New Orleans Trip, American Idol: Registration

Since we were out until 4am Saturday morning (or Friday night, however you choose to look at it lol), I decided I would stay up and go register right at 5am. That didn’t work out well for me. LOL I fell asleep and woke up around 10am — we hurried down to the Arena to get registered for the audition on Monday. We walked. And walked. And walked… for what seemed like eternity! Maybe it just seemed that way because my legs felt like I had bear traps clamped onto them from all the walking we did the night before! Everything hurt from my hips to my toes, literally. Between walking in those God awful 4″ heels before peeling them off my feet and walking barefoot through our French Quarter tour and walking around Bourbon Street aimlessly for 5 hours the night before, my body was on strike Saturday morning.

We finally got to the SuperDome and got directions as to how to get to the Arena. The cops in New Orleans are SO nice, by the way. Not. We walked ALLLLL the way around the SuperDome (by the instruction of one cop who halfway told us where to go while mumbling something and getting into his car, shutting the door before he was even finished) only to have another cop turn us around about 30 yards from the front door of the Arena to go ALLLLL the way back around the SuperDome (which for those who don’t know is about ten thousand miles around!) because there was construction going on. “But those people just went through that came before us!” I exclaimed. She responded, “LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING! If you want to get to the Arena, you’ll….” then I turned around and walked off before I ended up in jail. Lack of sleep and my natural attitude don’t make me a very reasonable person when two groups of white people just walked through the same area that this cop is now refusing to let an interracial couple pass through. I mean, I’m just sayin…

So we walked ALLLLLL the way back around the SuperDome to the Arena where THANKFULLY it only took about 2 minutes to get registered. I presented my birth certificate and my ID, they gave me a wristband and a ticket as well as a list of instructions for audition day and that was a wrap.

We walked back to the hotel to get the car and go find somewhere to eat breakfast. Or lunch. Whatever. I called Jessica and the bus had already left for the Plantation that Bloggers on Bourbon was going to visit that day which turned out to be over an hour away. No WAY was I driving all the way out there so I missed that completely. In missing that, I also forgot to get my Bloggers on Bourbon tshirt later that day. Darnit. But, hey, registration was the main thing for Saturday and I honestly hadn’t expected to be able to go to the Plantation anyway because I expected registration to be insanely chaotic, which it surprisingly wasn’t at all. We found a McDonald’s and had lunch then headed back to the room.

My body was KILLING me by the time we made it back to the hotel and I can’t imagine having walked one more step. Barry and I spent the rest of the day recuperating from the night before, which involved me not moving one inch from the bed (except for a quick trip to Walmart for microwavable dinners — eating out was just TOO expensive!) until Jessica called later that night to say they were headed to the Cat’s Meow — up, up, up I went… got dressed and made our way to Bourbon Street again for the last night of Bloggers on Bourbon and some fun with my girls! I hated missing the Dickie Brennan’s dinner… I heard WONDERFUL things about the dinner itself and the Opensky presentation afterward that I regretted being bedridden while it was going on :(

There’s still more to come!! I took some great photos at a cemetery on Canal Street Sunday and then of course I’ve yet to tell y’all all about my audition experience on Monday. Check back later!