to her house, we could all get into the taxi with the working meter and she'd take us where we needed to go. We told her, honestly, we didn't care much about the meter and were willing to pay her anything to just get home. She just laughed and told us to get in, "sorry about the mess, you can just hand me my purse!". Nicest woman alive. On the way home we told her our story and she was amazed at the general fail by every cab company in the city. She got us home, cold and hungry but HOME, where we thanked her profusely and stumbled into the house.

Meanwhile, the lucky 6 that had gotten in the FIRST cab and had sporadic contact with us through this ordeal had picked up the po'boys we had ordered so many hours ago and managed to not eat them all. Those lasted, oh, about 3 minutes. After which I was pretty excited for a nap, having had a ridiculously early and long morning, but the general consensus was showers and then heading back out.

More to come next time -- if you can believe it, this was not the lowest point of our day.