New Orleans means staying at the Parks-Bowman Mansion — a fabulous Victorian home in the Garden District — hanging out with its owners, my friends Adrienne and Bill, and of course eating amazing food.

Above is the wood-fired oven at Cochon, a place that serves up magical dishes, centering around pork, as the name suggests.  Fried pork ears are a specialty.

A visit to Commander’s Palace, in the background above, just a couple of blocks from Adrienne and Bill’s house, is a must for me on any trip to New Orleans — we dined royally there, as always.

I also sneaked in a lunch at Fiorella’s in the Quarter, which serves fried chicken almost as good as my mother makes, and a trip to Café du Monde, for coffee and beignets.

One afternoon as my two sisters and I wandered around the Quarter, we started looking for a place to grab a quick bite for lunch. By chance we stumbled upon Hermes, the bar attached to Antoine’s, the legendary New Orleans eatery, founded in 1840 and the oldest continuously operating restaurant in America.

There, Anna was able to try for the first time one of Antoine’s original signature dishes, Oysters Rockefeller, which amazed her.  The staff also gave her and Libba a tour of the whole restaurant, just closed down after the lunch hours, including the small private dining rooms where much clandestine romantic intrigue has undoubtedly played out in years past.  The tour was just the sort of beau geste you come to expect from people in New Orleans.

Libba, not fully recovered from her exertions for the wedding, decided she needed to fly home from New Orleans, so my sister Anna and I pushed on by ourselves.

We took with us two muffuletta sandwiches from the Central Grocery. These are enormous, complex Italian sandwiches, peculiar to New Orleans.  They can be found all over the city, but the Central Grocery makes the best ones.  They served for lunches and late-night snacks on the road, until Anna got tired of them.  I was still eating mine and part of hers back in Las Vegas.

You can stay at the Parks-Bowman Mansion yourself, because Adrienne and Bill now offer four of its rooms on airbnb.  The rates are a bargain for central New Orleans, in a magnificent home filled with wondrous folk art, hosted by people who embody the creative and fun spirit of New Orleans.  Check it out — The Red Room.

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We took the coastal road along the Florida Panhandle on our way to New Orleans, stopping for a night at Apalachicola, Florida, a little shrimping port on the creek that flows into Apalachicola Bay. I’d been there before, and wanted to revisit Up the Creek, a funky seafood restaurant overlooking the shrimp-boat docks.  We had a fine meal there at twilight, watching the shrimp boats head out for their night’s work.

On the way to Apalachicola, greedy for seafood, we’d stopped for lunch at the roadside joint above.  The fried oysters my sister Anna had were not great, alas, but the fried shrimp I ordered were excellent.

Traveling with my two sisters, both of whom are excellent drivers, made for a different kind of road trip.  I’d done almost all of the driving on the way to Maine — my nephew Harry has a learner’s permit but can only drive with a licensed California driver in the car.  It was nice to lap the miles in shifts.

On my last visit to Apalachicola I’d stayed at a Best Western, but driving into town this time we decided to take a chance on the Gibson Inn, which dates from 1907, during Apalachicola’s brief history as an important lumber shipping port.  It was a fortunate choice — the place was reasonable and comfortable, with a good bar (which like almost every other drinking and eating establishment in Apalachicola closes at 9pm) and wide porches with big rocking chairs to pass the time (and smoke) in.

One reason we chose a southern route back to Las Vegas was for the great food and interesting places to stay we knew we’d find close to the highways.  We were not disappointed in the Florida Panhandle.

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Our destination in Florida was Lake Butler, which is near the small town of Winter Garden, an hour or so west of Orlando. Winter Garden is an old-fashioned town, where my friend Mary Zahl (below) grew up and now lives with her husband, my oldest friend, Paul Zahl. Mary’s family has a cabin on Lake Butler, and she and Paul offered the hospitality of it to us.

It’s an old-fashioned cabin, dating from the 50s I guess, on a lake that now attracts celebrities, like Shaquille O’Neil, who build mansions there. It still manages to have a sleepy air.  It has crystal clear waters and is a lovely place to recharge your batteries on a long road trip.

On one night of our three-day sojourn, we went to a fine little restaurant in Winter Garden called The Tasting Room.  It specializes in small dishes, like a tapas restaurant, but I had a stupendous main-course entree of shrimp and grits.  Everything was delicious.

On another night we went to a great barbecue joint in town, The Four Rivers Smokehouse — the highlight of which for me were some stuffed jalapeño chiles that really packed a punch.

Above, while stepping out for a smoke, I peeked in to see what I was missing in the way of conversation.

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Lee and I drove from Maine to my sister Libba’s house in western New York State, where Libba and Simon had already arrived. Lee flew back to her home in Los Angeles, then Libba and I headed south to North Carolina — the start of my long drive back to Las Vegas.

Meanwhile my sister Roe had driven my nephew Harry and my mom back to North Carolina, and Anna and her husband Pete had driven their clan back there, too.

Libba and I took a route through the Shenandoah Valley to avoid Washington, D. C.. The ghosts of John Mosby (above) and Stonewall Jackson feel ever present in that valley. One of the roads we traveled was even named for Mosby — see the picture at the top of the post.

We stayed a night in Virginia, then reached Wilmington, N. C. the next day. As soon as we hit the Tar Heel State, we stopped for barbecue, at a reliable chain called Smithfield’s — reliable but not in the same class as Jackson’s in Wilmington, which makes barbecue that tastes like it did when I was a kid:

Oh, my . . .

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My sister Libba and her husband Simon and her son Jason make the best smoked fish in America — mostly salmon but also trout and tuna. If you’ve ordered smoked salmon at a fancy restaurant or bought it at a gourmet food shop in a major city, chances are you’ve eaten it, not always under their company’s name, Samaki, because they supply it to a lot of companies that re-brand it under their own names.

That’s my nephew Jason in the picture taped inside the window above, back in his childhood days in Africa — the guy whose wedding I just attended in Maine.  That’s his dad Simon below.

They started out smoking fish in Kenya, where Simon and Jason were born — samaki is the Swahili word for fish — supplying it to game lodges and safari camps, but political instability there caused them to move to the U. S. in 1983, where the business has continued to grow by leaps and bounds, though they remain a relatively small, artisanal producer, shipping about 300,000 pounds of fish a year.

The fresh salmon is soaked in brine and a little brown sugar, then rolled into the brick-oven smoking room:

Smoke from burning sawdust of various aromatic woods is fed into the smoking room from this stove:

Then the fish is sliced and shrink-wrapped and sent on its way:

Samaki doesn’t do a lot of online selling to individuals — their volume business has gotten too big to concentrate on smaller orders — but they will, at this link:

Samaki, Inc.

. . . where you can see a short documentary on their business done for the New York Magazine web site, featuring Jason, the now newly married man.