By ROBERT N. JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
Published September 4, 2005
What's this - stories on blissing out in the Keys and seeing Europe from a Danube River cruise? With last week's catastrophe wrought on our regional neighbors, you may be thinking, why are there stories in the paper today ignoring "the real world"?
We aren't ignoring the suffering and devastation.
After Katrina hit, I decided you also should read about the future of tourism on the upper Gulf Coast. But after leaving unanswered phone messages and e-mails for friends and associates in the travel industry along a 200-mile stretch of the region, I realized even before New Orleans had to be evacuated that no one could answer my question:
When will your area again be ready for visitors?
No one knows when the gamblers and the golfers will be able to board the chartered flights out of St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport for the quick trip and cheap rooms in Biloxi and Gulfport. Tourism there had surged in the past decade, after gambling was legalized and farm land was converted to dozens of golf courses.
Although tourism was new to that Mississippi region, it came early in the 20th century in fabled New Orleans. Yet perhaps you had not visited, considering it as merely the place where drunks crowded the French Quarter before the Sugar Bowl game, or where women flashed their breasts in exchange for beads tossed from Mardi Gras floats.
If you never traveled to New Orleans, then you missed out on a place where gourmands and fans of jazz, zydeco and Cajun music could find satisfaction at a different place every night.
You never window-shopped the antique stores on Royal Street. You haven't wondered at the plainspoken heroism showcased in the National D-Day Museum, or learned about pioneering jazz combos, as told in the old Arsenal.
Your kids never got excited seeing the albino alligators in the acclaimed Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, or played in the Children's Museum.
You never fed your dark side by strolling the above-ground cemeteries, prowling the French Quarter's voodoo shops, or gazing through the fence at gothic novelist Anne Rice's former home in the lush Garden District.
And if you did enjoy any of those treats particular to New Orleans, or if you came just for a Sugar Bowl, a Super Bowl or a Mardi Gras parade, then you are even more saddened by last week's disaster. Maybe you even recall residents you met in a city called the Big Easy, for its good-natured way of life.
No one knows when you will be able to visit the city again.
There will be a recovery, of course, but so much of historic and cultural import that drew tourists will have changed. Those centuries-old buildings can only tolerate being under water for so long before their timbers and walls crumble.
Meanwhile, life goes on for those of us who aren't suffering the sudden, violent loss of loved ones or dealing with the immense uncertainties of rebuilding. We are the lucky ones, and we are the ones who will still want to see the world away from where we live - the landscapes, the monuments, the museums, the differing cultures, foods and lifestyles.
For you, there is today's Travel section, with stories about the Keys, the Danube, Lake Michigan. And when the time is right, there will be stories again about New Orleans.
