Saturday in the Park

After a rain soaked Labor Day weekend , we were very happy to be given a picture perfect Saturday. We headed out to Lafayette Square in New Orleans to attend the 5th Annual New Orleans Seafood Festival.

We got there right when it opened so we could enjoy looking around without a large crowd. I think the park was a great location to have this small festival. It provided shade and lots of green space.

All of the food vendors were lined up on one side of the park in the shade.

Mr. B’s Gazpacheo was refreshing

Remoulade’s meat pie wasn’t really spicy but it was tasty.

We never did make it to the Luke booth. This picture was taken early and they weren’t ready to serve at that time.

Cafe Giovanni’s Shrimp and Grits where a huge disappointment. Instead of the expected rich, spicy flavor we found this dish to be too sweet (?)

The fried shrimp and bacon poboy was very, very good!

We sampled the bread pudding and it was delicious.

By this time we were extremely full and needed to move around. We decided to walk around the block from Magazine to Julia and back up St. Charles. There is so much to observe in this area of the city that we played tourist, stopping every few feet whenever something caught our eye.

I have a slew of other pictures and I plan to do a post on some of those, especially the variety of window styles, in the near future.

Back at Lafayette Square, the crowd at the Festival was growing

and it was almost time for Amanda Shaw to perform.

We first witnessed Amanda’s incredible talent 8 years ago when she was 11. At that time she was relatively unknown and her playing blew us away. She has matured since that performance and in my opinion she gets better and better. She sounded fantastic at the Seafood Festival and she got the crowd dancing.

You gotta love being in a place where a busload of tourists drive by a festival and wave at the festival goers!

After Amanda finished we followed our stomach’s advice and got in line at Drago’s char-broiled oyster booth.

They were worth the wait!!

Drago’s was going thru french bread to fast, they had more delivered by cab. LOL

Kermit Ruffins followed Amanda Shaw with his Barbecue Swingers. They played for more than 90 minutes and the crowd loved them.

Kermit’s 19 year old daughter Neshia performed and she has a very sweet voice.

You can tell who her Daddy is, can’t you?

We left about 4 and the people were still streaming into the park. It was a fantastically fun day, but it was good to get home, sunburned and full of good memories of a day in New Orleans. We are truely blessed to live here. See you next week!