I awake, grateful for the restraint of last night, as the niggling air-con induced cough I’ve noticed over the past two days, has developed into a more pronounced chest infection. Skipping the hotel breakfast we instead head out for a traditional New Orleans Sunday brunch in Jackson Square, home to the famous Café du Monde. However, we’re not prepared to queue for an hour in the scorching sun just to get a coffee and croissant, no matter how “must-do” a visit to the café supposedly is, opting instead for Monty’s On The Square opposite where we’re seated within ten minutes.

There’s no point in trying to maintain our healthy eating ethos in such an establishment so we have a traditional dish of fried green tomatoes and doughnut-style king-cake cinnamon beignets, dusted with enough icing sugar to make a wedding cake. It’s the kind of thing that should make us giddy with sugar but walking over to Toulouse Wharf to board the only working steam-powered paddle-steamer still on the Mississippi I’m feeling distinctly under par in the heat. Once on board our river cruise I slump into the first available seat in the shade, grateful for the cooling breeze that cools us down as we set off from the dock.

The Steamboat Natchez is 285 feet long, 46 ft wide and has a wheel weighing 33 tons to drive it along the third biggest river in the world. We head south of the city, towards the Gulf of Mexico, which sits 100 miles down river from New Orleans, passing heavy industry and huge ships as we go. It’s a taste of old school travel with the Steamboat Stompers playing Louis Armstrong numbers and Dixieland jazz in the dining room, but there’s not a huge amount of scenic beauty to observe and we’re happy to be first off the boat to the sounds of them playing ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’ two hours later. 

We can still hear the strains of the steamboat’s calliope organ as we wait at the trolley stop to take us to our next adventure, the fabled Garden District of New Orleans. There are various tramlines that criss-cross the city, but the rickety St Charles Street car is the most famous one, connecting the French Quarter with the Garden District and as such is a magnet for tourists. We manage to bag the two remaining seats on board before everyone else piles on, and trundle along from Canal Street to Washington Avenue, a 30 minute journey of fits and starts.

Our immediate priority once we’ve disembarked is lunch and a coffee, but the renowned Commanders Palace restaurant at the heart of the Garden District has a strict blazers-and-long trousers dress code and is incredibly meat-heavy so we opt for a snack and a frappucino at a nearby coffee-shop. Suitably refreshed we head into the Lafayette Cemetery, all raised tombs, crumbling mausoleums and magnolia trees, before wandering along the historic streets of old-school New Orleans.

The Garden District boasts row after row of stunningly beautiful antebellum homes, which belonged to rich merchants and plantation owners 150 years ago, but are now more often owned by film stars such as Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise alongside famed New Orleans author Anne Rice. The various mansions each have their own style and together comprise a stylish, wistful architectural look at a bygone era of refinement, opulence and white-privilege, very much at odds with the devastation that was wrought across the poorer black neighbourhoods during Hurricane Katrina.

It’s a distinction that continues when, back at our hotel, we drink champagne served to us at the pool by the black staff while the almost exclusively white guests have a cooling dip from the roasting heat. On the sun-loungers next to us are Julie & Liz from the UK, who have done exactly the same road trip as us, escaping their husbands and grown-up children for a Deep South road trip, fuelled by cocktails and laughter the whole way. Kindred spirits thousands of miles from home, we pass a good hour nattering about shared interests.

That evening we make our way to Manolita, a Cuban bar, renowned for its tapas and Hurricane cocktails before wandering along to Frenchman Street, an altogether more sophisticated area than Bourbon Street, with jumping jazz joints, lively bars and art exhibitions. We stroll through its tropical alleyways and enclaves before stopping for a while at Favela Chic, where a singer channels her best Amy Winehouse, fronting a loose and funky band, whilst we sip on $6 punch and get heady on the vibes. It’s an intoxicating brew… but I’m still a little under par so we call it a night soon after midnight.