First New Orleans Road Trip Day 1

Being the first real exploring road trip, this still remains my favorite. Just a quick weekend getaway with some of my favorite people. After deciding on New Orleans to be the destination, we thought the best weekend for us would be Feb 2-3…until I started started searching hotels. Either priceline.com was broken or something unusual was going on. If you’re a Baltimore Ravens (or SF 49ers) fan, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. We searched far and wide for a decent hotel or rental house that’s not crazy expensive. No luck. After a few minutes of research, Scott figured out what our problem was. Well, this goes for everybody…it’s not the best idea to schedule a trip to a city on the weekend that they’re hosting the fucking SUPER BOWL! Needless to say, we changed our dates.

After delaying the trip for 3 weeks, we were finally waking up on Thursday morning, ready to head out. We knew our day would consist of mostly driving, so we decided to take a detour and enter Alabama a little further north, explore a few spots while the sun is up, then continue to New Orleans. We found a pretty cool looking abandoned high rise building that had some boarded-up shops below, so we stopped to take a look. The girls stayed in the car as Scott and I walked around the outside, along some very busy streets. We found an area where it looked like a car drove into the storefront of a hair salon and there was a small opening at the bottom. As Scott stood guard, I crawled inside with only my iPhone to take a look around. Immediately I hear someone yelling outside. Since it was pretty busy on the street, it could’ve been anything. I’m inside of this small (I’m assuming, since there were posters of different hairstyles inside) hair salon and I’m just trying to find a way into the larger part of the building. There are some stairs going up and a back door, so I go through the back door and find my way into the real building. I don’t mean to be gross, and some explorers would probably hate me for doing this….well, lemme start by saying I have anxiety and, as some people that explore with me know, I really have to pee as soon as I get inside of a new building. So yeah, I don’t mean to be gross, but I had to pee really bad. The only/best place I could find on such short notice was an elevator shaft. So as soon as I get that out of the way, my phone starts ringing. Scott is calling me and apparently that yelling was the guy at another hair salon across the street, yelling at me. I was told he has a phone in his hand, describing to the person(s) on the other end that he just saw someone crawling into the building across the street. Not sure what he thought I was doing, but nonetheless, it was time to take a couple iPhone pics and get outta there (apologies for the horrible pic). They pulled up to pick me up just as I crawled out of the hole, the guy across the street still with phone in hand, trying to figure out what’s going on.

Next (and only other) spot we stopped in that area was a steel plant from the 1800’s that still has a few buildings and smokestacks left and even this awesome, giant steel mixer. We’ve never claimed to be the best explorers in the world (we actually proclaim the opposite), so remaining true to that, we took the toughest way in. After making our way through tons of briars or sticker-bushes, we found a huge empty building that was completely flooded in the basement areas. We then made our way (over walls and more briars and bushes) to the smokestacks and the awesome steel mixer. It’s definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen on an explore. We found a few train cars on the property, shot them, then went into another set of buildings closer to the road. Luckily, we found a much easier way to get back to the car, then we were on our way to New Orleans…

go back ←