By 10 a.m. Monday Casey and I were ready and alert and the jingling of Casper�s collar bell in the hallway told us that Amy and James were awake as well.

Although we�d been awake past midnight and into Casey�s birthday, waking up on the actual day brought a new round of �Happy Birthdays� and the usual coffee (for them) and a few phone calls, including Bassett, who didn�t realize we were still in New Orleans. Monday was the most productive morning the one in which we spent the least time mulling around deciding what to do for the day. James looked into the Garden District tours on the Internet and we set out to make the 1:45 p.m. one since the only other one began at 11 a.m., now just 10 minutes away.

First we got lunch at an Italian deli near Tulane on a street with many college residents in the houses. It�s the best Italian in New Orleans, according to Amy and James, who have noticed the lack of such fare in the city. For four people from the northeast, an abundance of good Italian eateries is as expected as the ability to get a good bagel on the corner. But that�s what travel does -- it reminds you just how big and diverse this country is. Amy laments the lack of a decent bagel in Louisiana, just as Matt does in Seattle. I had a friend in college who would look forward to trips home just to get a good bagel.

With time to kill after lunch, James drove us down along the levee where, on the way back, we got behind a slow-moving Chevy, and I took a picture. Get it? A picture of a Chevy down by the levee? Bye, bye Miss American Pie. C�mon, people! The levee is actually the hill built alongside the Mississippi to keep back the flood waters when the river rises, so as we cruised down River Road unable to see the actual river, I sang the chorus to American Pie over and over in my head wondering what, exactly, Don McLean meant when he sang Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry when the levee is actually the dry land meant to keep the river back and not the riverbed itself (when younger, I�d always pictured the levee as a sort of canal). I realize later, though, that the what the lyric probably means is that the top of the levee was dry, that the river was not rising, that there was no imminent flood.

The point of the trip was to drive by the one plantation nearest to the City of New Orleans (hey, another song!), which we did. We came up to the visitors lot, passed it and pulled off the road alongside the historical marker, read it, gazed at the mansion, and turned around. James drove into the parking lot to give us another view of the house and grounds and then we were off again, heading east to get to the Garden District.

We passed under two pipe systems spanning the road high above us. They reached to the river, clearing the levee easily and connecting the riverside to the oil refineries on the other side of the road. New Orleans thrived on oil in the 1980s and there are many residents who want the city to create another corporate identity for itself. Right now there is no major business or industry that calls the city home, nothing to create jobs and an identity other than the popular tourism trade. The pipes were used to get the oil from the tankers on the Mississippi to the complexes on the other side of the road. The were intriguing structures and it occurs to me now that I probably would�ve liked a photo or two, but at the time I was a little tired with the warm sun coming through the rear window heating the car and making me drowsy, so I didn�t think to ask James to pull over for a moment.

In the Garden District we entered a small shopping center built in a former skating rink (though it looked nothing like a skating rink, at least not the part we were in) and inquired at the book store where to meet the tour. �Right outside the shop,� the retailer said. James asked if we paid for the tickets there. �You pay your tour guide,� he said. So while Amy and Casey waited in the long line for the bathroom (a single) in the coffee shop, James and I went into Anne Rice�s doll store, located in the loft above the entrance. The dolls were custom made for the shop and cost thousands of dollars. Photos and t-shirts with Anne Rice�s picture on them were for sale, as were shirts and cards featuring the artwork of her husband Sam. Or is it Stan? I don�t know, nor do I really care.

Our tour guide arrived a little before 1:45 and sat down on a bench and announced, �For those of you here for the tour, I�ll take your money starting with exact change first.� Those with $14 came forward ($12 for seniors and students, and I could�ve said I was a student because she didn�t look, but I�m stupid that way) and recieved a neon-green dot to stick on their jackets identifying themselves as part of the tour. Once the transactions were complete, she introduced herself.

�Hello, I�ll be your guide for this afternoon,� she said in a soft Nawlins drawl. �My name�s Anna Ross -- one name, two words, no hyphen, very southern.�

She assumed, like many New Orleans residents must, that the majority of the tourists were from cold states and then explained that the weather, to her, was cold as she put on her heavy overcoat, scarf and gloves.

The tour started across the corner in Lafayette Cemetery Number 1, a walled cemetery that from the street looked familiar. I recognized it because it is the cemetery used in Double Jeopardy when Ashley Judd is looking for her son and later wakes up in a casket (I have to see the movie again). Anna Ross told us the history and traditions involved with burial in New Orleans, which sits below sea level and cannot sustain bodies beneath the ground. Dig three feet down and you hit muck, continue to six feet and you�ve got a pond. So people are buried in tombs or wall vaults or, becoming popular about 30 years ago, creamated.

A family would buy a wall vault and then have to decide if it would be used for one person or several. If it was one, when that person died, they were embalmed, placed in a coffin, and slid into the vault. If it were for a family, when someone died, he or she would not be embalmed (to help the body decompose faster) before being placed in the coffin in the vault. When another member destined for the vault passed away, the vault would be opened. The coffin inside -- now containing only bones -- would be removed and the bones placed in a burlap sack. The sack would go back into the vault and then the newly deceased would be put in a coffin and slid into the vault, pushing the bag of bones to the back. The coffin of the first person would be broken up and thrown out, because, as you�d expect, it�s pretty grimy.

But all this happened only if the first person had been dead for more than a year and a day. It was considered bad taste to disturb a grave before it had been sealed for a year, and they�d wait the extra day so as not to disturb the grave on the first anniversary of the person�s death. Should someone die before the year and a day (or several people die at once, such as in a fire), the other bodies would be placed in a separate vault until such time had passed as would allow them to be moved into the family vault.

Playing in cemeteries is a way of life when you grow up in New Orleans. Anne Rice did it as a child (in this very cemetery), but we were warned, naturally, not to walk on parts of the tombs not meant for treading. So when they filmed the scene of Ashley Judd waking up inside a tomb, it was not done in any of the actual tombs in the cemetery, but in a new one built specifically for the movie on a small undeveloped plot in the cemetery. We also saw, in one corner, four tombs in the section known as the �secret garden,� where Brad Pitt danced in Interview with the Vampire. Another interesting plot was that of a Civil War veteran originally from Maine. His wish was to be buried beneath six feet of Maine soil, so his plot is raised four feet off the ground. Dirt was brought down from Maine and the veteran was buried beneath it in a New Orleans cemetery.

Around this time a photogenic cat came trotting through the tombs and craved the attention given to him by some of the people on the tour. He was spotted at one site and followed the tour to a few more as we made our way through the cemetery. Anna Ross then took us to one of the roads bisecting the grounds (two cut down the middle and intersected in the center), where two green dumpsters sat near a closed gate to the outside road. Having seen a grave opened that morning for a new internment and now closed, she lifted the lids to one of the dumpsters to show us a newly discarded coffin, a feature certainly not available to all tours.

It was now 2:45, 15 minutes after the cemetery was scheduled to close, and one of the workers whistled to us to leave. We were forced out the opposite side to where Anna Ross wanted to take us, so we walked around it to the tourquoise restaurant on the corner: Commander's Palace, where Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse got their starts and there�s a dessert you have to pre-order because it�s so popular. I think it's the bread pudding.

From there we continued down the street, passing numbered cross-streets in descending order. The houses were large and elegant but crammed into small lots with gates around them. One, with a spotless sidewalk (as opposed to those strewn with leaves that we�d been walking over), was Trent Reznor�s. When the Nine Inch Nails frontman moved in, the �little old ladies� in the neighorhood (as Anna Ross called them) were skeptical. Two approached him asking if he�d be so kind as to host some fundraisers. He replied, �Yes ma�am,� and �Yes ma�am,� according to Anna Ross, who then looked over at the house and noticed a black Tahoe parked in the street. �And, oh, he�s here. That�s his black Explorer (she got it wrong). I know everybody�s cars around here. Reznor immediately became the darling of the neighborhood. �He�s such a nice boy,� Anna Ross said, �they don�t care what his music sounds like or what his lyrics say. And, my, he is cute! All the little old ladies are trying to marry off their daughters and grand daughters.�

Down the block, Anna Ross showed us the house Courtney Love wanted to buy during her stalking of Reznor, but after she insulted the neighborhood, people made sure it didn�t happen.

A gigantic house on Second Street was under renovation, bought by a New Jersey couple who intended to fix it up nice and then live in an apartment in the carriage house. What I would give to be able to afford to live in the carriage house.

Crossing Second Street (where the tiles on the corner fell four short and only read �ND� as Casey pointed out) we continued down the block toward First Street. A limousine had just pulled up in front of one house and two men and a woman walked through the gate. �Oh, look,� Anna Ross said, �There�s Anne Rice walking into her house.� One woman behind me started frantically searching for her camera but was too late. As a groundskeeper closed the gate, he looked up at us, then turned to his coworker and said, �She got in just in time. Here comes a tour.� They watched us looking at the house from across the street for a while and then went around back.

The sun shone through a window on the limo (license plate OPHANIM), illuminated three decanters on the shelf. After the groundskeepers departed, we crossed the street and stood on the sidewalk in front of the house. It�s a house Rice admired for a long time, the one she used for The Witching Hour. When it came on the market, she whipped out her checkbook, as Anna Ross explained, and bought it. But now that she owned it, she realized some of her descriptions (which she�d been forced to conceive herself) were inaccurate. The book was already being printed, but she halted the process and rewrote some details to match the actual house. She also used some literary license to take a historical incident from a house down the block and put it in this one: that of a body being discovered in the ceiling between the second floor and the attic.

Apparently, according to Anna Ross, the walls in Rice�s house are white, with pens readily available. When she has an idea, there is no need to search for pen and paper; she simply writes it on the wall and it�s later transfered onto the computer (and the wall washed). The house across the street is for sale, too, for something like $2.5 million.

Down the block we learned the story of the body in the ceiling. It was found one afternoon when Anna Ross was in high school and at 5 p.m. that evening, everyone was glued to the news. A press conference was held on the sidewalk where we stood and the police (or D.A. or whomever) stood in front of the camera, confirmed the discovery of a body, and that the case was closed. That�s it. Case, well, closed. No indication of whether it was male or female, clothed or not, old or recent. Speculation ran rampant, and there is still no explanation. Anna Ross�s theory is that it was likely a mistress who was discovered. Back in the day, rich families would have their house in the city and their vacation home in a fashionable resort area. The wife and kids would go and spend the summer months there, with dad joining them on weekends and during a week or two off from work. But those old-time southern gentlemen couldn�t be expected to go without a woman�s touch for all that time, so they often had the lady on the side. At least that�s what Anna Ross said.

Diagonally across the street is the house used in JFK as D.A. Jim Garrison�s home, and next to it is the home of Archie Manning, former NFL quarterback and father to the Colts� Peyton and Mississippi�s Eli.

Back out on the main street (the name of which I can�t recall) where we�d started the tour a few blocks ago, we turned into the home stretch. Anna Ross pointed out more houses and history and finished in front of one property surrounded by an iron fence elaborately decorated with corn stalks. She explained all the symbolism involved, which basically screamed, �I�m rich!� It was there the tour ended, and Amy, James, Casey and I went back to the coffee shop to warm up. It was sunny and pleasant for the two hours we walked around the Garden District, but as the day wore on, the cold started to get to us. After coffee, we looked in a photo gallery and at pictures of the renovation of the skating rink into a shopping center and then went to the car to go to the airport.

After saying our goodbyes on the curb, check-in was again a breeze, though we were pulled aside for random searches at the security checkpoint. A woman ran the wand over Casey, then a guy did the same for me, though our bags remained unsearched, which seemed strange to me. I�d think that the point of a random search would be to go through the bags for anything that might not come up clearly on the x-ray. During Casey�s search, her calves set off the wand, though it might have been the metal lace loops on her orange canvas Chuck Taylors. During my search, the center of my chest and back caused the wand to beep, confusing both me and the security guy. I don�t wear any kind of metal chain around my neck, nor do I have anything implanted in my chest that I�m aware of. Maybe I have metallic chest hair. He also made me undo my belt when the buckle set off the wand. Then I had to put one foot on a stepstool (as Casey did) and he checked one leg, then the other. After that, he said, �OK, now you�re other leg,� which, of course, I�d already done. I started to say just that when he said, �Oh, we already did that. Are you done?� How the hell should I know? But I figured I was, so I said, �Yes.�

The problem with such efficient checking in is that we were left with more than an hour on the B Concourse at New Orleans International Airport. The few places to eat weren�t too promising, so I settled for a slice of pizza and a Coke. We saw four other rather young people there who had been on our tour a few hours earlier. After I ate, we walked down to our gate at the end of the concourse and were there in plenty of time, this time avoiding a summons over the public address system.

Taking off after dark, I looked out the window at the lights as we rose over the Louisiana wetlands. Below us, the cluster of yellow lights abruptly stopped and the tiny lights of the cars traveling through the blackness looked like fireflies. They were the only visible lights over most of the land below, making it impossible to tell if it was the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain or I-10 cutting through the swamps. Most of the cars cruised steadily in a straight line, but some, just beyond the edge of the golden lights of the city, darted off in arcs and circles, taking exits into the darkness.

We flipped through the SkyMall catalog looking at silly products we�ll never buy and then dozed off for a little while after eating our pretzels. After reading a little, I spent the latter part of the trip gazing out the window at the lights below. One cluster of lights could�ve been anything from Knoxville to Charleston to Raleigh to Richmond. At one point, I noticed the two towers of a nuclear power plant and soon I had the feeling we were over central New Jersey. As the plane banked on its final approach, I realized we were just over the Raritan River, the Driscoll Bridge and Garden State Parkway below. I recognized the toll booths, then gazed out across the water toward Sandy Hook and the Highlands area, where I�m from. I pointed it out to Casey and we watched as we passed over Staten Island and saw the Verrazano Bridge�s blue lights stand out against the golden ones below. We saw the Empire State Building�s red, white and blue lights standing tall above Manhattan and soon we were on the ground again, back home in New Jersey.