We are blessed vacation wise, in that we live quite close to two of the largest cruise ports in the country, Galveston and New Orleans. We have only used Galveston once, and an oil spill cost us two days of sea time, so we prefer New Orleans. It’s a short drive, really only around seven hours.

Sunday is actually embarkation day, but we always go up Saturday so we don’t have to get up so seriously early to arrive by 11:00 or so, which is normal embarkation time. This time we drove an hour south of New Orleans to a town called Houma, where we met with some friends who have family there. That’s actually funny, in that we live less than a few miles from them and drove 8 hours to have supper with them. I already wrote about the seafood feast we had there, but hey…can one write about food too much? Crab legs, frog legs, shrimp, chicken and the whole enchilada so to speak. All you can eat. Yum right?

 

The port of New Orleans is very cool and unique. It is a deepwater port, yet it is not a harbor. The port is actually quite a few miles up the Mississippi River. It’s far enough up that when passengers go to bed night one, we are still in the River. Here is some data from Wikipedia:

The Port of New Orleans is a deep-water draft port located in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2016, it was the fourth largest port in the United States based on volume of cargo handled. It also has the longest wharf in the world, which is 2.01 miles (3.4 km) long and can accommodate 15 vessels at one time.

The Port of New Orleans handles about 90 million short tons of cargo a year. The port also handles about 50,000 barges and 1,000,000 cruise passengers per year, with several cruise ships from Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Lines, making it one of the nation’s premier cruise ports. The Port of South Louisiana, based in the New Orleans suburb of LaPlace handles 193 million short tons. The Port of New Orleans and the Port of South Louisiana combined form one of the largest port systems in the world by bulk tonnage and among the top ten in the world by annual volume handled. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

One thing that is very cool is that Carnival Ships pull up the to the wharf just short of a low clearance bridge and stop; then, the ship has to actually do a u-turn to go back down the river. This is a serious River!

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Lots of traffic and goings on in the River!

And finally, us just on board

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