 |
| Sing the River on the Mississippi River levee in Baton Rouge. |
Part 20 ended in Lafayette after dinner in neighboring Scott, where boudin and gumbo had made a persuasive case for staying put. We resisted. The previous leg had brought us from San Antonio to Lafayette via Houston and Beaumont, and Shehzadi—our Toyota Tundra—was ready for the road east.
The day's route was simple on paper: I-10 to Baton Rouge, a stop beside the Mississippi River, then New Orleans. By evening we expected to trade interstate miles for a St. Charles Avenue streetcar and Bourbon Street jazz. Louisiana had apparently decided one transportation system per day was not ambitious enough.
Trans-America Overland Part 21: Lafayette to New Orleans via Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River — Post Summary
This part takes us from Lafayette to Baton Rouge, where we meet the Mississippi again, walk the levee, see Sing the River and eat rooftop sushi, then continue to New Orleans for our St. Charles Avenue lodging, a streetcar ride to Canal Street, and jazz with jambalaya on Bourbon Street.
| What's Covered | |
| 🌊 | Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River — levee walk, Sing the River and rooftop views |
| 🛣️ | Baton Rouge to New Orleans on I-10 — east across southern Louisiana |
| 🚋 | St. Charles Avenue Streetcar to the French Quarter — Canal Street arrival |
| 🎷 | Bourbon Street Jazz and Jambalaya — live music and dinner |
| 🏠 | Home Base on St. Charles Avenue — first New Orleans night |
| ➡️ | Next Stop — Algiers Point and the French Quarter in Part 22 |
We left Lafayette in Shehzadi, our Toyota Tundra, and followed I-10 east to Baton Rouge before continuing to New Orleans. In Baton Rouge we stopped by the Mississippi River, walked the levee, saw Sing the River and ate lunch above the riverfront. By evening, we had parked near St. Charles Avenue, traded the truck for a streetcar, and reached Bourbon Street for jazz and jambalaya.
Method: Overland by truck, then streetcar in New Orleans
Distance / Time: Road leg / New Orleans overnight
Themes: Mississippi River · Baton Rouge public art · St. Charles streetcar · Bourbon Street jazz
Vehicle: Shehzadi (2024 Toyota Tundra)
Route at a Glance
- Lafayette to Baton Rouge — I-10 east to the Mississippi River
- Baton Rouge riverfront — Sing the River and the levee
- Shaw Center rooftop — sushi lunch and downtown river views
- Baton Rouge to New Orleans — I-10 east through southern Louisiana
- St. Charles Avenue — lodging and streetcar ride to Canal Street
- Bourbon Street — live jazz and jambalaya
- St. Charles Avenue — return to our New Orleans home base
Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River
Between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, I-10 crosses the Atchafalaya Basin. The National Park Service calls it America's largest river swamp, while U.S. Geological Survey research describes the basin as the largest remaining forested wetland in the contiguous United States. From the cab, that scale was easy to underestimate. Trees, water and elevated highway simply kept arriving. Louisiana had found a way to make a huge wetland look like a sequence of interstate views.
By late morning we reached Baton Rouge and stopped for fuel before heading downtown. The city's name reaches back to Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville's 1699 account of a red pole along the river. Modern city history treats one common explanation cautiously: the pole may have marked a boundary between Bayou Goula and Houma hunting grounds. A city called Red Stick beginning with an actual red stick is unusually efficient branding.
 |
| Shehzadi at a Top Fuel stop in Baton Rouge. |
The Mississippi brought the route back to familiar water. We had first reached the Mississippi in St. Louis, and the next leg included a river cruise beneath the Gateway Arch. Baton Rouge gave us the same river much farther south, wider in our memory even before we reached the levee.
Sing the River
We parked Shehzadi near the riverfront and walked onto the levee. There stood Sing the River, artist Po Shu Wang's 14-foot stainless-steel sculpture, commissioned as a Rotary Club of Baton Rouge gift to the city. High Mississippi water delayed its installation until November 2019, with the dedication following in December. The river had made the installation schedule about itself, which seemed on brand.
 |
| The Vagabond Couple with Sing the River and the Mississippi River. |
The clever part is the sound. Sing the River is connected to Mississippi River measurements, and changing river data affects the tones it produces. The tones are not wind-powered; the river data does the work. Baton Rouge gave the Mississippi an audio output instead.
 |
| Sing the River overlooking barges on the Mississippi River. |
From the levee we watched barges moving along the working river while the sculpture caught the light. The piece made more sense there than it would have in a gallery: water level, shipping traffic and public space were all in the same frame. The Mississippi was scenery, infrastructure and data source at once.
 |
| The Mississippi River and I-10 bridge from the Baton Rouge levee. |
Rooftop Sushi and Baton Rouge River Views
Lunch changed the angle completely. We went to Tsunami Sushi on the sixth floor of the Shaw Center for the Arts, above the LSU Museum of Art on the fifth floor. After several days of heavy road food, spicy tuna rolls beside a river view were a useful reset. Barges drifted below while downtown Baton Rouge arranged itself into a surprisingly effective sightseeing menu.
 |
| Louisiana Art & Science Museum and the riverfront from the Shaw Center rooftop. |
The white castle below us was Louisiana's Old State Capitol, not the modern tower farther north. James H. Dakin designed the old statehouse in what he called castellated Gothic. Construction began in the late 1840s; the building was later gutted by fire during the Civil War and reconstructed in the 1880s. State government apparently decided a capitol could use battlements.
 |
| Louisiana's Old State Capitol in downtown Baton Rouge. |
Another rooftop landmark was The Crest at Galvez Plaza. The stainless-steel structure was completed in 2013 as both public sculpture and performance stage. From above, the looping form looked less like a conventional stage roof and more like somebody had asked a ribbon to solve an engineering problem.
 |
| The Crest at Galvez Plaza, seen during our rooftop lunch. |
The broader downtown view included the River Center Branch Library, courthouse buildings and the civic core around the Shaw Center. We kept the photograph broad rather than assigning every window a job. Rooftop sightseeing is at its best when it does not require a municipal organization chart.
 |
| Downtown Baton Rouge seen from our rooftop lunch. |
St. James Episcopal Church added a different scale to the skyline. The congregation dates to 1844, but the present Gothic Revival church came later, in the 1890s, with the first services there in 1896. That distinction matters: congregations can be older than their buildings, a fact architecture captions routinely try to forget.
 |
| St. James Episcopal Church in downtown Baton Rouge. |
The white riverfront hotel began as the Heidelberg Hotel in 1927. National Register records identify Edward F. Neild as architect and tie the building closely to Huey Long-era Baton Rouge politics. Architectural labels vary: the National Register nomination calls the Heidelberg vaguely Romanesque, while later hotel material uses Art Deco. The building-specific sources do not support the old post's Beaux-Arts label. Today the historic building forms part of the Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center. Even a sushi lunch had managed to acquire a governor subplot.
 |
| Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center on the Mississippi riverfront. |
Farther along the river, the Port of Greater Baton Rouge supplied the industrial half of the view. The port sits at the head of deepwater navigation on the Mississippi and connects oceangoing shipping with barges, rail and roads. From the rooftop, cranes and cargo ships were a reminder that the river was still doing serious work while we were debating another sushi roll.
 |
| Port of Greater Baton Rouge cargo facilities on the Mississippi River. |
Baton Rouge to New Orleans on I-10
After lunch we returned to Shehzadi and continued east on I-10. Baton Rouge fell behind, and the road carried us through southern Louisiana toward New Orleans. Water appeared more often beside the highway, bridges became part of the rhythm, and Spanish moss showed up in the trees. We did not need a dramatic transition. The geography was handling it.
St. Charles Avenue Streetcar to the French Quarter
By late afternoon we reached New Orleans and parked near our lodging by St. Charles Avenue and Euterpe. Shehzadi had spent the day carrying us across Louisiana; now she could take the evening off. We showered, changed clothes and walked to the streetcar stop.
 |
| Historic streetcar on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. |
St. Charles Avenue gave us a transit lesson with wood seats and a bell. New Orleans RTA dates the line to 1835 and calls it the world's oldest continuously operating streetcar line; the Library of Congress uses the same distinction. That made it part of our route rather than a museum exhibit. A railway older than the internal-combustion era had just solved our parking problem.
We rode toward Canal Street as evening settled over the oaks. Canal marks the edge of the French Quarter, and Bourbon Street was only a short walk away.
 |
| Canal Street viewed from Bourbon Street in New Orleans. |
RTA's Jazzy Passes cover streetcars, buses and ferries, which was useful because Part 22 would require more than one kind of vehicle.
Bourbon Street Jazz and Jambalaya
We walked into a jazz club with open-air seating, following the brass spilling onto the sidewalk. Inside were horns, piano and upright bass, played without microphones. We ordered jambalaya and another round of boudin. Lafayette had started the food argument; New Orleans was refusing to let it end.
 |
| Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. |
New Orleans had already changed flags several times before the United States was very old: French, Spanish, French again, then American in 1803. The buildings tell a less tidy story. Fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed much of the earlier French colonial fabric, so most surviving French Quarter buildings came later and reflect several architectural traditions rather than one national template.
The music was mixed long before our dinner. National Park Service histories trace New Orleans jazz through contact among African, Caribbean and European musical practices. Congo Square became an especially important gathering place for enslaved and free people of color, with music and dance that fed the city's later sound. Our club was not a museum reconstruction. It was simply the evening version of a much older New Orleans habit of putting different musical languages in the same room.
 |
| Jambalaya on Bourbon Street. |
The jambalaya arrived hot with garlic bread, and the band kept moving. Around us, people danced, clapped and raised glasses between songs. We stayed long enough for the road day to feel very far away. Shehzadi had carried us from Lafayette to New Orleans; Bourbon Street was handling the final few hundred yards with brass.
Home Base on St. Charles Avenue
Late that night we rode back toward St. Charles Avenue. Our feet were tired and our ears were still carrying the club with them. Outside the lodging, a small brown lizard occupied the pebbled ground with the confidence of a resident who had not paid for parking.
 |
| A small brown lizard outside our St. Charles Avenue lodging. |
It offered no useful clues about its family tree, so we left its parental status unresolved. This was only our first night of the New Orleans stay, and the truck would remain parked while the city supplied streetcars, ferries and walking routes.
This leg compressed Louisiana into one road day without pretending the state could be summarized that quickly. Lafayette had sent us east with boudin still fresh in memory; Baton Rouge gave us the Mississippi again, this time with public art and barges; New Orleans ended the drive by making Shehzadi temporarily unnecessary. We had crossed most of the continent by truck, then reached a city where a streetcar, a short walk and a jazz club were the sensible tools. The expedition kept changing scale: interstate miles in the morning, a river levee at lunch, brass and piano by night.
Next Stop — Algiers Point and the French Quarter
The next full day would keep Shehzadi parked. We would take the streetcar back downtown, cross the Mississippi by ferry to Algiers Point, return through the French Quarter and spend more of the night around New Orleans jazz. That continuation is in Part 22: ferry to Algiers Point and another day in New Orleans.
Our reference route maps for the USA and Mexico overland loop are Map-1 and Map-2.
Until next time,
- The Vagabond Couple and Shehzadi
