I have been away, in New Orleans and other places

It is true: Bourbon Street is what would happen if all the jocks grabbed their guns, Harris and Klebold style, and took over the country.

While we were there, we saw an awful lot of kids. Unfortunately the 'I got Bourbon faced on shit street' shirts only came in adult sizes.

One Dad was busy passing on his really healthy attitudes towards women to his sons as we walked by. He lifted them up so they were standing on a window ledge on either side of him. In the window was a silhouette of the stripper inside. Somebody took a picture of the three of them for the family album.

Fortunately Bourbon Street is a very small part of New Orleans. We hung out at the Ritz-Carlton and enjoyed all the free drinks and did our best to ignore the long-winded dudes and their wives, some of whom were unnecessarily mean to the staff, or whoever they had on their cell phones at the time. We were possibly the youngest people there who were not with our parents.

The high point was the AirBoat ride through the Bayou. Those things are louder than you can ever know seeing them during their obligatory appearances in any show or movie taking place in Louisiana, and they're very fast, too. The guy who drove us from the hotel to the Bayou was an English dude, and he mentioned how Cajuns marry their cousins 3 or 4 times. He found it really fascinating and odd, yet in England they have the royal family, so it wouldn't seem like such a big novelty.

We got to hold not one but two alligators. I don't believe the alligators dug it very much.

It's a strange place. Definitely a city with its own identity, though.