The Fest is over but the Big Easy still Rocks on

Now that the 2018 Jazz and Heritage Festival is behind us, everyone can get back to so called "normal" life in the Big Easy as the summer season approaches. Our tourists this year probably did not realize that we had two weekends of just about perfect weather and even with the cooling, light rain for a bit on second Saturday, we had some perfect days.

Each year, Jazz fest works to improve services and they managed to trick us a little bit this outing since we had houseguests who brought us 12 ounce Yeti beer coolers and all but two of the Fest beers were all 16 ounce cans. Shock Top and Sol ended up being the 12 ounce cans so we moved to those by the end of weekend two. Of course our whirlwind bar and party hopping continued throughout the two weeks of the fest because you know you have to keep the fun going all night. Friends close to the New Orleans Fair Grounds always pull out all the stops for parties, and we are fortunate enough to have house parties on both weekends making it easy to support everyone.

The restaurants in the Big Easy are also very accomodating to festival goers and it is great to be able to attend some of our favorites like Ralph's on the Park in comfortable casual clothing. We visited Rosedale several times simply because Crawfish Friday started on the now full service patio. Lakeview Harbor, one of my favorite burger joints, even opened on weekend one after closing a couple months ago with lots of the same staff. Their new location near the Lakefront makes it easy to grab a burger in the midst of seafood land. Of course no weekend is complete without a stop at Second Line Brewing in Midcity and they were fully on fire with some new brew offerings and the crawfish food truck.

We closed the weekend in the Quarter and of course had to visit the Black Penny, Effervescence(who recently won Eater's new bar of the year) and finally Orleans Grape Vine to enjoy some wine and happy hour margaritas. Our final stop turned out to be Morning Call in City Park for Irish Coffee as we waited for Jazz Fest friends to join us. We discovered the new location for the Gondola as a cute couple closed their evening with the champagne sunset ride. Cheers to another Jazz Fest in the Big Easy.