New Orleans, Louisiana 2024- Part 1- City Park & Audubon Aquarium
City Park & Audubon Museums
March, 2024
New Orleans Museum of Art 1
Cafe Du Monde
Audubon Aquarium
Audubon Insectarium
City Park
New Orleans City Park is home to the New Orleans Botanic Garden, New Orleans Museum of Art, a Café Du Monde, Mini-Golf, and more. It can easily take up an entire NOLA itinerary day for any family, and this was our second visit to the park.
On a chilly Saturday March morning, we chose to save time and took a ride-share from our Central Business District (CBD) hotel for roughly $25.
A short walk from NOMA is the City Park location of Café Du Monde. While the wait for a table in the original French Quarter can be hours, in City Park we waited just a few minutes to purchase our traditional chicory + coffee drink and beignets. The queue to order also took us past the staff making the sugary confections. We easily found seating indoors; outdoor tables were also available.
We spent the first two of the morning at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Sculpture Park, including lunch in Café Noma. The restaurant can be accessed from City Park without paying Museum admission and offers flatbreads, salads, snacks, desserts and drinks.
A short walk from NOMA is the City Park location of Café Du Monde. While the wait for a table in the original French Quarter can be hours, in City Park we waited just a few minutes to purchase our traditional chicory + coffee drink and beignets. The queue to order also took us past the staff making the sugary confections. We easily found seating indoors; outdoor tables were also available.
If you consider the Canal Street Streetcar public transportation route from City Park back to downtown New Orleans, the length of time can vary greatly depending on the departure time of the next trolley. So, while it looked like a 40-minute ride on our App, the time moving along the 5-mile route was only 20 minutes. Exact change was required, and because we didn’t have it, we received a ticket with the difference for our next ride. Normally the ride would have taken us closer to our next destination, the Audubon Aquarium, but the line was down for maintenance along a downtown section of Canal Street.
Audubon Aquarium & Insectarium
Audubon Aquarium
The Audubon Aquarium is part of a group of three museums that also includes the Audubon Zoo and the Insectarium. If we were visiting all three in the same day we would have purchased the all-attraction combo pass, but with just an afternoon we chose to only visit the Aquarium and Insectarium, both located in the same waterfront location. Like our first visit in 2014, we found the Aquarium to be extremely busy at our 2:00pm arrival, so we spent the first hour only visiting exhibits that were less crowded. We returned at 4:15pm (last entry was 4:30pm) and were able to revisit some of the tanks and spend as much time as we wanted before closing.
Audubon Insectarium
The Audubon Aquarium is part of a group of three museums that also includes the Audubon Zoo and the Insectarium. If we were visiting all three in the same day we would have purchased the all-attraction combo pass, but with just an afternoon we chose to only visit the Aquarium and Insectarium, both located in the same waterfront location. Like our first visit in 2014, we found the Aquarium to be extremely busy at our 2:00pm arrival, so we spent the first hour only visiting exhibits that were less crowded. We returned at 4:15pm (last entry was 4:30pm) and were able to revisit some of the tanks and spend as much time as we wanted before closing.
The butterfly pavilion was the most popular section, and it was one of the most populated of the many that we’ve visited, but in variety and number of butterflies.
Museum staff in the Bug Appetite shared the environmental and nutritional values of eating insects. Despite fully recognizing the benefits of the world adopting a more bug-based diet, we declined the offer to try cookies made with crickets,
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