Jazz on Frenchmen Street, beignets at Café du Monde, crawfish étouffée, and a city that invented its own culture and refuses to let anyone forget it.
New Orleans (6 nights)
6 nights total
Local budget · Unrushed pace · Explorer travel style · $60/day
The independent backpacker
Six nights is actually the right amount of time for New Orleans because the city takes a day or two just to slow you down to its pace, and fighting that is the biggest mistake most first-timers make. The French Quarter is worth your time but it rewards the morning hours, around 8 or 9am, when the streets smell like last night and the light hits the iron balconies before the crowds arrive. Frenchmen Street in the Marigny is where locals go for live music, and the difference between a Tuesday night there and a Saturday on Bourbon Street is genuinely hard to overstate. Most visitors eat only in the Quarter and miss the whole point, so at least one lunch should happen in Mid-City or the Bywater, neighborhoods where the food is just as serious and the rooms are half as loud. The thing people consistently underestimate is how much the heat and the food will slow you down, so building in a long afternoon rest most days is not laziness, it is just logistics. Cash still matters here more than most American cities, especially for smaller music venues and second line bars, so carry some.
Tags: Food Scene, Nightlife & Social, Culture & History