Visiting Soon - Can you help with questions?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Tulane University
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<p>My wife, two boys and I are visiting New Orleans and Tulane in a few weeks over our spring break in the Pacific Northwest. We have two boys, a high school junior and a sophomore. We arrive early Thursday afternoon and leave Sunday morning. We are staying at Quality Inn & Suites St. Charles. I would appreciate some advice:</p>

<p>1) Should we rent a car or is the city explorable with feet, cabs and the streetcar? I would like to see, and show the family, some of New Orleans as well as Tulane and the area around campus. My prior time in New Orleans was limited to Mardi Gras a few times during college quite some time ago and a wedding at Oak Alley Plantation (spectacular). I do not know my way around. I would also note that I am very GPS dependant as I can get lost driving around the block. I am aware of the St. Charles streetcar line.</p>

<p>2) Whether we get a car or not, is there a good tour someone would recommend? Something that would provide a good overview of the city, history, culture, etc?</p>

<p>3) My rising junior son really likes music, as do I, and he and I try to go to at least one top music (prefer indie/pop/rock) venue in association with our visits to college campuses. For example, we went to the Troubadour in LA while visiting USC, Cat’s Cradle while at UNC-Chapel Hill & Duke; 40 Watt Club while at UGA, etc. Any suggestions for a similar venue that draws students from Tulane?</p>

<p>4) Any suggestions for night time entertainment for the whole family? Is Preservation Hall a must see?</p>

<p>5) We will sign up for the standard University tour and info session. Is there anything else we should try to arrange through the University? If it makes any difference, my son has very high stats, likely NMF, solid EC’s, etc. He has yet to sit in on any classes. </p>

<p>Thanks, I will likely have more later. I appreciate any help you can give me.</p>

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<p>1) I think you don’t need a car, I have been there dozens of times and only rented a car twice, and one of those times was for moving my daughter into the dorms. My preference is to take the taxi to the hotel and then the streetcar the rest of the time. Perhaps the occasional taxi if you are going somewhere unusual, but for Tulane visits most people find everything is accessible by streetcar. Everything, in this case, means the campus, Audubon Park, the various restaurants and shops off South Carrollton, Oak and Maple, the French Quarter and downtown, and Magazine Street. For what is essentially a 2.5 day visit, with one of the days being heavily Tulane, that really should work out very well and you won’t have to hassle with a car.</p>

<p>2) Someone (was it Vitrac?) said they had a fabulous bike tour last year. I don’t know if this was the one [Home</a> Confederacy of Cruisers](<a href=“http://confederacyofcruisers.com/]Home”>http://confederacyofcruisers.com/) or this one [New</a> Orleans Bike Tours](<a href=“http://www.bigeasybiketours.com/Big_Easy_Bike_Tours/Home.html]New”>http://www.bigeasybiketours.com/Big_Easy_Bike_Tours/Home.html) or another, but New Orleans is flat as a pancake so it seems like a great way to do it. If you want to do a plantation tour instead, there are companies that will pick you up at the hotel and bring you back. Frankly, with only Saturday to really do anything like this, I would probably do the local bike tour, but of course that is just me. Thursday, if you get to the hotel in good time and all and have the rest of the afternoon to explore, you could walk over to Magazine Street and see what that is all about. Of course the weather will play a role in all these decisions. If it is pouring rain you might have to make a last minute change and explore some museums instead, like the WWII museum on the edge of downtown.</p>

<p>3) I will have to leave this totally up to current students to make suggestions.</p>

<p>4) For me Preservation Hall is fun but not a must see. There might be things going on at Tulane one evening that you would find interesting, and of course I am assuming you want to go out at one or more of New Orleans more well known restaurants. So many to choose from! A nice evening is to eat uptown (Jacques-Imo’s, Dante’s Kitchen, many others), ride the streetcar all the way down to the Quarter, walk around Royal Street and some of the others (I personally would avoid Bourbon Street for the most part), and finish up at the Cafe du Monde for coffee and beignets. Then a taxi or the streetcar back to the hotel.</p>

<p>5) What does your son think he wants to study? I think it is always very useful to meet with a prof in the area(s) he is thinking he wants to focus, do research, whatever. Then he should certainly see if there is a class he can sit in on as well. It really depends on what he likes.</p>

<p>This is all just examples of course, there are almost infinite possibilities, combinations and permutations. About the only certain thing is that you will have a great time.</p>

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<p>fallenchemist;</p>

<p>Thank you for your response. I really do appreciate your assistance.</p>

<p>As for what my son wants to study, he is very much undecided. He wishes to attend school out of state. Given his grades and test scores, he has a lot of options and so this is making the college search and selection process more difficult. So far, he seems to like larger schools (i.e. 5000 or higher) in a suburban or an urban environment, so we have focused on high quality universities with diverse academic offerings. Tulane seems to fit all this criteria and I think he would love New Orleans.</p>

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<p>Your welcome. You can always Private Message me as well if you want to discuss details you think won’t be of general interest to everyone. Like your son, my D could have gone virtually anywhere, at least academically. The same is true for a fair number of students who post on here or whose parents do. There are any number of reasons people choose Tulane over higher ranked schools. It is one of those schools that when it fits, it really fits. Plus Tulane is so good with scholarships, which it sounds like your son will be in line for as well.</p>

<p>Since he doesn’t have any particular area he is focused on yet, that does make it a bit harder to pick a class to sit in on or a prof to talk with. Still, it might make sense to look over the list of classes being offered at a particular time of the day and see if any sound particularly interesting to him. If so, he could write the prof and ask permission to sit in. It is the polite thing to do, plus he wouldn’t want to sit in if there happened to be an exam that day! I can help walk him through how to see what is being offered at any given time.</p>

<p>I was thinking more about the family entertainment, and there is the Rock & Bowl. It is a short cab ride from campus and Thursdays are usually Zydeco night. Lots of fun, check it out.</p>

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<p>OP, you might want to check the New Orleans forum on Tripadvisor.com for info on the St. Charles streetcar being shut down at least part of the way during your visit. We are also from the Pacific Northwest. My S is a freshman at Tulane and I am planning on visiting with my younger S during his spring break in a few weeks. I was planning on using the streetcar but it looks like we will either need to take a bus or transfer from the streetcar to a bus at Napoleon.</p>

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<p>Yes, that was me, fc! Loved the bike tour provided by Confederacy of Cruisers. Great way to see NOLA and learn about its history, art, architecture. etc. Great for your high school kids, twoby2013.</p>

<p>When I visited, I transferred from streetcar to bus at Napolean and got totally lost. As I was cursing myself for being such a dope, a drunk passenger serenaded me while all the passengers applauded. It became one of my fondest memories of NOLA. But my h insisted–next time, we rent a car! Some hotels have free parking.</p>

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<p>Just a different perspective - but we’ve been visiting 2 kids at Tulane for the past 8 years and we always rent a car. We just find it more convenient and not much more in cost when you factor in to and from the airport and back and forth around. We like the ability to get to any part of town and not rely on waiting for the streetcar (which I once had to wait an hour for). But as FC has said it is very doable without.</p>

<p>Live music is fabulous in the city. For music check out what’s playing at the Maple Leaf, Tipitinas or Howling Wolf. Look at the local great radio station’s website: WWOZ.org for more info.</p>

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<p>Thanks altmom, excellent suggestions. You are right, to each their own on the car thing. I like just tooling around via streetcar and walking, especially on short trips of 2-3 days. During longer trips the car was nice for sure.</p>

<p>I’ll have to check out some of the live music next time. I have been to Maple Leaf and Tipitinas, but not while there were shows. I think NOLA.com also has a nice list of all the events going on locally.</p>

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<p>PErsonally I love the flexibility of having a rental car. I have been able to rent in NOLA for as little as about $12/day, and that way can choose when to use the car and when to ride the trolley. I vote for the car, but thats JMO.</p>

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<p>OP, for the hotel you are staying at, I would recommend the car for as short of stay that you have. The hotel has a very user friendly parking lot and you can come and go as you please and avoid the streetcar situation all together. I recommend it for move in as well for that reason. It was very easy to pack and unpack the car there. Unfortunately for me, we are staying in the FQ at a hotel that does not have a good parking situation and I only became aware yesterday that I would not be able to take the St. Charles streetcar all the way to Tulane. Not feasible to change hotels either because our visit overlaps the FQ Festival and there are no hotels left to speak of that I can get two beds at. Have an enjoyable visit. We are thinking of trying the bike tour as well.</p>

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<p>Vitrac, I looked again at the new orleans forum and apparently when the street car route is shut down, the bus takes over the exact route so the only difference is that you get off at the curb. I certainly hope that is true because I don’t want to get lost!</p>

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<p>Thank you all, very much. I really do appreciate your time and effort on our behalf.</p>

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<p>Bumping thios thread. We are heading home today after a wonderful 4 days! Enjoyed the Segway tour, the zoo, Crawfest and eating our way through the city!</p>

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<p>JYM–Details of segway tour please! What a great idea! Where did you go? What’s the name of the tour company?</p>

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<p>Was it just random when I visited, or did you find a large feral cat population roaming around Tulane after dark?</p>

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<p>What day were you there, meg? Remember, they just held Crawfest, which entailed thousands and thousands of pounds of seafood. The cats must have smelled it from miles away! I don’t recall a large population of kitty cats otherwise.</p>

<p>Vitrac,
The segway tour co. is segwaynola.com It5 was a lot of fun. They had to reroute the trip a bit because of the ironman race yesterday, so we didnt get over to the lake. It went around the french quarter, into treme, the market, the river, etc. Great history lesson too!</p>

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<p>There is a cat population that lives under a couple of the buildings, but like jym I would not have called it large, although clearly that is a subjective term. But they are well known to all the Tulane students and employees.</p>

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<p>Well I must have seen well over a dozen- late march/early april. It wasn’t alarming or anything- they didn’t seem rabid obviously. It was just kind of funny/odd. I think it gives the school character haha</p>

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<p>My son and I just returned from a Destination Tulane weekend. He had been focused on another college with a ranking in the 20s beforehand, but is now planning to attend Tulane. I’ve seen some criticism on other threads of Tulane’s free application and other marketing strategies. Ordinarily strategies like these might strike me as inconsistent with “top 50” college behavior, but the fact is that my son “threw in” an application to Tulane because of this marketing, then found out more about the university after he was accepted, was enormously impressed, and will now be attending. He liked the fact that service was incorporated into the curriculum, that the students seemed smart and happy, and that New Orleans (and great music) were so close by. We stayed at a quaint hotel in the French Quarter that I would highly recommend, called Chateau LeMoyne. (I would definitely not rent a car if you are staying in the French Quarter. We didn’t need it and parking is expensive and inconvenient.) We also took a fabulous bus tour (can’t think of company, sorry) of the city that included Lake Pontchartrain, an old cemetery, the 9th Ward, the Garden District etc. We ate at K Paul’s and Johnny’s Po Boy, among other places. I now have a recipe for beignets, but I’m scared to make them after Cafe du Monde. The most amusing thing we did was having our palms read in Jackson Square (I think the palm reader’s name was Denise.)</p>

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<p>timeforcollege - Thank you for that note. Welcome to the Tulane family!</p>