Nola/Miss/Phoenix Trip Retrospective

[canyonwalker]

It feels a bit late to do a retrospective on our trip to New Orleans, Mississippi, and Phoenix as we've been home for 10 days now. But considering I just finished pushing out my last backlogged blog entry from the trip (with part 3 of hiking the amazing Red Bluff canyon) it's not a day too soon. Plus, some things in retrospect are clearer with the benefit of time's perspective. Here are Five Things about the trip:

• Length: just right. We conceived this trip as 10 days, taking off from work a Friday and all of the following week. That's frankly as long as we've ever taken off in our working lives in corporate America. When we chose to shuffle parts of the trip only a week ahead of time we seriously considered cutting it shorter by several days and giving back two vacation days. I'm glad we didn't. 10 days was the right amount of time to see and do several things, mostly forget about work while we were doing it, and yet not come back to everything gone haywire.


• Staying in the French Quarter: nice. We faced lots of choices about where to stay in New Orleans. We decided early on "Let's stay right in the French Quarter" but when looking at price/value tradeoffs on hotels we considered a number of alternatives on the edge or a few blocks away. Ultimately staying in the 'quarter just 1 block from Bourbon Street was a good choice. It was so close to everything yet just far enough from the hubbub that the hotel was always a quiet oasis when we wanted it.


• Dropping the beach for Phoenix worked. When we made the choice to cut out 4 nights at the beach I wondered if any of the trip was still worth doing. We landed on the plan of replacing 4 nights on the beach with 3 nights at a resort in Phoenix but I had regrets the morning after booking it. The beach would've been no fun with the cooler weather on tap. We've got a better beach trip coming up soon now anyway. And Phoenix turned out to be a great piece in the combination.


• Pacing: slower days were important. The first several days of the trip felt very go-go-go. By the time we got to Phoenix I was ready to slow down. Fortunately that's what our resort stay provided. We were just steps from the waterpark at the hotel, and we could come and go as we pleased during broad hours. Relaxing on a chaise lounge by the water or on a chair in our roomy suite were both great options. A key was that when I wanted to take it easy, I wasn't just relaxing but relaxing in relative luxury.


• Renting a car in Phoenix was the right choice. We didn't rent a car for our 4 days in New Orleans. It didn't make sense, as a) most of what we wanted to do was walkable and b) parking was stupid expensive. I hesitated to rent in Phoenix. Our friends insisted they'd just Uber/Lyft everywhere and it'd be cost effective. I did quick mental arithmetic and figured that if we wanted to make even one trip per day it'd be close to even. And we wound up making a lot more trips than that. Especially for our friends who had lots of "I need this... oh now I need that" special requests. And having a car meant we weren't stuck with eating at the hotel for all our meals. That saved a lot of money right there as even modest lunches would've been upwards of $30 apiece. Plus we enjoyed way more variety than the hotel's safe-for-visitors-from-Iowa style menu.