Travels: February 2011

Day 1: Arrival

Brian and I have decided to try to run a marathon in all 50 states. This will probably take us decades to complete! For my 4th state and his 2nd, we flew to New Orleans, Louisiana. We had an early afternoon flight out of town, which meant lunch at the airport:

Once there, we picked up our rental car:

This guy really wanted to be listed first in the phone book!

We rented an apartment off of vrbo. Here is the exterior:

And some inside shots:

The ceilings were very high. This was much nicer than we were expecting.

After dropping off our stuff, we walked to the convention center where the expo was held.

Here's the convention center. We entered in the opposite side of the building from where the expo was, so lots of walking was involved to get to where we needed to be:

Finally, we made it!

After we picked up our race numbers, we started walking back home. Since it was dinner time, we stopped at Slice and got some pizza:

We then walked back home and relaxed in the apartment.

Day 2: Grand Isle

Our second day in New Orleans, we wanted to be off of our feet as much as possible, so the plan was to drive down to Grand Isle State Park, birding along the way.

First, we had to stop at a store. I needed to buy sunblock for the race the next day, and Brian thought he might want to buy a cheap throw-away shirt to keep him warm while waiting for the race to start.

This is the cheapest one he could find, but ultimately decided against it and would just be a little cold to start:

Here are some egrets and pelicans resting on a roof. It was pretty windy, as you can see from the egrets' feathers:

We had to stop and pay a toll to get to the park. They had a little kiosk in the gas station for this purpose:

The roads were elevated over the marshy land:

It was so beautiful! Brian is walking on this peninsula to get a better look at some water birds:

We saw a kestrel on the wire:

This is one of my favorite pictures ever. We noticed a roseate spoonbill, so Brian pulled to the side of the road so I could get a picture. This is what we got:

A pelican, roseate spoonbill, and ibis taking off at the same time.

Blackbird in the reeds:

Finally, we made it to the park itself:

This wooden structure led to a bridge where we could get closer to the water:

Coming in for a landing:

Pelicans flying:

Off to the right, we noticed a dolphin that we originally thought was dying, as he was flailing about. However, we're pretty sure he was scrounging up food:

On the drive back home, we got a view of the Superdome:

We got home rather early and had a pre-race dinner of pasta and sauce. We went to bed in order to get a good night's sleep as the race was starting rather early in the morning and we needed time to get ready and walk to the start line.

Day 3: Marathon

Marathon day! We got up very early and dressed:

I didn't have the camera with me at the race, but we both did really well! I set a PR by almost 10 minutes and finished far faster than I had thought possible. Brian set a PR by over 30 minutes! We both felt great and are looking forward to doing more marathons. The race course was very flat and fast. We finished at a location quite a few miles from where our apartment was. The race had shuttle buses to downtown. We thought about walking the 3-4 miles home, but we were tired after the race, so Brian flagged down a taxi which dropped us off at our door.

After the race, I was pretty salty:

The shower felt really good!

After a bit of relaxing, we decided to stop by Audubon Park for a bit of bird watching. The race had gone through here, and we were both amazed by the fulvous whistling ducks flying around. We wanted to see more when we had our binoculars and were able to stand still!

One of my friends happened to be running the race as well! A friend of hers used to live in New Orleans, and some of his friends invited us all to their house for dinner. Luckily, she is vegetarian as well, so she made a delicious vegetarian jambalaya:

The table after the rest of them finished eating:

We got back home, exhausted, and slept well, again.

Day 4: Barataria

The day after the marathon, we wanted to be out walking and moving around to work out the soreness in our legs. So we headed over to Barataria Nature Preserve. The view from the car driving over a bridge:

Me, in front of the information place:

It was gorgeous!

We had a bird checklist, so when we saw something new, we could narrow down its possible identity:

We saw plenty of black vultures flying around; this guy was resting:

More scenery:

Some ibis walking around:

We stopped at a grocery store and had a picnic lunch near the preserve:

At another location, we found many armadillos! This guy was walking on the path, following behind us:

The armadillo is in the background:

This cute little raccoon was foraging around:

Crocodile! (Or, alligator; I can't tell)

There were many different habitats, so we got to see a variety of birds. Many of them were small and fast-moving, so no pictures. Luckily trees don't move!