Why New Orleans is the Perfect City With Teens

By Rhonda Carrier

We’re in Café du Monde, agreeing, as clouds of icing sugar waft out into the air around us, that the beignets served here (since as far back as the early 1860s) are in themselves reason enough to come to New Orleans. But then we start thinking of all the other food we’ve had here – shrimp and grits, pickle plates, fried green tomatoes, crawfish po’boys, crawfish omelettes, crawfish beignets, crawfish hot dogs, crawfish étouffée, gumbo, oysters, and Italian muffuletta sandwiches, and that’s just off the top of my head – and we decide that NOLA is actually foodie heaven on Earth.

‘Our Wicked Women of New Orleans Tour took us deep in the often dark heart of the history of the women who helped shape what became known as the most haunted city in the USA, from Ursuline nuns to Voodoo queen Marie Laveau and socialite and serial killer Madame LaLaurie.’

Sequin-encrusted drag queens waving from wrought-iron balconies (some decorated with twinkling lights and/or with signs saying the likes of ‘Hail Satan’), music spilling out the streets from jazz joints and bars and clubs, couples twerking in broad daylight on Bourbon Street, alfresco brass bands and other street musicians and poets, tarot card, palm, crystal and psychic readers set up at rickety tables all around the main Jackson Square, foot massage parlours, tattoo parlours, trams, neon-lit supercars, flea markets, artisan collectives, and indie boutiques selling all kinds of quirky art, fashion and souvenirs… All these and more make New Orleans an absolute dream of a city to visit with teens.  

We amble around, dipping in and out of shops selling T-shirts with hilarious (often lewd) slogans, voodoo dolls, vintage clothes and homewares, affordable art, oracle cards… The list goes on and on. Among our favourite happen-upons are Disco Warehouse, The French Market flea market, Sassy Magick, and Vice & Craft Swamp Rags. In short, New Orleans is the kind of place where you need to arrive with lots of space in your case for everything you’ll want to bring home.

They may not be able to take in all of its legendary nightlife (for most bars you need to be 18+ to enter, and 21 is the legal drinking age), but there’s so much else to do, you’ll be pushed to pack it all in anyway. There are lots of great museums, including the Historic New Orleans Collection, National WWII Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans Jazz Museum, Backstreet Cultural Museum, and New Orleans Pharmacy Museum – all fascinating. But you can have an equally good time just wandering, shopping and sitting by the banks of the Mississippi, watching passing steam boats (or hopping aboard one).

New Orleans warrants a good few days of exploring. Perhaps controversially, I recommend going outside Mardi Gras in February. New Orleans’ Carnival – the USA’s biggest and most boisterous –is definitely a bucket-list experience. But there’s also a very good argument for coming when New Orleans is not so frenetically busy and full on, to appreciate what a fantastic city it is in its own right – unique, with a searing history of fires, epidemics, colonisation, oppression, torture, Voodoo and of course the modern-day trauma of Hurricane Katrina. In some senses, as in high-velocity Naples with its ever-present threat of an eruption by Vesuvius, many people live here as if it’s their last day – there's the same carpe diem vibe.

We highly recommend, here as elsewhere, a city walking tour – always a good way to bone up on history in the company of a local expert armed with the juiciest details. We actually did two walks. The first was a French Quarter Walking Tour with a lovely man called Dave from Historic New Orleans Tours, whose evident passion for his city shone through as he regaled us with tales of everything from Creole culture to Louis Armstrong.

The second was a Wicked Women of New Orleans Tour with a brilliant lady called Tanya, who took us deep in the often dark heart of the history of the women who helped shape what became known as the most haunted city in the USA, from Ursuline nuns to Voodoo queen Marie Laveau and socialite and serial killer Madame LaLaurie.

New Orleans can be very intense, so we recommend doing as we did and branching out for a few days into wider Louisiana, where things are a bit more laidback. We did a little road trip out to Lafayette, where Atchafalaya Basin Landing & Airboat Swamp Tours took us out on a thrilling ride through this vast wetlands and river delta area in search of some of its alligator population amidst a landscape that felt almost prehistoric, filled with horizontally rooted cypress trees swathed in Spanish moss.

We then set out for Saint Francisville, stopping en route at the Audubon State Historic Site for a moving insight into both plantation life and the slave trade that it was built on. Saint Francisville also stands out for its late 1700s and early 1800s homes and churches, and for The Myrtles – one of America's most haunted homes, now a charming inn with entertaining ghost tours and a fantastic restaurant.

In New Orleans, we highly recommend the Hotel Monteleone, family-owned for several generations, with a rich literary history, the unique revolving Carousel Bar and a rooftop pool far above the hubbub of the street. In Lafayette, the DoubleTree by Hilton is a reliable option with an outdoor pool open ’til late into the evening. And in Saint Francisville, the Saint Francisville Inn is a great choice for those travelling with kids aged 13 and up, oozing character and with another outdoor pool.

We can book you a trip to New Orleans and Louisiana with kids, perhaps as part of a wider USA family holiday. Call us on 020 3633 0653 or message us on our enquiry form.