As I wrote last week, the second leg of my back-to-back travels was to New Orleans. New Orleans is one of the very few distinct cities in America, and even if that brings certain negatives I hope that it maintains its own identity. I spent about six weeks there during one of my law school summers in a misguided attempt to find a home for the start of my legal career. That isn’t enough time to truly get to know a city, but that experience did make me a relative expert among the attendees. One person, perhaps in a fit of overexuberance, told me that my recommendation that he stroll along Frenchman Street and pop into one of the jazz clubs led to the best part of his trip. I took a similar walk myself after the final evening’s activity ended en route back to the hotel and enjoyed it myself. This conference was a digital business owner summit and not a legal conference, so it was a fire hydrant of information as everyone was talking about what’s working in different business models, what’s not, and what people are building as AI tool enable more and more use cases. I have definitely taken advantage of the subsidy that is a per-seat license on an AI platform since I returned.

On this trip, once the rideshare dropped me off at the hotel I didn’t wander much. I didn’t venture across Canal and only went north of the Quarter by a short distance for the closing arcade event. It wasn’t the sort of trip to stroll down St. Charles or Magazine. Had I not needed to cram work into the mornings, I probably would have. Instead, I took a shorter morning walk to different places for beignets. Of those, the ones at Café du Monde were best. Maybe that was the walk down Royal towards Jackson Square or the café atmosphere more than even the pastries themselves, but they were better nonetheless. If I ate that much sugar on a regular basis the consequences would be severe, so it’s a good thing that I don’t partake outside of vacation mode. I stuck with Creole food for most of the other meals too. Other than how spicy certain things can be, I enjoy the food (which like the music has a distinct identity in a manner that makes the city punch above its weight class in cultural relevance compared to population). And now that I’ve returned it feels like we’re finally in fall, which is the best time of year to be in North Carolina.