Best tour of the entire trip!
“Over the course of our stay in New Orleans, my friend and I did three tours with this company. (what can I say? We were in full-on tourist mode. Tours are a great way to see the city and actually know what you’re looking at, instead of wandering around aimlessly and guessing). We did the Haunted French Quarter Tour, the New Orleans City Tour, and the Cemetery/Voodoo Tour.
The Haunted French Quarter tour was awesome- it was a small group (probably because it was a Thursday night and raining). But I saw tours on Friday and Saturday night that had 20-30 people in the group. Boo. Not fun. Our tour was personal and our guide, Leon (I think that was his name) was great. He certainly knows his history- but he presents it in a fun, informative way. It was based more in history than sensationalism, which I prefer. Leon seemed to have a real respect for the stories he was telling, and not just some guy rattling off a script.
The Cemetery/Voodoo tour was cool, but my least favorite of the three. Our tour guide, Anna Ross, was great- she has a fantastic sense of humor and is very easygoing, but I just got a little bored. I felt like all I really wanted to do was walk around the cemetery (St. Louis #1), and explore and take pictures. Guess I should have just done that rather than take a tour. Oh well. And there wasn’t really a Voodoo part, we went to visit a Voodoo priestess, but the whole thing was really confusing and it felt like the priestess didn’t really know what to say to us.
And my absolute FAVORITE tour (yes, all-caps, because I loved it that much) was the city tour with Randy. Okay, seriously people, if you only do one tour in NOLA, you must do this! Randy is AWESOME. Not enough words to describe how much I love that man. He is flat-out hilarious, and definitely knew his New Orleans history. It didn’t feel like a tour at all, it felt like I was having a good friend show me around. He’s so in love with New Orleans and it makes a world of difference! He answered every question we had (even my obnoxious ones about Brad Pitt), taught us the right way to say ‘Praline’, and we even stopped in City Park to get some Pralines! He had restaurant recommendations, told us a little bit about his Katrina experience, and was just generally an amazingly fantastic tour guide.
It’s a three hour tour, and he drives you around in a van, which was nice, because there’s no way you’d get to see everything we saw if you were walking. We went to Metairie Cemetery, which is a lot more impressive than some of the other ones (and Anne Rice’s family tomb is there!), drove through the Marigny, down Frenchmen, through the Garden District, City Park, Lakeview…we saw it all! It was so great to get a more comprehensive tour of New Orleans, rather than just a French Quarter or Garden District tour. I felt like I really got to know the city. (And consequently fell in love with it, but that’s another story for another day…)
All in all, this was a great tour company.
Alright, alright- I will end my gushing. But this is such a great company, and their tour guides are real, genuine residents of the city who love it and want to share it with you, and I definitely felt that. Go with Historic New Orleans Walking Tours and you will definitely not be disappointed!”
– Kate, Chicago, Illinois
