New Orleans

• California in a Fortnight? - California
• Frankly, my dear, you'll love it - Charleston
• Blown away by the Windy City - Chicago
• Blown away by Chicago - Chicago
• Haunted by Hemingway - Florida
• We have the keys to unlock Florida - Florida
• My Love Match with Las Vegas - Las Vegas
• The town that cloned Europe - Las Vegas
• A Chorus of Angels - Los Angeles
• LA: An actresses guide - Los Angeles
• The Stars Bite Back - Los Angeles
• Hotel of high fashion - Miami
• Miami Spice - Miami
• Alien Town: Roswell - New Mexico
• How the kids went Cajan - New Orleans
• Seta and the City - New York
• Glamour by the sea - Santa Barbara
• Celebrity Hotels - USA
• Escape to Sundance - Utah

NEW ORLEANS HAS LONG HAD a reputation as a place where adults go to enjoy themselves.

Although the plush bordellos have long gone, lap dancers and sex shops still set the tone on Bourbon Street.

Come evening poor white trash and stogie-puffing youth from Mississippi and Texas whip up a nightly atmosphere of bacchanal. Elsewhere in the city, the chief alternative entertainment is the profusion of late-night clubs and music bars.

New Orleans is not, in short, well known as a family destination. It has a high crime rate, and no theme parks. Thus, when I arrived just before Easter with my two infant daughters, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. Was there anything to do other than eat hot dogs off the famous Weenie carts and stumble up and down the Vieux Carre trying to avert the children’s eyes from obscene T-shirts?

But the city turned out to be one of the most enjoyable destinations I’ve visited with my kids. Despite the sometimes oppressive heat and the unbalanced tourist-to-resident ratio, there’s plenty to do here to keep a family happy.

Magicians & Musicians

We started our visit with a walk around Jackson Square, in the heart of the Vieux Carre. This was a series of clichés - face painters and fortune tellers, magicians and musicians. Ruby, eight, and Cissy six, lacking my impatience with oddly annoying statue-mimes, drank in the atmosphere and goggled with delight at the inept bird-conjurers and hectoring tap dancers.

Also, the music is always worth listening to. For all its commercialisation, New Orleans is still a great town for authentic street sounds, particularly jazz and roots music.

Most of the hustle is pretty good-natured. Ruby and Cis happily joined in one of the mime shows while, yards away on the Mississippi, a fat woman with pillar box red hair sent puffs of steam from the calliope on the steamboat into the blue sky, the hurdy-gurdy sounds mixing with the patter and electric blues.

The next day we took a swamp tour. This began unpromisingly – the boat looked like a floating tin can with the sides scooped out. But the trip itself was a delight.

The swamps have a mesmeric effect on the otherwise raucous tourists, and the well-practised riff of the Cajun tour guide is affable and well informed. He fed marshmallows to circling alligators, who leapt to retrieve them.

Ruby and Cis were ecstatic when he brought out a baby ‘gator for them to pet. The other wildlife – egrets, pelicans, turtles – and the hanging white moss of the Cypress trees added to a heady atmosphere.

The day before Easter we went to the Aquarium Of The Americas, the best attraction of its kind I’ve ever visited.

I’ve always been in love with the poetry of the naming of marine life - Cownose Stingray, Porkfish, Sucereye Porgy - but the aquarium is often claustrophobic and dingy. Here though, a vaulted ceiling infuses everything with light.

You enter through a glass tunnel that takes you under the sea, where you’re surrounded by the teeming eccentrics of the deep.

Attendants wander up to chat about the exhibits and there is the aquatic equivalent of a petting zoo - Ruby, thrillingly, stroked a shark. Other highlights include the simulated rainforest and the glass-sided penguin pool.

We decided to quit New Orleans and drive to Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. We took the slow route, the old Highway 90. It was on this still atmospheric stretch of road that Jayne Mansfield came violently to the end of her particular road.

Elvis and Hank Williams slogged up and down here in the Fifties, and something of its roots, its feel, still survives in the old clapboard fishing camps that line the highway, where they go baiting for catfish and giggin’ for frogs (frogs’ legs are still very popular in these parts).

There is a space centre here, The Stennis Centre, the closest this area has to a theme park.

We passed through the artists’ colony at Bay St Louis, more or less destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969 but still an attractive development of low-rise clapboard houses..

A pleasant interlude

We spent a gorgeous weekend at a house on Pass Christian, a small town from which you can take boats out to the wildlife sanctuaries at Ship Island. On returning to New Orleans we paid a visit to City Park, where the canals were restful and the magnolia trees made excellent climbing. The Museum of Modern Art was, for me, a pleasant interlude.

We took a river trip from the aquarium to the City Zoo at Audubon Park. We took the 2pm boat but got there only 90 minutes before closing time.

We managed to take in only the Komodo dragon and the reptile house before being kicked out at 5pm. I’ve been before, so I know what the kids were missing – the recreated swampland is one of the best zoo exhibitions going.

If you’re short of time, take the old streetcar up to Audubon Park - a great experience and only 90p. That night I took Ruby and Cis to a music venue at Carrolton Station, a funky neighbourhood bar in the Garden District. Outside they were selling cheeseburgers, inside the music was superb.

That evening, we went down to Frankie & Johnny’s, a restaurant where John Goodman is often seen maintaining his generous waistline.

On the jukebox were Dean Martin, Frankie Ford and the Ventures, on the menu, soft shell crab, shrimp po’boy sandwiches and crawfish pie.

The walls were cheap veneer and the ceilings low and Styrofoam, but it was a perfect end to a perfect vacation.