M’Orlins

The WWII museum is brilliant, but you’d have to believe that the Yanks won the war by themselves. Whilst there are a few passing references to other participants (Allies) the focus is definitely on what America did. It is a HUGE musem spread over several buildings….

and whilst I only captured a bit of the outside its when you get inside that you can appreciate the scale…

yeah I know it’s very ‘plane’ but these are just hanging from the ceiling everywhere. This is really a big kids bedroom. The entire museum follows this pattern – its big in every way….

but all of the various displays of individual theatres of both the war in Europe and Pacific are so fragmented it is impossible to get a photographic overview. Suffice to say they are both telling and moving – there is no softness, the stories tell it like it was.

This museum is really worth a visit but you do need to devote at the very least a full day to it, possibly even more. Despite its Americacintricity I found it very moving.

I think this is Saturday and we’re off to the Whitney Plantation. I know it was a bloody early start as we had to meet the tour bus at another hotel further up the road at 8.00am. We were actually early and the concierge at the Hotel Modern, Geoff, took pity on us and invited us in for breakfast. He also booked us a bus tour for  Monday. Very accommodating and friendly. Anyway the bus finally arrived at 8.30am and we headed off to the plantation.

The Whitney Plantation is billed as a tour ‘from the slaves perspective’. The present owners aquired it a few years ago and have turned it into something of a shrine to the slave labour of its history. It is certainly interesting and somewhat enlightning. There are memorials set up to remember the 100,ooo or so slaves brought to Lousinia and seperate memorials to the slaves engaged on this plantation. Much of the infrastructure is original or has been replanted from elsewhere to represent the period of its early operation (mid 1800’s) and our guide took us through all of the history…

This was a sugar plantation and in its day all of the cropping and processing to refinement was done on site by slaves. They tell us the average life of a slave in the field was just 7 years and they were put to work by age 10. Horrendous. The domestic staff apparently fared much better though.

An interesting observation by our guide however was ‘America was built on the slave economy, that it owes its success and wealth to the slave labour of the past’.

There’s more to N’orlins yet. We’re presently in Orlando after several days in Daytona Beach where we had no connectivity so I’m trying hard to catch up. California wine is catching up with me right now but as a final point of interest Californian wine here is dearer than imported Australian. Hard to choose!