First thing on today’s schedule, after a shower, was The Packing Of The Baggage. Then the eating of the breakfast.

As has become traditional, here’s the view during breakfast;

No Beignets today; I ate at the hotel restaurant, for I had things to do.

Such things.

 

On the bus tour yesterday, we stopped for a while at Basin Street Station, and I’d grabbed a flyer for the cemetery tours they run of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, resting place of somewhere between 50 & 70 thousand people, including a number of historical figures. It’s also the eventual resting place of Nicholas Cage.

They had a 9:30am tour, which struck me as a fine way to spend my last morning in New Orleans.

The picture above is Paul the tour guide, who started out by giving us (there were four of us in the tour including Paul) a basic run-down of Voodoo-as-religion, as opposed to Voodoo-as-movie-bollocks, just to set the stage. And also to loiter in the air conditioning for as long as possible.

I’ll get this one out of the way. The church sells plots, and what you put on your plot, in terms of design, is up to you. Some go big, some go small, and some … choose to go in a direction counter to the general aesthetic.

Future resting place of Nicholas Cage, with dramatic ray of light. And East Texan tourist.

The tourists were having to adjust their travel plans; They’d intended to take a cruise, but there’s a storm out there roughly the size of the first Death Star, so a re-thinking was in order.

It’s not quite a maze in there, but the paths are winding and erratic. You have to be with a licenced guide, though that’s more of a response to vandalism than a fear of lost tourists; It’s not that big.

The vaults and crypts are reused. It only takes a year for decomposition to do it’s thing, at which point the space becomes available again, and the … remnants … are either gathered into a container to stay in the crypt, or swept to the back to mix with all of the previous occupants.

If you didn’t spend time with your relatives before, you’re doing it now. ~ Paul the Tour Guide

The outer wall of the cemetery is made of multiple rows of vaults, family owned, still being used, though the wall is sinking, so the top of the bottom row is at maybe ankle height.

Standing between a couple of society tombs, where folks who don’t have a family plot can be interred.
I’m assuming you need to be a member of the specific society, the Italian Society or the French Society or so on.

The door there, we’re told, is actually where the groundskeepers store their tools.

As can be seen, some tombs are very new, some are very new, and some have crumbled almost into nothing.
The Church will intervene only if a structure could collapse and cause damage.
That said, if the structure is coming apart, they’ll try to track down a living relative. If that can’t be done, and the tomb is basically gone, and they have no alternative, they’ll re-sell the plot.

It was genuinely fascinating way to spend the morning.