Final Day on the Viking Mississippi Cruise – New Orleans

After many, many articles, we reach the end of the line! This extended review of the Viking Mississippi cruise from St Paul in Minnesota ends in New Orleans with this article. The initial overview of the cruise can be found here, and the previous day spent on an airboat ride in the Atchafalaya Basin near Baton Rouge is here.

We had to be up and ready to leave the boat by 8am on the final day and were taken in groups via coach to the Westin Hotel by the French Quarter for our final night before leaving to fly home on the following day. Although it was early in the morning, we did get our rooms pretty quickly and a light lunch was provided. The passengers departing on the boat to go north were also in the hotel and you could (sort of) eat in their room if you wanted. We all look alike!

Our first outing was then a stroll along the riverbank to the French Quarter. We had been to New Orleans before, maybe 20 years ago, and all I remember was that it snowed and was pretty cold! This October day was sunny and warm – perfect. As this was the Halloween weekend, it was quite crowded and many homes nicely decorated for the festivities. Some people as well….

But basically, New Orleans was it’s usual colorful and very pretty city and we tried to see some of the streets that are less full of tourists with plastic glasses of beer!

As you can see, we started our stroll reasonably early and there were not many tourists around even in the normally busy areas, and the warm sun and blue skies really helped with some of these photos.

The Cathedral of St Louis, King of France, is right there on the square with some noisy entertainers outside, but inside, it is a lovely calm place:

And there were few visitors, which gave me a chance to put my camera on the floor of the main aisle to capture this photo of the fantastic ceiling painting above:

Each street has its own charm, but I was particularly taken with this brick building with its ornate balconies. This was on the corner of Chartres and Governor Nicholls Streets. I did remove a trash container and a couple of pedestrians!

Some of the homes are absolutely gorgeous with the way they have decorated the wrought iron balconies with hanging baskets. This one, known as LaBranche House is on Royal Street and is one of the most photographed buildings in New Orleans.

It is difficult to show the full building with the narrow streets, but with a series of vertical images stitched together, you get some idea of the scale of the house.

With that, and aching feet, I made my way back to the hotel and left Bourbon Steet to the Halloween Revellers! But I was up at sunrise to see if I could capture the sun shining on the spires of the Cathedral by Jackson Square:

There were a few people still around from the night before watching the sunrise, but I was pretty much on my own. We had to leave the hotel around 9:30am to catch a shuttle to the airport (the shuttles ran every 30 minutes and you chose the one that fitted best with your flights.) But on my way back, I did manage to capture the Monument to the Immigrant with the sunrise behind it. A lovely end to the cruise.

Final Thoughts on the Viking Mississippi Cruise

In my very first article about this cruise from St Paul to New Orleans, I decided to wait until I had written the full set and thought about each day before deciding what I thought about the cruise. I still have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Firstly, it is very expensive for the number of days, and to be honest, the scenery along the river is not that great – in fact, you can rarely see much more than the river and its banks. We were extremely lucky, I think, with the weather. Apart from the first day in St Paul when it poured down with rain, we rarely even needed a coat on many days. The places you visit are not that old (not in European terms at least) and are more commercial centers than tourist centers, with a couple of exceptions and if it had been raining, there would have been little to see in some of the more northern towns. There is some information and visits for Civil War buffs but because of the age of many of the passengers, there is a lot of coach time and not much foot time! I can imagine that people who don’t want to fly long distances to foreign lands, would enjoy it, but if you are still comfortable flying to more interesting places, perhaps a cruise there might be more intriguing. Our next cruise is on the Nile in Egypt, so it will be interesting to compare and contrast them!

Anyway, I hope you find this series of articles interesting. I have written a few more about Viking Cruises – you can find them here.

We cruised with Viking for several years before I found out about a discount that we had been missing. I’ve written an article about those cruise credits you can obtain here.

And without being too overt with my salesmanship, my photos are available as prints – more details here!